What to expect from B2B marketing and sales in 2024

Now that the decorations are down and the new year’s resolutions are hanging by a thread, we find ourselves back at work in the anticipation that the forthcoming year will smash out of the park the previous year and that our carefully planned strategies will bring success to ourselves, our company, and our customers in 2024.

But without an almanac of future events, like the one Marty McFly bought in Back to the Future, how will we know if our short term and long-term bets will work out the way we hope they will?

Fortunately, thanks to the number crunchers and analysts at BNZSA, we have compiled a series of trends and provided analysis to help predict will have the biggest impact on B2B marketing in 2024.

Following a tough year in 2022, the tech industry didn’t get off to the best of starts in 2023 and we saw continued cutbacks, setbacks, and layoffs.

Over the year, we witnessed over 1100 companies letting go a combined total of more than a quarter of a million employees, in what proved to be another tumultuous year for tech companies and their workers.

And today, as we enter the first few days of the new year, the outlook for 2024 remains uncertain due to high interest rates, unstable geopolitical tensions and climate related disasters ravaging the globe.

These constraints will likely continue to put pressure on marketing teams who have to manage lower budgets but are still expected to achieve high results with less resources. Don’t worry, you are not alone!

And in this scenario, this piece will look at ways to help you reach your goals in the the most efficient way to maximise your budget and get the best returns.

A personal touch in the age of Generative AI:

The prediction:

As we step into 2024, the integration of generative AI, such as ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s Copilot, has become increasingly prominent in B2B marketing. These powerful language models have revolutionized content creation, social media engagement, and even customer service, offering marketing teams unprecedented efficiency and scalability. The use of generative AI has allowed marketers to automate routine tasks, generate personalized content at scale, and enhance customer interactions.

However, this surge in AI adoption comes with its own set of challenges. Consumer concerns about misinformation, biased content, and potential job displacement have reached a critical point, with 72% expressing worry, according to Gartner. Striking the right balance between leveraging the capabilities of generative AI and addressing ethical concerns is crucial for B2B marketers in 2024. Building transparency, ethical guidelines, and oversight mechanisms will be essential to maintain consumer trust and ensure responsible AI use.

How BNZSA can help:

Companies looking to grow their content strategy at scale, but do not want to rely heavily on AI produced content can avail of our Content Creatr services. This offering is powered by people – content writers, graphic designers, communication experts – who can support you to create high quality content with a human touch that lands your messaging with your customers.

From social media advertising and email nurture tracks, to longer form content such as whitepapers or in-depth webinars, our team of content writers, graphic designers and videographers are on hand to create bespoke and engaging content that will land your messaging with your target audience. We help you in building brand awareness, establishing credibility through consistency, and driving sales.

Companies will struggle to nurture and maintain connection with prospects following layoffs:

The prediction:

When it comes to B2B sales, traditionally people still buy from people. But In an increasingly digital world, where more technical aspects of work can be easily automated, soft skills and a human touch will be ever more crucial in adding value to prospects’ experiences. Companies with limited resources following layoffs who may not have the BDR or SDR staff to nurture prospects and maintain that connection.

How BNZSA can help:

As an integral part of our Opportunity Finder stack, BNZSA’s BDR and SDR Sales-as-a-Service offering is designed to both enhance the functions of you in-house BDR team, while also giving instant resources and multilingual support to generate credible and compliant opportunities that are more mature in the sales cycle.

Our native speaking team can support 26 languages that allows clients to instantly ramp up in new territories, achieve a lower cost of sale and see quick, sustainable, and measurable ROI to investment. To learn more about how our People-powered services can help you, see here.

Buying preferences are changing as Millennials and Gen Z take on purchasing roles:

The prediction:

The demographics of buying teams are changing as Millennials and Gen Z progress in their careers. Buyers aged 25-44 will make up 75% of business buying teams in 2024. Being digital natives, younger buyers are comfortable seeking information online before engaging with sales teams. But they can still face challenges in the buying process, such as building consensus with other key decision makers, meaning that personal interactions with product experts are incredibly valuable. These interactions allow young buyers to address their specific challenges and bring reliability and credibility to the decision-making process.

According to Forrester, two out of five Millennial buyers will demand early access to B2B product experts in 2024. Millennials and Gen Z buyers value expertise highly in their decision-making process. They want to ensure that the product or service they are considering is backed by knowledgeable experts who can answer their questions and provide detailed information.

This shift in buyer behaviour is driving the need for B2B sellers to adapt their go-to-market strategies and engage with these younger buyers through various channels, including self-guided digital platforms.

How BNZSA can help:

BNZSA’s Promoter Programme (BPP), is the B2B equivalent of B2C influencers. It also falls within the framework of Opportunity Finder. BPP is run by highly trained specialists (Promoters) who work with end users and channel partners to inform them and educate them about a client’s hardware, software, platform, and service solutions.

A promoter’s goal is not to sell per se, but to act as an advisor to the end user or channel partner about the benefits and use cases for deployment. This product focused approach bridges the gap between sales and users by providing younger buyers with the opportunity to connect with an expert early in the buy process, as well as being supported throughout their user journey.

The end of the MQL and “Lead”? The move towards “Opportunities” for sales and marketing alignment:

The prediction:

This year will see a notable shift in B2B sales and marketing away from Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to a stronger focus on sales opportunities as a more robust and aligned objective between the two functions. Aligning sales and marketing around opportunities and buying groups provides a more accurate and efficient approach to revenue forecasting.

