Today in Boston at the B2B Marketing Forum, BlueOcean CEO and Co-Founder, Grant McDougall will be speaking to B2B marketers both in-person and virtually at 12:50 PM ET. His session, titled “The Road to B2B Growth is NOT Paved in MQLs, it’s Built with Brand,” will close out several days of inspiring B2B stories and conversations, across the event and at the BlueOcean booth.
In his inspiring talk, Grant focuses primarily on the important task B2B marketers have at hand, to create a deeper connection and relationship with our audiences, and in doing so get back to what we love about marketing. He covers how the increasing pressure on marketing ROI has put the B2B marketing discipline in the vice grip of the MQL, with marketers overly focused on optimizing short-term goals. However, in reality, the key to long-term B2B growth is building a strong brand, which takes more intentional audience connection.
Grant’s story is supported by new first-party research from BlueOcean, launching today.
New Research analyzes the positive impact of closer brand and audience alignment
The BlueOcean team set out to learn more about how B2B brands can effectively build relationships with their audiences. Since messaging and content are foundational to all marketing touch points, the team focused on how B2B brands aligned their messaging and content with their audiences, and what was the impact when done successfully. The dataset included over 3,200 key terms referenced over 2 million times between audiences and B2B brands since May of 2021 – each instance with its unique sentiment score.
The research reveals that B2B brands, not too surprisingly, struggle to achieve messaging alignment and positive audience sentiment. But when they do, they experience improved brand health, stronger SOV, and higher estimated revenue growth compared to their competitors.
In fact, the data showed that messaging alignment combined with more positive audience sentiment was more strongly correlated with estimated future revenue growth than even advertising spend.
