Sam Gavin
Director, U.K.
In the face of a challenging economic climate, B2B tech companies are vying for a shrinking pool of prospects in an increasingly crowded market. As every brand scrambles to latch onto the next big tech trend, finding a unique and authentic voice can seem daunting. It’s time to break away from the crowd and dive into the data.
In an industry that traditionally leverages data for reporting and customer insights, we explore how a sophisticated tech stack can help carve out a unique position for your company through data-driven narratives.
Unlocking Audience Interest with Data
Recent research from LinkedIn reveals that only 1% of accounts on the platform are actively in the market, down from 5% in a more stable economy. This smaller pool of potential customers leaves no room for waste. When developing a data-driven narrative for your brand, you need to start with your audience. Who are they? Where are they? What problem can your business solve for them?
The B2B industry often treats its audience as job roles, addressing them as business functions rather than individuals. Using insights tools like Global Web Index, we can build comprehensive personas for our audience, understanding their beliefs, motivations, and what makes them tick at a human level. This level of insight is crucial for reaching the 1%, allowing us to craft a position that fosters trust and buy-in from the audience.
Commercially, intent tools such as Bombora allow us to accurately pinpoint and predict the purchasing behaviours of an audience. Intent data provides insight into what businesses are actively researching in the market by sector and job role, enabling us to understand the conversations and topics most relevant to our audience at any given time.
An Empirical Approach to Narrative Development
Historically, the PR industry has relied heavily on prior knowledge and intuition. Developing brand narratives and thought leadership often involved a team of PR specialists manually auditing media, gauging the stories that are out there, and using their expertise to suggest new angles for a brand. While this level of consultancy and intuition is still valuable, it can be enhanced by a data-driven approach that supports gut feeling with hard facts.
Today, storytelling can be a more empirical exercise, allowing comms professionals to precisely target a communications whitespace discovered through the exploration of trends and data. Tools like Netbase Quid enable us to identify the connective tissue between conversations across media and social landscapes, examining how different elements of storytelling combine and align at both macro and micro levels.
Understanding what’s driving conversation at an industry level and building a detailed picture of the interconnection between the stories your brand is currently telling, comms professionals can find the intersection in the conversation that gives a brand its unique position in the marketplace.
Equally important, this exploration of media and social conversation provides laser-targeted insight into who is driving the conversations that matter most to your business, enabling you to create an effective communications strategy across channels that cuts through to reach the elusive 1%.
With access to an ever-growing suite of sophisticated data analytics tools, communications professionals are better equipped than ever to navigate the complexities of challenging economic times. By mapping audience interest, commercial intent, your intersection in the conversation, and the voices driving conversation, we can construct data-driven narratives that empower businesses to drive demonstrable commercial impact through comms.