The problem with using MQLs as a basis for pipeline generation is that it does not necessarily tell you whether it is a real sales opportunity or not, which is why there is typically a low conversion rate between MQLs and SRLs. Marketing teams need to focus on creating intricate campaigns with multiple digital and human touch points in order to optimize their pipeline generation efforts.

Identifying and qualifying opportunities that have the highest chance of closing involves applying various strategies along the sales funnel in order to fully engage and convert prospects to opportunities effectively. This can be hard to get right at every step but disintermediation and creating curated content experiences are huge steps in the right direction.

How BNZSA can help:

BNZSA Opportunity Finder is a fully integrated end to end solution that concentrates on generating revenue by offering services at every stage of the buying process. This helps companies optimise their outreach strategy by enriching first and third-party data, harmonising automation technology, and providing guidance on segmenting tactics, creating personalised content, and building strong relationships with target accounts. As a result, higher quality and more tangible opportunities are created.

In September 2023 we launched inTNT, our precision intent data solution which gives B2B marketers validated, compliant intent signals captured from conversations not clicks in multiple European languages to enable them to get in front of more buyers more effectively. BNZSA’s inTNT is a key pillar of Opportunity Finder, driving higher conversion rates as sales and marketing teams can engage with prospects when their interest is at its peak leading to more closed revenue and shorter sales cycles.

In our research, we found that typically in the B2B landscape up to 98.5% of leads are discarded from the pipeline without converting, but Opportunity Finder helps to avoid this by using precision targeting, aligning sales and marketing through our Warm Handover^TM method, and delivering measurable return on sales investment.

Reflecting on 2023: A Year of Change

As we come to the end of another year, I always like to take time to reflect on the wins and the challenges we faced over the last twelve months. In what has been another tough year for the tech industry, I am immensely proud of the adaptability shown by everyone at BNZSA. We have weathered the storm, and we are stronger together for it.

2023 has been a transformative year for BNZSA. We have always strived to “Change the Industry”, a goal that has been strongly woven into our core values as a company since I started BNZSA a decade ago.

BNZSA has big ambitions for the future; this presented us with two options, either we continued this journey alone and took the risk that it will take another ten years to develop better integrated global offerings, or we looked to partner with a company whose ambitions and values align with ours. This led to the biggest change of all for BNZSA in April of this year, when we officially joined the Anteriad team. Over the past nine months we have been working hard to fully integrate our data-driven, people-powered products and services to offer our clients comprehensive sales and marketing support on a global scale.

Again, in an effort to “Change the Industry” in September we launched inTNT, our AI powered, multilingual intent data solution, bringing GDPR compliant and validated intent to the market. I’m excited to be able to launch this product that supplements Anteriad’s global intent offering and provides our customers with the ability to get in front of more EMEA-based buyers.

As I look back on everything we have achieved as a team this year, I want to take this moment to thank my team for their hard work and dedication. I am optimistic for the outlook of 2024, and I am excited to see where the next chapter brings us as we continue to integrate our offering with Anteriad. Watch this space!

Lead Alignment: The Key to Sales Success

When it comes to sales success, one of the biggest obstacles is misalignment between marketing and sales teams. Marketing teams often focus or only have budget to generate MQIs and MQLs from typical strategies such as content downloads or email campaigns, and while these are valuable activities to quickly generate pipeline, if done in a silo without proper follow-up, or even a conversation between sales ad marketing, sales teams can become frustrated from receiving leads that are not sales ready. They have a quota to hit after all!

Ultimately both teams have the same goal – to support initiatives that attract and retain loyal customers to the business. However, conflicting day-to-day goals and KPIs can cause tension, where marketing may feel their work is undervalued and sales don’t see the full worth of marketing’s activities. This misalignment can be complicated even further when a third-party agency is brought in to support lead generation efforts.

Lead alignment is not just alignment between sales and marketing teams goals, but it is also a process of determining exactly where a lead falls in the sales funnel and how it should be followed-up by marketing, sales, and any third-party stakeholder.

The biggest barriers to sales and marketing alignment:

There are many challenges when trying to align across marketing, sales, and out-sourced agencies such as:

Unclear communication:
Poor communication between sales and marketing is undoubtedly the biggest obstacle to lead alignment. When turning to an agency to aid with lead generation, marketing may choose to buy opt-ins, MQIs, MQLs and so on, but on the other hand sales may be expecting sales ready leads. Manage expectations early. MQI and MQLs, are first contact without any personalised nurturing. One seldom gets married on a first date and MQIs and MQLs tend to convert as SRLs between 0.2 and 0.6%
Different Objectives:
Misaligned goals between sales and marketing can further hinder overall business success. Sales teams may prioritize short-term revenue generation, while marketing teams focus on long-term brand building. This misalignment can lead to conflicting strategies and a lack of cohesion in campaigns. To address this barrier, organizations must foster a culture of shared objectives. This involves creating a unified vision that aligns both sales and marketing goals with the overarching business strategy.
Siloed processes and systems:
Although sales and marketing are natural partners, they often work in siloes due to unclear communication and different objectives, which can be detrimental to the company’s bottom line. This lack of integration can lead to duplicated work and a fragmented customer experience which can affect overall conversion rates.
Poor handovers between marketing and sales:
The transition of leads from marketing to sales is a critical juncture in the customer acquisition process. Poorly managed handoffs can result in lost opportunities, as valuable information may not be effectively conveyed between the two teams. This challenge may stem from inadequate lead qualification processes, insufficient communication protocols, or a lack of shared understanding regarding the criteria for a sales-ready lead.

