Ran Mullins By Ran Mullins • March 21, 2023

Why Marketing Maturity Stages Are Linked to Connection with B2B Buyers

We hear it all the time:

 

“My content isn’t being digested enough!”

“Our organization needs to be more buyer-centric.”

“We need to improve our customer experience.”

 

What do all of these business challenges share in common? They all indicate a lack of relevance.

If you want your business to survive in today’s fast-paced and ultra-competitive landscape, you’ve got to focus on growing and maintaining your relevance with prospects and clients. Fortunately, it IS possible to do just that, and Relequint’s Marketing Maturity Model can help guide the way. Lets take a look at this model, including the four different marketing maturity stages. 

Staying Relevant, By the Numbers

You are not alone if you’re struggling with building and maintaining relevance. Today, 55% of B2B marketers report struggling to get their content in front of their target audience, while 58% of marketers aren’t sure how to master the art of marketing personalization. 

The bottom line is this: staying relevant in B2B campaigns is tough, and most content that marketers create doesn’t get consumed.

Fortunately, you can take steps to start changing that dynamic. 

Context is Key to Building Relevance

So, you want to create more relevant content. What’s the first step? Context.

In the B2B marketing world, “context” refers to the set of facts, circumstances, and meaning that frame a prospect’s intentions and clarify their needs as they relate to an experience or interaction.

To be relevant to prospects, you’ve got to master the context surrounding them. When B2B content creation is contextual, it will be more profitable and relevant. To be as contextual as possible, you’ve got to harness and utilize the power of data.

You can enhance your strategic and contextual capabilities by leveraging buyer research and insights. For some B2B marketers, this requires a slight shift in how they do things. These teams may need to add a different product to their tech stacks, for example, or focus on dismantling visibility barriers between sales and marketing teams.

For other B2B marketers, though, utilizing data requires a system-wide overhaul that considers the team’s current stage of marketing maturity, roadblocks, information silos, and desired outcomes. 

Shifting to a Buyer Insights-Driven Strategy

Once a team has realized they need to prioritize context and shift to a strategy powered by buyer insights, the question becomes, “how?”

Fortunately, it’s possible for most B2B marketers and their teams to ideate and execute in a streamlined manner.

The first step is for the organization to make changes that upset the current status quo and the functions that keep them from being a contextual B2B operation. This may mean looking at intra-company communication, setting buyer intelligence and buyer insights standards, and dismantling silos that keep information from moving freely between teams.

Next, the team will likely need to take a closer look at the marketing maturity stages and evaluate their current position and the deliverables and roadblocks between them and the next stage.

By following and adhering to the Marketing Maturity Model, teams can gain a real-time, evidence-based roadmap for improving operations and enhancing context (and, thus, relevance) in all their marketing efforts. 

Greater Relevance Is Just a Few Steps Away

While becoming and remaining relevant in the B2B world has gotten more complex as the years go by, it’s not a unique struggle for businesses. 

Additionally, it is possible to question and re-evaluate the current ways of doing things to create a more cohesive, functional, data-driven operation from the ground up.

As you learn to leverage data more efficiently and move through the Marketing Maturity Model in a more streamlined way, the natural result will be greater context and relevance for your customers. Contact Relequint to learn more.

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