As marketers, we spend a significant amount of effort and resources on activities aimed at generating leads. But here’s a question worth pondering: How much of this marketing effort is directed towards people who have little or no chance of ever becoming our customers?
Would our efforts be more fruitful if we spent more time focusing on those that have already engaged with our brand – our Know, Engaged, Marketable Audience (KEMA).
Shouting into the void
Modern audiences are bombarded with marketing messages from every angle. So much so that even the best piece of content can get lost in an inbox or social media feed.
Recent research suggests that we encounter roughly 10,000 marketing messages each day—twice as many as just a decade ago. Not only that, but we also have an estimated 16 times more competitors vying for our audience’s attention and their wallets.
The result? Increasing costs and diminishing returns. Customer acquisition costs have surged by 128% in real terms, while average click-through rates have decreased by 27%. These trends can be seen across most digital marketing channels.
Add to this the shift in audience behaviour—today, it takes three times as many touchpoints to convert, and over 50% of the buyer journey happens online well before potential customers reach out to your team.
The Ineffectiveness of Traditional Funnel Marketing:
Traditionally, B2B marketing has centred on the familiar lead generation processes and demand generation funnels. You know the drill:
Write an ebook or white paper.
Set up a landing page.
Optimise it for search.
Put some promotion behind it.
And voila!!!
But it’s becoming clear that this approach is no longer as effective as it once was.
Most organisations we talk to put the bulk of their marketing spend and resources into the top and bottom of the funnel. But as we’ve highlighted, the top of the funnel (TOFU) is becoming more costly with less and less returns. Whilst the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) and now much further down the buying journey.
The middle of the funnel (MOFU) has traditionally been where audiences explore and evaluate their buying options, but as buyer behaviours have changed it’s now so much more than that. Today’s audiences want solutions to their business problems and answers to their questions.
We all have a professional userverse – the places we go to find answers to those burning questions, to get inspiration, updates on industry trends, to meet peers and to learn. Our userverse is typically made up of many places both online and offline including: Websites, LinkedIn, YouTube, Trade Press, podcasts, conferences, training courses and much more.
And herein lies the opportunity…
What if we could make the middle of the funnel work harder for us?
Introducing your KEMA
This extended middle of the funnel is something at Totem we call your KEMA.
Your KNOWN, ENGAGED, MARKETABLE, AUDIENCE and is central to a powerful approach to B2B Marketing.
These are people that have already engaged with your brand in some way. You have met them at an event, they have attended a webinar or downloaded a whitepaper. All too often we see that as soon as these people say they are not ready to buy they are dropped by the organisation only to spend vital budget and resources to re-engage them again at a later date.
What if we could create content destinations so compelling that they become an essential part of your audience’s userverse. By creating compelling, sticky, content experiences we can create long lasting relationships that not only increase trust and loyalty with our brand, but deliver higher quality leads and increase client retention.
From Consumer to Business
Consumer brands have long understood the value of creating environments for their KEMA. Brands like Lego and Starbucks have created destinations for learning, inspiration, and community-building that have helped build meaningful relationships with their audiences.
But this approach is no longer limited to the B2C realm. Major B2B organisations are now harnessing the power of their KEMA to gain a deepre understanding of their audiences,
Five Steps to Multiply Your Marketing Impact with KEMA:
We have developed a simple 5 step plan to help organisations harness the full potential of their KEMA:
It’s no longer enough to just fall back on well-researched white papers housed in a 90’s style website resource centre or drip-fed out to agnostic prospects. To really “own” our audience, we need to diversify our marketing assets, creating a rich, binge-worthy library of content. Something at Totem we call a Digital Audience Home.
As marketers, we need to diversify our content if we are going to stand out from our competitors. This means embracing a full range of multimedia.
Podcasts, videos, webinars, online courses, quizzes, live streams and interactive workshops are just some of the media formats we are seeing deliver increased engagement. By thinking and acting like a media company we can curate Netflix style libraries of multimedia content, in turn creating a destination for learning, information and inspiration.
Rather than being guided down a predetermined funnel, give your KEMA the freedom to access on-demand and live experiences, saving their favourite topics across all stages of the funnel rather than us dictating what they receive and when. Un-gate as much content as you choose, before placing a single sign-up form to provide access to everything else. In this way, it balances the need to freely educate your KEMA with the need to capture first-party data.
It’s time to adopt a new approach that minimises friction, enhancing ease of engagement for our KEMA with our content and brand. We suggest a focus on three key friction points: content dispersion, disjointed Martech systems, and excessive forms, advocating for the creation of a digital audience home that consolidates content, unifies Martech, and streamlines access to maximise user experience and data capture.
By leveraging advanced technology, marketers can effectively track buyer behaviours throughout their research journey, allowing for the collection of rich intent data from every touchpoint, enabling more precise prospect triaging, targeted marketing campaigns, and personalised communications. This ultimately leads to a deeper understanding of individual buyer interests and enhanced engagement.
Conclusion:
The B2B marketing landscape has changed and the traditional funnel approach is no longer sufficient. Shifting your focus towards your Known, Engaged, Marketable Audience (KEMA) is the key to unlocking greater success in today’s competitive environment. By following the five steps outlined in this blog post, you can start harnessing the power of your KEMA to build trust, loyalty, and meaningful relationships with your audience.