How to overcome lead alignment challenges:

Align expectations:
It is important to define expectations from the very start of a lead generation strategy, especially when working with a 3^rd party agency. What type of leads will sales receive – MQLs or SRLs? Who will be expected to nurture leads who are not sales ready?
Set common goals:
While day-to-day goals may vary between teams, sales, marketing, and any outsourced teams need to have overarching goals. By aligning individual and team objectives, you can foster a sense of unity which promotes collaboration.
Define workflows:
Lead alignment challenges can arise due to uncertainties in processes and workflows. It is essential to define and document clear workflows that outline the sequence of tasks, and responsibilities, to know who owns what task and the larger context of a strategy. Well-defined workflows streamline operations, reduce friction, and enhance coordination, making it easier for team heads to align their efforts seamlessly.
Create standardized handover procedures:
In order for sales to efficiently convert marketing generated leads to closed revenue, a defined handover system is pivotal. For example, BNZSA’s approach is our trademarked Warm Handover; a three-way call between our BDR, a sales rep from our client, and the prospect.
Share frequent feedback:
Maintaining an open stream of feedback on the insights that sales gain from interactions with prospects that have been handed over from marketing as this will allow marketing to adjust strategy, target, or messaging as needed to optimise their outreach and lead generation.

Lead alignment in BNZSA:

As an agency designed to support both marketing and sales for leading IT companies, lead alignment is crucial to ensuring our client’s success. To achieve this, as part of our campaign onboarding process we include a call between key stakeholders – The Project Manager and Sales Coach assigned to the campaign on our side, and both the sales and marketing team from our client. This ensures everyone is aligned on key points such as ICP, USP of the product or service and KPIs from the very start of the campaign.

In-house or outsourced? The pros and cons of outsourcing B2B content creation

At its most basic, B2B content marketing is about creating and sharing relevant and valuable information with your target audience to engage with them and drive sales. In today’s info-saturated world however, this is not the easiest task. It requires delivering quality content consistently across numerous channels that address a B2B prospect’s interests, needs and problems with the goal of building trust and credibility, eventually transforming that prospect into a paying customer.

Many enterprises are currently facing what can be called a content marketing conundrum. Once you build a content marketing strategy that adds value to your business, you need to keep that content machine running continuously, standing out from the crowd in quality to stay successful. What does that take? This requires businesses to publish for instance from 3–5 new and updated posts per week on a company blog according to Hubspot.

Whether an SMB or a large enterprise, the next question is how does one meet these intensive content standards? This requires manpower, money, and time. For in-house content, you need to hire staff that know the product and the industry, and constantly builds on their ideas and expertise. Sourcing talent like this doesn’t happen instantly, is not cheap, and often when you do have the staff, the content marketing can take them away from core day-to-day business functions.

Therefore, the answer often is to outsource content. There are several factors, however, to take into account when deciding whether to outsource content creation or keep it in-house and these pros and cons need to be weighed-up depending on business needs.

Creating content in-house:

There are both pros and cons to charging your in house marketing team with content creation, should you have the necessary talent and resources available – designers, content writers, SEO specialists and the list goes on.

An in-house solution could be to invest in a qualified, dedicated content team that can establish authority and build the brand. But this can take years to become an effective source of content, and can be costly, as you need to pay your internal content-writing staff salaries, instead of by project hour. In the short term, or when your need results quickly, the in-house option can be limiting.

The Pros:

Control – Producing content in-house allows for more control over your content strategy, the writers you work with, and the quality results they deliver.
Convenience – Presumably, those that know your brand best are in-house. The flow of communication among an internal content staff can also be easier.
Knowledge growth – Your content team will not have all the quality from the get-go, so the skills and expertise of your staff will grow the more content they produce, which will benefit a long–term content strategy. If you have the significant resources and time for this, this will support a long-term content marketing strategy.

The Cons:

Time – According to a study by Ragan, a 1000-word blog post can take approximately 4-8 hours. As mentioned earlier, keeping the content machine running consistently with 3-5 posts a week, for many enterprises takes more time than they can afford internally.
Resource Intensive – Time spent researching, writing, reviewing, publishing, and promoting content is less manpower focused on the core business, such as focusing on strategy, generating new marketing ideas, learning trends, and engaging with your customers. Also, having to hire content creators full-time, aside from the elevated cost, also limits flexibility and may not be the most efficient way to scale.
Limited Expertise – Just because you have the expert on your product and customers in-house, doesn’t mean for example that writer is also a SEO expert. Or that their perspective and knowledge captures the latest and most relevant industry trends or have extensive insights on the competition. There could also be a risk in bias, not to mention a lack of diversity by limiting content creation internally. And this could impact content quality too.

Outsourcing B2B content creation:

According to a 2022 B2B Benchmark report by Content Marketing Institute, 57% of the most successful content marketers outsource content, while half of all B2B marketers outsource at least one content marketing activity. Outsourced content creators and agencies don’t have to replace your in-house team, rather they should be used to support them and enhance your strategy.

