Are you barking up the wrong tree?
When defining a B2B marketing audience, we tend to start with the usual suspects: company, industry, job title and geography. Perhaps company size, seniority or purchasing responsibility, too. These are all useful parameters that help us narrow a potentially enormous market down to a group of people who might plausibly be interested in what we offer.
But identifying the right people on paper is only the beginning. Understanding what they actually care about is what makes a communications strategy relevant.
What are they trying to achieve? Which challenges are keeping them busy? What makes a particular subject worth their time? And how do they prefer to discover and consume information?
Too often, the answers are based on assumptions, anecdotal evidence or a handful of interactions that we interpret as proof of a much bigger interest. We build a picture of our audience, then plan our communications around that picture without necessarily questioning how accurate it is.
The result is we spend considerable time and money delivering a message we believe is important, only to find that it doesn't resonate with the people we're trying to reach.
So, where do we go wrong, and how can we get better at understanding the people on the receiving end of our marketing?
Are we subconsciously Netflix’ing?
Think about how Netflix assesses your interests. You watch a crime thriller one evening, and suddenly your homepage seems convinced you've developed a lifelong passion for murder investigations and every recommendation is another variation on the same theme.
Except perhaps you watched it because your partner chose it, someone recommended it, or simply because nothing else looked appealing that evening. It was a one-off, not the beginning of a new personality.
The algorithm has taken an action and interpreted it as an interest. Email marketing can fall into exactly the same trap.
Someone downloads a report about artificial intelligence, attends a webinar on sustainability or clicks on an article about a particular market. We record the activity, assign an interest and start sending them more of the same. Before long, their inbox is full of content based on a single interaction that may not reflect what they actually want to hear from us.
Don’t get me wrong, using behavioural data to inform our communications is the right direction to take. The problem comes when we treat an action as a definitive statement of interest. And there is an even bigger distinction to make: interest is not the same as buying intent. Someone might be curious about a subject without having a business need, a budget or any intention of purchasing a related product or service.
So, can we get better at understanding their interests?
Imagine you've just added a new contact to your database. They fit your target audience perfectly: the right company, the right job title, the right industry. You send them an introductory email, they open it, perhaps click on one link(holy grail!), and then nothing.
It's tempting to conclude that they aren't interested. But what if the problem is that we've already decided what they're interested in before they've had a chance to tell us?
I believe a broader introduction to what you offer is key. Rather than immediately directing them towards the product, service or subject you assume is most relevant, give them an opportunity to explore. You might be surprised by what catches their attention: a contact who appears to have little interest in your main offering might engage with a completely different part of your business.
These are the interactions that reveal opportunities that a narrowly defined audience segment would have missed. So use engagement as a clue, and leave the door open long enough for people to show you where their interests actually lie.
Your database might have more reach to give.
This is another opportunity that is easy to overlook, particularly in B2B, where professional networks, industry communities and trusted recommendations can help people discover new suppliers, services, events and ideas.
Perhaps your research answers a question your contact’s colleagues are trying to solve. Perhaps your event brings together people facing a common challenge. Or perhaps your service addresses a problem someone in their network has been struggling with.
The key is to give people something genuinely useful to pass along. You're not just asking them to promote your business; you're helping them offer something of value to their network.
So, when planning your communications, consider not only whether your message resonates with the person receiving it, but also whether it could help them identify someone else who would benefit from what you offer.
If a message lands where nobody is listening, does it make a sound?
Do your potential customers rely on industry publications, professional communities, colleagues, search engines, email newsletters or events to keep up with developments? Do they prefer detailed research or short practical insights? Are they actively looking for solutions, or are they more likely to encounter an idea while following a broader industry conversation?
These questions help you understand not only where you might reach people, but how to make your communications useful in the context of their working lives.
The objective isn't to be everywhere. It is to understand how your audience discovers information and what makes them pay attention to it, then use that insight to make sensible decisions about your marketing channels.
So what does it mean?
Audience research can easily become an exercise in collecting more data, creating increasingly detailed segments and trying to predict behaviour with greater precision.
But more data doesn't automatically mean better understanding.
You can have a database full of job titles, company names, engagement scores and inferred interests and still have very little idea what would make someone care about your proposition.
A useful audience strategy starts with the fundamentals: identify who is most likely to benefit from what you offer, investigate what matters to them, give them opportunities to tell you what interests them, and pay attention to the context behind their behaviour.