We just wrapped up our 12^th Annual Midwest Marketing Roundtable. Our format changed this year in such that we extended the timing and executed a virtual event. We kicked off this four-day event with an open invitation to a webinar on Multi-Channel Success & Marketing Personae, followed by two days of invitation only virtual meetings focused on customer acquisition and retention, as well as an Executive Recap. We were really excited about the engagement and feedback that we received from some of the leading B2B marketers that participated and wanted to take a moment to share a few of the common themes, trends, and learnings that emerged from our event:

Many companies have developed marketing persona(e) to help distill strategy and enable easy, consistent marketing execution and analysis across multiple channels. Personae are being used effectively by marketing, sales, and merchandising groups. Integration of postal, email, display, social, and PPC efforts via personae providing marketing lift and becoming more widely adopted.

Email prospecting meets more success – Many companies have tested or increased use of e-mail as a customer acquisition vehicle. There has been much more success than in the past using e-mail, both as a stand-alone channel and in support of other media like catalogs or outbound telemarketing. Even with increased to greatly increased frequency of email, there has been no reports of significant increases in opt-out requests.

New customer acquisition during COVID – There is a fairly broad-based concern about the quality and downstream value of new customers acquired during COVID. Most have seen an influx not only of consumers, but of non-traditional buyers in new verticals.  One suggestion was to bucket new customers into three groups for analysis and future marketing as follows:

• COVID only product buyers
• COVID and traditional product buyers
• Traditional product only buyers

New verticals emerge – Wide-ranging marketing tests by many companies have showed that new, productive verticals have emerged in the midst of COVID. While these new buyers are often driven by PPE purchases or ordering existing product to use in new ways, even PPE-only buyers have proven effective cross-sell targets for many companies. 

Expanded assortments – Most participants shared that they had expanded their assortment as a result of COVID.  Many added new or expanded lines of PPE, while others developed product-lines that aligned with the paradigm: WFH, social distancing, increased gifting, etc.  These expansions have proven successful in the short term, but the question remains whether they have long term staying power.

Content and cadence more important than ever – As adoption of digital channels grows so too does the importance of content and marketing cadence.  Increases in frequency of communication with both customers and prospects has generated strong results.  Some have accomplished this by increasing the tempo of email efforts, while others have looked to low cost-high touch channels like display and social.  More attention is being paid to the content of these communications as marketers seek to cut through the clutter.  Whitepapers, thought leadership, digital catalogs, and solution selling have all proven successful.

Pre-Order and subscription pricing models limited in use, but often successful – Not many clients have implemented the pricing models, but those that have report good results. This has been used to help reserve high-in-demand product to contracted customers and/or increase the number of products on the contract and share-of-wallet.

Interested in learning more about what we discussed? Contact us at [email protected]. We’d love to share more details on how people are putting what was shared into practice for 2021!

Blog Contributors:

Chris Pickering
Executive Vice President | Client Strategy
[email protected]

Scott Tinkoff
Senior Vice President | Client Strategy
[email protected]