The Pros:

Quality – If you outsource your content, you are dealing with professionals that produce quality content. It’s their bread and butter. These content teams have expertise in your industry, in SEO, in multiple forms of content for a variety of audiences, mainly because their business reputation depends on it.
Fresh Perspective – Outsourcing content creation introduces a valuable dimension of fresh perspective to the work. External content creators, unburdened by internal company dynamics or biases, often bring a novel and unbiased viewpoint to the table. This external lens can inject creativity, diversity, and innovative ideas into the content, offering a unique and engaging perspective that might be challenging to achieve solely through an in-house team.
Consistency – Outsourced content pros focus only on content and quantity. They are not focused on other business activities like your internal staff are. They work on a project basis with a budget and meet accelerated delivery times. This allows for ongoing consistency in meeting your content targets.
Cost-Effectiveness – As mentioned earlier, in-house content writers are more expensive than hiring outsourced professionals to write. You don’t have to pay taxes, benefits, or social security. While the hourly rate for outsourced content writing is higher, you set the budget up front for the content that’s produced in much less time.
Scalability – If you need more content for a special campaign or to confront a branding opportunity or emergency, you can scale much more effectively via outsourcing. This flexibility also allows you to experiment with different perspectives and expertise in the field. And if strategy changes, and you need to reduce content for a set amount of time, this is easier to manage through outsourcing.

The Cons:

Control – When outsourcing, there can be some miscommunications along the way. While this can happen with in-house content writers as well, externally there is greater sense of lack of control.
Confidentiality – Sharing sensitive company information with third-parties has its risks. There could be leaks to the competition or cybersecurity breaches outside your enterprise that can cause significant damage to your content strategy. However, contracting quality content creators with a solid reputation will limit these risks.

Content Creatr by BNZSA

Content Creatr by BNZSA provides companies with the resources they need to create high quality content at scale. We are specialists in the tech industry and have proven results in turning content projects around quickly and with the highest quality for top clients in the tech field.

Learn more about BNZSA’s digital and content services.

Five reasons to use BNZSA INTNT DATA to connect with in-market buyers

Companies are tired of guesswork when trying to filter through the noise of identifying the buying patterns of their target customers. With buying cycles increasing and purchasing decisions taking longer, accurately targeting companies that are currently in market is vital to accelerate pipeline and revenue generation.

The value of intent data in B2B sales:

Traditional intent data refers to information that provides anonymous signals and insights into the online behaviour and activities of individuals or companies. It reveals the specific actions and signals that indicate a potential interest or intention to purchase a product or service. This data is typically collected from various online sources, such as website visits, search queries, content downloads, social media interactions, and more.

In B2B sales, intent data is invaluable when trying to identify high-potential leads as it provides sales teams with a deeper understanding of consumer behaviour and buying intent. This leads to more precise targeting, highly personalised messaging and offers tailored to address specific pain points and challenges potential customers are facing.

What sets BNZSA inTNT apart from other intent data solutions?

Currently piloting in EMEA only, BNZSA inTNT is a different approach to collecting and processing intent signals and this is because it is firstly based around multilingual human verified conversations that have verified GDPR compliance. Thousands of conversations each month are then analysed by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning tools to digitally verify the human collected intent.

Unlike traditional intent that can be layered onto firmographic and technographic data in marketing automation platforms, BNZSA inTNT is only available as part of a digital media spend and not as a feed. Using inTNT for advanced segmentation of ideal customer profiles, companies that have been flagged with human and AI verified intent are targeted programmatically and socially and those companies that engage with your brand, product are service are then further called to verify intent and consent. Those contacts are then passed back as compliant opportunities to call by the client.

How does BNZSA inTNT work?

5 reasons to use BNZSA inTNT:

BNZSA inTNT can supercharge your pipeline and help you get in front of the right people at the right time. By incorporating BNZSA inTNT into your marketing strategy you can expect:

Higher Conversion Rates: Engage with prospects when their interest is at its peak, leading to higher conversion rates and shorter sales cycles.
Precise Targeting: Tailor your messaging based on the specific needs and preferences of each prospect, increasing the relevance of your communications.
Strategic Insights: Gain deep insights into the pain points and challenges faced by your target audience. Craft solutions that resonate and address their unique concerns.
Maximized ROI: Stop wasting resources on cold leads. Invest your time and energy where it matters most – on prospects who are actively seeking solutions like yours.
Data-Driven Decisions: Better decisions start with better data. Replace guesswork with data-driven decision-making. Make informed choices backed by real-time, actionable insights.

BNZSA inTNT packages:

BNZSA inTNT is available in three packages, Promoter, Influencer and Evangelist. Each offering builds on levels of awareness and promises precisely targeted, leads that are human, and AI verified and digitally activated who have also consented to being contacted, which is a crucial differentiator to other intent data platforms.

To learn more about how inTNT can take your lead generation efforts to the next level, get in touch.

