Three Strategies to Focus on When Shifting to Outcome-Based Marketing

With time, marketing objectives can become blurry for even the most seasoned marketers. An outcome-based strategy might just provide the well-thought-out clarity they need. When executed well, it creates long-term collaborations that thoroughly integrate businesses into their consumers’ ecosystems, and it does it with a higher ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) than reach-based planning.

Digital transformation during the pandemic has had an impact on which metrics count in B2B marketing. More channels, statistics, and measurement options have, in many situations, simply added more trees to obscure the forest. Customer behaviour has become even more abstract as face-to-face encounters with sales professionals have faded and buying has become self-directed.

Marketers are learning that the pursuit of obscure “success criteria” that fail to move the needle in ways that match with sustainable revenue growth is costing them tangible, long-term gains.

Businesses require a new approach to organize and assess their audience touch points in order to achieve larger, long-term goals.

Also Read: Embracing the Flexible Future of Marketing

Outcome-Based Marketing

B2B marketers are becoming increasingly interested in outcome-based marketing. It aims to redefine business marketing success by starting at the end—that is, by going backward from desired consumer behaviors to the elements that drive those behaviors.

In outcome-based strategy, pursuing a goal entails defining the end state and resolving a shortlist of circumstances that lead to that end state without becoming side-tracked.

Customer lifetime value is increased and ad expenses are reduced by using an outcome-based approach. According to MMA Global’s 2021 research, ‘Outcome-Based Marketing v2.0’, outcome-based marketing surpasses reach-based media planning on a ROAS (return on ad spend) basis by more than 50%. Furthermore, it was discovered that “movable middles” may be predicted with 99 percent accuracy, demonstrating the efficacy of an outcome-based strategy.

Many of the basic tools of modern digital marketing must be reset when adopting and implementing an outcome-based strategy. Planners must look at their methods from a different perspective.

When shifting to an outcome-based approach, there are three key areas to consider.

Optimizing the channels

Knowing the value of different consumer interactions can aid in making multichannel decisions. If a company knows that its clients require a specific number of touches on average before making a purchase decision, those touches will almost certainly occur across many channels.

Paid search, for instance, is conversion-driven, which makes it useful at the end of the sales cycle when a prospect is conducting a very specific search and seeking a very specific answer. A sponsored social ad, on the other hand, may not result in a direct conversion right away, but it can benefit businesses in tracking what is driving customers to convert.

The right data foundation

It’s possible to see who the prospects are and how companies interact with them at a granular level with the correct data foundation.

Sales in the digital world are no longer a linear process – they are a meandering journey. Brands can design strategies to mimic that journey by understanding the events and experiences that drive it.

In addition, when it comes to metrics, less is more. Because “analysis paralysis” is a typical marketing ailment, organizations must constantly ask themselves whether a particular indicator is vital to track.

Also Read: How Can B2B Brands Benefit from B2C Experiences?

Leveraging predictive analytics

Predictive analytics can help businesses figure out what kind of media to buy and how much to pay. It’s all too easy to get caught up in social media likes and followers—at the expense of meaningful results that help companies grow their business.

Businesses have a wealth of data about their consumers and their habits that can be used to target media campaigns and users. The goal is to build “lookalikes” for the most valuable audience groups based on their typical actions, and then recreate those settings.

Lookalikes in the middle of their journey—those stuck between awareness and conversion—can benefit from predictive analytics.