Journey-First Marketing

Buyers are in charge. The path to success is a marketing approach that starts with them. B2B marketing budgets ballooned over the last decade from 5 percent to 9.5 percent of revenue. But marketing performance stalled: Lead conversion rates were flat, customer acquisition costs spiked, and the time to breakeven doubled. Why this disconnect? Simply put, because even as the B2B buyer journey fundamentally shifted toward the expectation for self-service and hyper-personalization, marketing teams doubled down on high-volume lead strategies. In Journey-First Marketing, revenue leader Brent Keltner shows B2B marketing teams a better way. He offers a blueprint for audience personalization at scale, focused on identifying and targeting in-market customers with the highest likelihood to buy. In twelve chapters, Keltner shows you how to personalize messaging and content for each buyer, based on their key goals, role, and market segment; take ownership of connecting personalized value across the full buyer journey from marketing to sales to account management and customer success touchpoints; and offer buyers guided experiences focused on self-education and self-qualification to optimize matching around problem awareness and problem-solution identification. Throughout the book, Keltner draws on specific company case studies to offer detailed templates with actionable strategies and tactics. You will find guidance on value props that create buying committee alignment, message versioning to engage different target customer segments, content streams to personalize the brand experience, buyer intent to connect inbound and outbound demand generation, and much more. The outcome of adopting the Journey-First Marketing approach is a marketing strategy that better serves your buyers, your business, and your marketing team.