BNZSA Spotlight:

Human verified: The BNZSA Knowledge Exchange conducts 1000s of local language calls per month, generating valuable data points and insights across the EMEA market.
AI powered: BNZSA inTNT uses AI, ML and NLP to digitally verify intent signals from human conversations. It also checks compliance and other signals that are captured at the contact and company level not via clicks, cookies, or searches.
Multilingual: inTNT’s human verification capability is powered by teams of BDR agents who call across EMEA. inTNT can verify intent and compliance in: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic.
Cookie proof compliant data: Information is sourced through phone conversations rather than Web activity such as searches, downloads, or cookies, meaning the data is linked to the company and contact and not IP addresses.
Consent Buildr: BNZSA agents contact companies that have interacted with your brand and call the decision makers at that company to reaffirm intent, consent and to receive information and a call back from client to give an additional human verification layer.

Benefits of Integrating Digital Awareness in B2B Outreach

In an increasingly digital first B2B world, companies looking to expand their total addressable market and connect with the right decision makers can reap the benefits of integrating digital awareness campaigns into their outreach programmes.

From programmatic advertising, paid media, and email nurture there are many options for companies to boost awareness and engagement with their brand digitally. When integrated correctly, focused digital awareness campaigns can be integral towards achieving specific goals throughout the sales cycle.

Digital marketing challenges for B2B marketers:

Digital can be hard to get right, especially in the B2B space and 39% of B2B marketers say that one of their biggest challenges is balancing traditional and digital marketing channels.

The digital space is a highly saturated environment as people are inundated with content whether it be in their social feeds or email inbox. This puts the pressure on for B2B marketers to stand out and be relevant to their customers’ needs in order to break through the noise and grab their attention.

Additionally, whilst digital activity encompasses a wide range of actions and platforms, businesses can risk spreading their marketing resources thin trying to cover all their bases on each platform. However, the most effective strategies for digital outreach are focused on matching the right audience to the right message on the right platform at the right time.

Steps for successful digital outreach:

Before launching your digital campaign, it’s key to take the time to determine your strategy and complete the following steps:

Position your brand: The most important questions you should be able to answer are: How is your product different from other brands? How does it solve your customer’s problems? Determining and communicating your unique selling proposition (USP) is key to raising awareness of your brand.
Identify your target audience: Once you have established what your USP is, you need to know who you need to speak to and who is going to buy your product, so you can understand their potential needs and pain points. Typically, the ideal customer profile (ICP) in B2B will be decision makers and influencers within your target market. E.g., IT Managers if you’re selling IT hardware.
Segment your market: Different messaging will resonate with different profiles within your target market. Dividing your outreach by vertical, job title, management level will help you to tailor your messaging based on different needs and expectations of the different groups.
Understand your competitors: By researching your competitors you can better understand the current market landscape. This will help you build your messaging to differentiate your product or service. It is also an opportunity to identify any gaps where your offering can be improved to address more niche problems that are not being solved by you or your competitors.
Integrate your online and offline outreach: Although digital is highly important in building brand awareness and trust, people still like to buy from people. So, if you don’t have BDR and SDR resources in place to add a human touch to your outreach, it’s harder to convert your clicks and impressions to closed revenue.

Digital marketing strategies:

There are different aspects of digital marketing that can be included in your strategy. It’s important to tailor your approach and choose the best communication channel to connect with your ICP to maximise budget spending.

Content Marketing: This focuses on customer education rather than direct sales by creating informative long form content such as blogs, whitepapers, and articles. Content Marketing is an opportunity to use thought leadership as a way to attract potential customers.
Email Marketing: Incorporating email marketing allows you to build a more direct relationship with your prospect. Emails can be used to follow up content marketing strategies, provide prospects with regular updates about your product or service or to nurture middle of the funnel leads. It’s important to use segmentation so your message lands with the right people at the right time.
Paid Social: Social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are invaluable when trying to reach a large audience. While you can push content organically on these platforms, paid advertising ensures your campaign will be seen. Social media ads are typically very visual which can help familiarize your audience with your brand even more.
Programmatic advertising: This method involves the use of automated systems to purchase and display ads across various digital platforms. Programmatic advertising is a highly targeted approach that ensures your message reaches the right audience at the right time. By using real-time data and algorithms, you can optimize your ad placements for maximum efficiency.

Benefits of digital awareness campaigns:

Building trust and thought leadership: Digital awareness campaigns, particularly content marketing, provide an opportunity to position your brand as a thought leader in your industry. By offering valuable, informative content, you build trust with your audience and establish yourself as an authority, which can lead to long-term customer relationships.
Expanded reach and visibility: By using various digital platform you can reach a diverse audience, including prospects who you may not have been able to connect with via traditional channels. With the right strategy you can land your messaging in your target markets.
Enhanced customer understanding: Digital marketing gives fantastic metrics that can not only demonstrate the value of the marketing team’s hard work, but also give you valuable insight into what your prospects are interested in and their behaviour.
Data driven insights: Once you gather your metrics and insights, these can be applied to optimizations of your campaigns to improve your strategy and boost awareness even further amongst your target audience.
Improved customer experience: By engaging with your audience through various digital channels, you can provide a more personalized and responsive customer experience. Responding to inquiries, addressing concerns, and offering timely support fosters a positive relationship between your brand and your customers.
Enhanced lead generation: When integrated correctly, focused digital campaigns can be integral towards achieving specific goals throughout the sales cycle. When digital campaigns are run simultaneously with a complete BDR outreach strategy, this can aid customer education, identify in-market customers, warm up and nurture leads to push them through the funnel and optimise pipeline.

