Learn how you can prepare your portfolio marketing by identifying the challenges and implementing the key future activities necessary to build a more strategic team with the help of Forrester.
Now more than ever, digital transformation accelerates to greater heights. As most companies shift from legacy to next-generation business software systems, sales and marketing evolve too and get revolutionized. This moment is the best time for portfolio marketers to direct B2C and B2B brands toward maximizing their strategic capabilities to attain business growth objectives.
The Forrester 2022 Vision Report on Preparing Portfolio Marketing for the Future sets forth a portfolio marketing vision by identifying the challenges and implementing the key future activities necessary to build a more strategic team.
What is Portfolio Marketing?
Portfolio marketing has been considered an umbrella term representing several different roles, including industry, solution, and product marketing. Because of the high demand for content across channels, portfolio marketing emerges. But this marketing strategy goes beyond creating buyer personas and industry-specific content.
Forrester explains that portfolio marketing is basing your business on buyers’ needs. It involves identifying marketing opportunities to stimulate growth and creating messages that resonate to improve the buyer’s journey. In addition, portfolio marketing improves go-to-market momentum by launching new products with precision.
Enterprises must define portfolio marketing as a key strategy for driving growth across a broad portfolio. In that way, companies can meet the needs of various buyer segments in changing market conditions and technological adaptations. Portfolio marketing is also crucial in facing product-centric culture and portfolio complexity challenges.
Forrester Decisions help businesses across technology, customer experience, product management, marketing, and sales to plan and implement their initiatives. This research portfolio helps firms achieve desired business outcomes faster and sustain digital transformation.
Forrester experts can help businesses anticipate rapidly changing customer needs and market dynamics through research, market forecasts, customer insights, etc. Moreover, they help empower teams to prioritize with proven-effective strategic models, templates, courses, and other tools.
Segment Prioritization
Companies are not new to chasing as many buyers and markets as possible to boost leads and sales. The 2022 Forrester Marketing Survey shows that targeting new buyers and markets is the most important growth tactic for B2B marketing decision-makers.
Therefore, portfolio marketers must prioritize sales-qualified segments to drive revenue growth. They must create go-to-market efforts to meet customers’ needs and adapt to market changes.
A go-to-market strategy ensures a new product or service launch reaches the right target audience. It involves effective product positioning for buyers to understand its value. Therefore, marketers must map out how enterprises can engage with prospects to entice them to purchase their product or service. Furthermore, having a solid go-to-market strategy can help firms gain a competitive advantage.
Strategic Portfolio Marketing
Forrester’s 2022 Vision Report on Portfolio marketing explains the biggest challenges of portfolio marketers. Most organizations’ revenue engines are highly siloed. Portfolio
marketing must influence product, marketing, and sales teams to head in the same go-to-market direction
While agile adaptation has become a norm, implementing agile methodologies may result in a lack of planning, goals, and product direction. Teams can use portfolio marketing to determine
how offerings can lead to successful commercialization across target audiences and markets.
Because the dissolution of third-party cookies fundamentally disrupts marketers from targeting audiences, the future of audience targeting relies on research to generate non-cookie-based audience insights. Hence, strategic portfolio marketing comes into play to help marketers and sales teams understand customers better and beyond.
Reframing Portfolio Marketing
Forrester has made it clear. Portfolio marketing leaders are responsible for future-directing their teams by positioning this tactic as a critical business driver. Hence, marketing leaders must prioritize strategic activities to reframe how organizations perceive portfolio marketing.
Forrester’s B2B Marketing Ecosystem Model For Portfolio Marketing describes the core components to create a top-notch portfolio marketing function. One of these core components includes providing critical buyer and market insights to frontline team members.
Portfolio marketers must be market experts. They must be trusted advisors who can competently educate buyers to implement effective go-to-market tactics. Moreover, they must be highly knowledgeable about market trends to provide intelligent insights and drive excellent buyer engagement.
B2B marketing must rise from its comfort zone. Professional tone and minimalistic content don’t captivate B2B prospects anymore. B2B clients need to see more effort. They must see the numbers rising and social proof. Marketers must accelerate their engagement effort to sustain a good sales and marketing grip.
Marketer’s Compass in 2023 Shifting Seas
In 2023, Forrester recommends portfolio marketing leaders capitalize on audience-centric approaches. This bold step enables organisations to become more efficient and effective in responding to changing client behaviours.
Business leaders must convert offerings to tailor-fit solutions according to their audience’s profile and needs. B2B clients expect the same buying experience as B2C. Therefore, leaders must focus on driving greater value to the B2B buying experience through proper coordination.
There are so many things to prepare B2B companies in 2020 for portfolio marketing. It’s high time for B2B leaders to be more stringent in monitoring campaigns to ensure they address and prioritize the right audience.
Conclusion Portfolio marketing leaders are expected to redirect their teams’ focus to understanding buyers and market dynamics. Now more than ever, an audience-centric approach is necessary to understand buyers with the death of third-party cookies. They must identify growth opportunities and prioritize go-to-market efforts to achieve successful outcomes. These tasks involve in-depth research and using the right tools that Forrester can excellently provide.
