What are the 4 paradoxes of the BtoB marketing function?

Angie Business, an Angie group agency specializing in “narrative performance” supported by the Occurrence and Ch2 Conseil firms, reveals the results of the first study, conducted in France, on the business challenges faced by BtoB marketing decision-makers. Conducted between April and July 2023 and combining a qualitative exploration phase (12 in-depth interviews with BtoB marketing managers) with a quantitative survey (270 BtoB marketing managers interviewed), this survey provided an in-depth understanding of their missions, their needs and the challenges that await them. First lesson: BtoB marketing professionals are faced with four paradoxes, regardless of the size of their company, their sector, their audience or their operation.

The 4 paradoxes of the BtoB function

Paradox #1 shows that the quality of content is considered crucial by BtoB marketers during the 3 stages of the “bottom of the funnel” (acquisition, conversion, up-selling) but that the construction of a content strategy is largely lacking at the bottom of the funnel and that the coordination of marketing and sales teams, although crucial in this objective, is largely improvable according to 41% of respondents. Marketers in the BtoB sector are therefore questioning the prioritization of the strategy and the organization.

Paradox #2 pointe the fact that if “responsible marketing” is perceived by marketers as a prerequisite for performance, it is nevertheless rarely prioritized in their strategies. For Assaël Adary, co-founder and general director of the Occurrence firm, it is “of a surprise” : “We perceive a sort of gap between a significant portion of the people interviewed who tell us that this notion of responsible marketing is an important issue, and others who recognize that this responsible marketing is little implemented, little applied”he confirms. Thus, if 44% of marketing decision-makers declare that adopting responsible marketing is an important issue, it still represents a weak point in their company for 40% of them. CSR has thus imposed itself de facto in all functions of the company (from production to corporate to human resources). And marketing, which echoes this, is today itself quite helpless to manage its own responsibility in its communications and wonders how far it should go. A practice already widespread in the selection of service providers, this is less the case when it comes to customers.

The study reveals a third paradox : if marketers consider the production of their content satisfactory… what is missing is the construction of an impactful brand story. “Marketers are happy with their content, but they are failing to create a coherent narrative throughout the funnel, which is truly paradoxical,” comment Philippe Butigieg – strategist at Angie business, who explains it with “performance indicators which may not be completely well established upstream”. Indeed, BtoB marketers positively judge the performance of their content with their BtoB targets by giving them an average score of 8.1/10. However, many of them identify weak points in their story, whether to build a unique brand story that allows them to differentiate themselves from competitors (a weak point for 38% of them) or to decline this story across all of their content (a weak point for 39% of respondents).

Fourth and final paradox : legitimate within organizations, marketing decision-makers struggle to play their role as internal integrators. Decline the brand story across all of their content is a major challenge for 46%* of marketing decision-makers, but aligning all departments with a common and integrating brand story is a weak point for 41% of them. This dichotomy was extensively documented by the exploratory phase. It highlights the strong need for the BtoB marketing function to be a true integrator (and to have the power to do so) that must (re) reconcile strategic vision and commercial efficiency. That is to say, it must build the unique story that will allow it to differentiate itself, and which must be declined at all stages of the customer relationship, and therefore involve other departments of the company (in particular DG, HR, Communication, CSR, sales, etc.). “BtoB marketers are expected to make a real increase in strategic contribution to the company, but without always giving them the power, status or resources to do so.” notes Charlotte Tortora, founder of the ch2 Conseil firm.

It is therefore difficult, notes the study, to play the role of conductor, to give relevance to the offer, to create inspiring stories… and all this while responding to the immediate needs of customers. Marketers must realize “a big gap in their practices”also explains Thibaud Boury, Angie’s director of studies: “The marketer must succeed in articulating the long term and the short term, and in particular the work on the branding of his offer, which takes time, and the commercial, the growth, which is more low funnel and short term. This arbitration is necessarily a point of tension”.

The 3 people

After visualizing the 4 paradoxes, the study also allowed us to uncover three personas. There is the disengaged (representation corresponds to an estimate of 20% of respondents), that is to say the BtoB marketing decision-maker who is satisfied only with the tools that he can find at his disposal, without real awareness of the developments that are possible and the challenges that he must face. Then, there is the involved (estimate 38%) who understands both the major challenges of his function and the weak points of his systems. He is looking for solutions, particularly with regard to access to data and their optimal use in the context of BtoB content strategies. And finally, there is the hired expert (estimated 42%) which attracts attention in its ability to overcome with performance the challenges highlighted in the study and at the same time to have a more acute and refined awareness of the challenges to overcome tomorrow: how to maintain the quality of the human relationship in a framework of increasing digitalization of BtoB marketing strategies? From the point of view of Assaël Adary, co-founder and CEO of the Occurrence firm, the “committed experts” are those who do both BtoB marketing and BtoC marketing: “It’s as if having this ambidextrous side gives them greater flexibility because ultimately the storytelling is more controlled.”

What about the future?

The B2B marketing sector is, like its B2C counterpart, constantly changing. It therefore seemed important to question marketers and help them, via this survey, to question their operations and better understand the future. In the future, B2B marketing will have to take on certain challenges, the first of which is the integration of artificial intelligence into strategies. According to Philippe Butigieg, “BtoB marketers will have to have the intelligence to adapt and change the way they address customers if they contact them or make requests via AI tools. Thus, there will no longer be any point in creating a ton of articles, more or less encyclopedic, to generate traffic on your site, because AI platforms do not show the source of the information and will therefore not redirect to the brand’s site. What constituted the main interest for companies in a brand content strategy, namely to generate value-added content and provide knowledge, will necessarily be somewhat transformed.” A refocusing of the content on the company, on its expertise, its products and its services, will therefore take place to provide “more detailed content, on the heart of the company’s solutions”continues Philippe Butigieg. We will have to put more emphasis on proprietary data and bring something to human knowledge, with a capital S and a capital H for companies”adds the strategist at Angie Business, which implies internal transformations to capture customer data.