Unchain your growth with BNZSA’s Digital Awareness services:

BNZSA has recently launched its new and improved digital services to help our clients get in front of their customers and build brand awareness. The new offering consists of three different packages (Curious Minds, Restless Brain, and Stellar Executors) which build from early stages of awareness to high-level visibility and reach.

Our specialisation in the tech market gives us a unique expertise to build campaigns with a B2B focused approach. Additionally, our extensive experience in telemarketing allows us to offer integrated campaigns that mix digital and telemarketing outreach.

Additionally BNZSA inTNT, our newest intent data solution offers enhanced human and AI verified, digital activation to generate compliant leads while also boosting brand awareness.

To learn more about our Digital Awareness packages, get in touch today.

BNZSA, powered by Anteriad, is set to revolutionize the EMEA B2B intent market with the launch of inTNT, a multilingual, Artificial Intelligence, and human-verified intent solution

Hundreds of thousands of monthly conversations in EMEA between BNZSA-trained agents and business buyers in multiple native languages will be analysed by AI and Machine Learning for intent signals.

BNZSA, powered by Anteriad, has launched inTNT to offer the EMEA B2B market a GDPR-compliant, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and multilingual intent solution.

This new intent solution gives B2B marketers validated, compliant intent signals captured in multiple European languages to enable them to get in front of more buyers more effectively.

BNZSA’s inTNT is a smart, precision solution that verifies intent signals both digitally, using AI, and with human verification. In a market traditionally dominated by US and English-centric intent solutions, BNZSA’s inTNT’s multilingual EMEA data stands out because it is derived from hundreds of thousands of monthly conversations with native language agents that also confirm GDPR consent.

BNZSA’s inTNT will be offered to BNZSA’s and Anteriad’s existing EMEA customers as a performance enhancer to lead generation programs, and it will also be offered as an integrated add-on to digital advertising campaigns to increase target audience engagement .

BNZSA’s Knowledge Exchange Programme, which identifies the information technology needs of end users to connect them with BNZSA preferred partner suppliers, will also incorporate BNZSA inTNT. Additionally, this European intent data will be fed back into Anteriad’s global offering as BNZSA is fully integrated into the Anteriad organization.

International CEO of BNZSA, powered by Anteriad, Brahim Samhoud said, “The European market is highly regulated for data privacy and compliance. By launching BNZSA inTNT, we are supplementing Anteriad’s incredibly powerful global intent offering with validated compliant intent signals in multiple languages.

“We are thrilled to offer inTNT and provide our customers the ability to get in front of more EMEA-based buyers today,” added Samhoud.

Karie Burt, Chief Data and Privacy officer at Anteriad, added, “In the past, getting compliant multilingual intent for EMEA that has been verified by human native speakers has been difficult to source. With 1,600 BNZSA-trained agents on the phone verifying and capturingintent each month, we are excited to marry together human and artificial intelligence to deliver value to more marketers in multiple languages while preserving privacy and compliance.”

For more information on inTNT, please get in touch.

7 Benefits of using content hubs in B2B outreach

B2B buyers are increasingly expecting a B2C-like experience when interacting with B2B companies. This means that they want easy access to relevant and valuable content and information, as well as seamless and efficient communication and collaboration throughout the buying process.

To meet these expectations, B2B marketers need to focus on creating an omnichannel presence that allows buyers to engage with their brand and access content and information on their own terms. This can include creating a robust website or landing page with more in-depth contextual, educational resources than a blog alone that acts as a content hub.

Content hubs can bolster your B2B marketing strategy and provides many benefits for your outreach such as:

Customer Education:

Creating this space creates a point of reference for the prospect where they can be directed to further “bingeable” content, or where they can be redirected to multiple times whether through ads, emails or through their own interest. Making content easily accessible and all in one place aids customer education as prospects can research your product or service at their own pace.

Improved customer journey:

By delivering a B2C-like experience to B2B buyers, companies can not only improve the overall customer journey, but also differentiate themselves from the competition and build strong, long-lasting relationships with their clients. Creating localised content hubs with muti-lingual content and incorporating strategic CTAs brand can guide users to relevant content or encourage certain engagements.

Customer insights:

Creating personalised user content journeys through email content, social media advertising and landing pages, allows marketing teams to gather important data on what interests their customers and helps to identify buying intent signals which is valuable data which can strengthen a follow-up telemarketing strategy.

Targeted messaging:

Prospects’ content experiences can be enriched by using programmatic advertising on social media channels. By tracking engagement and user behaviour on the landing page to gather customer insights, prospects can then receive advertising with tailored messaging based on their user profiles and leveraging data on customer behaviour to push them to additional content relevant to their interests, industry, or job title.

SEO strategy:

Incorporating landing pages that act as a content hub for a specific topic, product, or service is a great way to improve SEO as you can drive more traffic to your website and rank for more keywords. It is also an opportunity to build backlinks as well as internal links, increasing the link authority of a page.

Brand Authority:

Building a content hub is an opportunity to showcase your industry expertise and differentiate your brand from your competitors as you present your insights with an authoritative narrative. It’s also an opportunity for your prospects to further familiarise themselves with your brand and therefore increases brand awareness.

Lead Generation:

By engaging prospects with meaningful content, brands can push users through the funnel from awareness to conversion. By encouraging users to subscribe or provide contact details in exchange for exclusive gated content, companies can capture leads and begin the nurturing process.

