How Psychology Plays a Role in B2B Marketing

By Clarissa Gunadharma, Marketing Intern at Heinz Marketing

The rise of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) in the B2B world has shed light on techniques rooted in human behavior, more specifically in this case, client behavior. From personalization to buyer personas to hyper-targeting, understanding these psychological strategies is more prevalent than ever in crafting your next B2B marketing campaign.

Buyer Personas / Ideal Customer Profiles

Crafting a buyer persona and/or ideal customer profile is no easy task. It requires conducting research to uncover behaviors that may include focus groups, online surveys, user interviews, etc. In traditional B2C context, your goal is to get an individual consumer to be confident in their decision of purchasing your product. In B2B situations, another layer of research is required to know your target customer account and their collective biases in an organization’s purchasing decision. As a B2B Marketer, you’re trying to find out what challenges and needs a business encounters (in various industries) and how your content can help them grow their business. Though it may seem like B2B purchasing behaviors are based on more logical selling strategies, there is still a psychological aspect involved that capitalizes on how impactful your content can be to an entire organization (e.g how you present your product’s messaging in an initial product demonstration).

Personalization & Hyper-targeting

Hyper-targeting is the process of providing highly personalized information to a customer at a pre-strategized time and place. It involves identifying your target demographic and personalizing a unique customer experience based on a business’ characteristics (categorization, geography, persona, industry etc.) and, of course, their needs and desires. The psychology behind this is that in intentionally delivering more relevant messages targeted to your customer demographic, the more likely you will attract the right clients to your B2B business.

Account Based Marketing (ABM)

The process of ABM is a method that targets converting best-fit accounts into customers. This usually involves pre-qualifying prospects that fit a certain categorization, geography, or persona so that messaging can be hyper-targeted and personalized. As mentioned earlier, taking into consideration the collective bias of an entire organization can quite frankly be more difficult than targeting one individual customer. ABM is a strategy that involves psychological research that uncovers a customer’s needs on a deeper level, rather than less meaningful surface characteristics (of course, a perfect example of qualitative > quantitative).

B2B marketers will have to tap-in to these on marketing tactics to expand their business. Understanding how psychology and client behaviors can allow businesses to thrive and adapt to market trends. Any ideas on what your next move is?