Land your messaging in new markets with the right localisation strategy

Expanding market reach globally is synonymous with growth and opportunity in B2B, but it can take a significant amount of time, effort, and resources. There is a need to familiarise yourself with the various nuances of each country and market.

From different languages and purchasing practices to learning about the local competitive market with varying time zones, customer preferences and pain points; an efficient localization strategy that is equally effective has never been more essential.

Challenges when landing & expanding in new markets

Hiring staff: Recruiting the right staff in a foreign market is a big commitment of time and money up front, before any income is even generated, and with little guarantee of success. There can also be significant differences in labour laws that your HR & Legal teams may be unfamiliar with that will need to be addressed.
Messaging: Localising content is much more than just translation. Messaging needs to capture local language nuances, image appropriateness and cultural preferences. Long turnaround times for adapting content to new markets, while ensuring no major gaffes, requires significant resources and effort. Keeping the brand voice and quality of translation consistently high is another hurdle.
Data & Compliance: Collecting accurate and quality customer and competitive data for your business from outside the target market, and then complying with all the different local data regulations and cybersecurity laws can be lengthy, cumbersome, and expensive.
Expectations: Sales, growth rate, market share, cost reduction are all quantifiable measurements of performance over time. However, they rarely happen quickly. Add all the additional upfront costs, local market and competitive unknowns, and what gets measured might be different at first, but you can still see results.

How to successfully localise B2B marketing outreach

At B2B level, your engagement rates, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction are a result of locally targeting your B2B customer whether they are in Florence, Italy or Florida.

According to CSA Research, enterprise businesses that implement localization are 2.5 times more likely to see YOY growth and 1.8 times more likely to report an increase in revenue. Business users are three times more likely to buy if addressed in their language. Customer service costs drop when instructions were displayed in the user's native language. And website visitors linger twice as long as they do at English-only URLs.

And in a public survey conducted by Forrester, employees who use a different language than that used at headquarters rated localization as much more important for customer centricity, market access, and competitive advantage, by an average of 21 percentage points. Among B2B buyers in the survey, 75% said it was important or very important to have sales materials in their language, and 67% wanted a localized website. In the face of these survey results, B2B organizations need to start looking at localization less as a cost, and more as an investment.

Here are four steps you can take to localise your outreach efforts:

Engage locally: By partnering with a company with an established presence in your target market, you can hire a local sales team without the headache of setting up a physical office. They will know your target audience, communicate in the local language, and provide valuable insights on cultural differences in business, such as understanding regional subtleties in job titles and reporting lines – overall improving your lead generation efforts. Also, using local numbers and email addresses, if possible, can help build trust.
Prioritize content: Carefully planning your messaging and visual assets in advance is key to making the impact you need in new markets. Finding a localisation partner in the target market with in-depth knowledge and professional linguists could provide the best option. For cost efficiency, developing assets from the beginning that support consistency across languages should become an overall business standard at globalizing enterprises.
Guarantee quality assurance: Data sourcing is paramount as thorough local and cultural research ensures your localization strategy is a success. When building a localised prospect database with personal data it is vital that you are compliant with local data protection laws e.g., GDPR. It is also valuable to to get direction and feedback from native speakers on your outreach and messaging strategy to achieve high quality leads with the right people. Choosing the right localisation partner that will help you scale faster, may not only be efficient, but will also allow you to expand with quality and accuracy.
Set new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Whatever your localisation strategy, expanding into new markets requires added resources, and quantifiable business results will take time and may differ from your core market. Therefore, it´s important to take this into consideration when deciding on what metrics to evaluate. Setting KPIs that are related to brand visibility, awareness and engagement are fundamental.

BNZSA Case Study

BNZSA recently provided localised lead generation services in EMEA to a U.S. based client that wanted to launch a successful Initial Public Offering (IPO).

Objective:

The client needed to boost its sales pipeline outside its own home market to meet pre-IPO revenue requirements. The EMEA market was chosen to launch a lead generation campaign to meet this goal.

Process:

BNZSA, as a partner, was able to localise coverage with a sales and business development support team in 26 native languages to deliver marketing qualified leads (MQLs) with the goal that a percentage of those leads would be sales ready.

Building on its localisation expertise with other large enterprise blue chip IT clients, and ensuring they had the right data, messaging, infrastructure, and services to build local relationships for their pre-IPO client the campaign initially launched in the UK, France and DACH region.

Results:

1790 MQLs were delivered in less than two years
€880K in closed revenue was generated by BNZSA BDRs
BNZSA's client launched a successful IPO
The project expanded to the US with BNZSA's SDR Sales-as-a-Service offering
$1.5M in closed revenue delivered by BNZSA SDRs
Global sales pipeline of $9.5M

Following these successful results, and post-IPO, this U.S. client continues to invest in BNZSA as a long-term preferred supplier and partner for its localised go to market strategy and for pipeline acceleration.

Enhance your sales outreach: Propelling your Q3 pipeline to Q4 success

As we head into Q3 2023, businesses are still facing uncertain economic conditions due to the cumulative effects of adverse events over the past three years – most notably the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This has had a negative knock-on effect across multiple industries, and even the tech sector has not been immune to cutbacks and mass job cuts.

Layoffs in the tech industry were mostly due in part to inflated hiring in the early days of the pandemic which saw an increased demand for hardware and software products and services as companies frantically tried to adjust their infrastructure to accommodate remote working conditions. This demand has eventually stabilized, leaving a surplus of workers within the industry who have been laid off in an effort to counteract soaring expenses and reduced profits.

Despite inflation remaining high, falling energy prices and improved global supply chains are signaling that the economy is slowly stabilizing. A cautious optimism is growing about the outlook of economic conditions according to McKinsey & Company as 48% of respondents in a recent survey had a positive outlook on conditions now compared to 6 months ago – the highest figure since June 2022.

Largely as a result of job cuts that continued into Q1 and Q2, companies had to overcome slower sales cycles with reduced sales teams which only adds to the pressure on staff to bring in new business.

Now, many commentators are predicting that it is vital for companies to build on this momentum of recovery by optimizing their sales outreach in Q3 and build a strong pipeline for Q4 to end the year on a positive note.

Igniting the lead gen universe

Companies often invest in resources and do a lot of work to map out their addressable market, identify their Ideal Customer Profile and build a database of relevant contacts. But how can you get started and ignite sales pipeline?
Gaining clear user consent among your target audience is perhaps the first priority. From here you can get the ball rolling and start building brand awareness, identifying in-market customers and aiding customer education on complex products.

This can be done in different ways:

Programmatic advertising:

By using intent data to determine purchasing intent and define audiences, programmatic advertising can be used to target prospects with specific messaging depending on where they fall in the purchasing cycle. The ads can be used to drive decision makers to specialized landing pages where they can not only access curated content to educate themselves on the product or service, but it is also an opportunity for them to digitally opt-in by using gated content.

BDR outreach:

Due to GDPR and other privacy regulations, gaining clear consent from your prospects is non-negotiable. Phone outreach is one of the most straight forward ways to achieve verbal consent. However, it also gives BDRs the opportunity to gain further insights such as confirming job titles, contact details and identifying other key stakeholders in the purchasing process, information that is invaluable for follow-up activity. BNZSA’s Consent Buildr removes the uncertainty of compliance as our team of BDRs gain the prospects consent on our clients’ behalf via phone.

Engaging prospects with the right message at the right time

Once you gain compliant consent, you can reinforce your outreach and engage your prospects with relevant content at the right time when you have identified they are in market or have a need for a particular product or service. In order to create a meaningful engagement with your prospects and generate a reliable pipeline, you need to understand their needs and pain points. More than ever prospects want to see that the sales agent reaching out to them not only understands their needs, but also their role in the purchasing process.

Content marketing:

Companies often find that prospects can get stuck in the middle of funnel without ever converting. Targeted content marketing using strategies such as programmatic advertising and email nurturing can help direct prospects to specially curated content hubs where they can self-serve content and further familiarize themselves about your products and services.
In particular email marketing can be a valuable strategy to drive prospects through the funnel as more and more, decision makers prefer to be contacted via email, (66% according to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report 2022), and more importantly they expect a heavily personalized message to show that the sales rep truly understands what they want and what they need.

BDR activity:

Digital activity is a valuable tool in generating consented contacts, however it can be difficult to determine where in the buying journey they currently are. It’s necessary to filter through and determine which prospects are hotter opportunities by verifying interest. Intent data and digital activity can generate valuable insights for BDRs to personalize their messaging whether their outreach is via phone, social media, or email.
BNZSA’s Lead Verifyr service helps cut through the noise of digitally generated leads gaining valuable insights such as confirming intent and identifying buying committees.

Seal the deal and close top opportunities

By using Q3 to build momentum and engage with prospects, you can build a strong pipeline with opportunities more likely to close in Q4 as companies distribute remaining budgets for the rest of the year.

For companies who are struggling to build momentum in their pipeline generation efforts, BNZSA’s BDR and SDR Sales-as-a-Service offering can reinforce and support existing sales teams. Our teams of BDRs and SDRs not only give support for pipeline generation, but our SDR-Sales-as-a-Service model allows you to avail of SDRs who act as a full-time sales resource who handle the deal throughout the entire sales cycle.

BDR-as-a-Service:

A comprehensive solution designed to augment your in-house BDR team's capabilities. Our service provides immediate resources and multilingual support in 26 languages, ensuring the generation of credible and compliant opportunities at a more advanced stage in the sales cycle. Our skilled BDRs excel at account profiling, following up on digital interactions, lead qualification, and identifying key decision makers and buying committees, gaining valuable insights through their conversations.
When a prospect is identified as a sales-ready opportunity, we facilitate a Warm Handover^TM call, where our BDR acts as a bridge between the prospect and the client in a three-way call. BDRs are available on a time-based leasing model and can operate with a client email, making calls on behalf of the client. We recommend providing training on the product or service to our BDRs before they start engaging with prospects.

SDR-as-a-Service:

Similar to the BDR-as-a-Service model, the SDR-as-a-Service offering provides our clients with an SDR who serves as a dedicated full-time sales resource.
The primary distinction between the BDR and SDR models lies in the scope of responsibilities. In the SDR model, our skilled representatives handle the entire sales cycle, from lead generation to closing sales and driving revenue. We collaborate with clients to create a strategic partnership, agreeing on a commission structure that aligns with mutual goals and objectives.