Effective marketing means knowing your audience so well that you can anticipate what they want before they do.
The 46th episode of the DesignRush Podcast brings you a conversation with RJ Licata, a digital marketer with 15 years of experience driving B2B growth in various sectors across the U.S.
Tune in to the show to learn:
- How an asset optimization strategy can lend you a greater command over your digital marketing strategies
- How to build trust with potential customers ahead of the buying cycle
- What the best strategies are for acquiring new B2B clients in 2024
Who Is RJ Licata?
As the Senior Director of Marketing at Terakeet, RJ leads a team of marketers who create and execute data-driven strategies to drive their clients' organic growth and brand awareness. With over 15 years of experience in digital marketing, RJ has a proven track record of delivering results in various sectors, including B2B enterprise, collegiate athletics, and small business.
Digital marketing in 2024 is more than catching the clients' eye — it's about engaging customers well before they're ready to buy. 80% of customers are more likely to purchase from brands that personalize experiences, so the stakes are high.
As RJ explains:
"What's interesting about B2B is that we have an approach to positioning Terakeet in a way that attracts customers to us, and then providing marketing services to them. We work with both B2B and B2C companies to help them reach their customers.
The one constant I see with many of our customers that we work with is the idea of high-consideration products. For example, if they're considering whether or not to hire us, they need to understand what they're getting, why they need it, and what problems we can solve.
The tactic that comes with that is not a bottom-of-funnel transaction – It's important, but we need to start much earlier than that.
We need to bring content along and support our potential clients long before they're ready to become customers. We're serving the potential customer as a consumer in advance of their readiness to buy because most companies in the B2B space aren't ready to buy."
In 2024, businesses are increasingly using generative AI to predict customer needs.
RJ reveals ways to adapt your marketing strategies to become more connected with our audience:
"Most of the time, there's that perfect window of when they're ready to buy that if you wait for it, you're going to miss it because by then some other company has already stepped in or the chances of them finding about your services are slim.
Terakeet's approach is to help potential clients understand the value of what we do and the problems we can solve long before they need our services. If you're not doing this, companies will continue having various problems without being aware of your ability to provide value to solving those problems."
READ MORE: Why All B2B Purchases Are Driven by Emotions
This strategy is the pillar of modern digital marketing where 77% of customers use multiple channels to interact with other businesses.​
"When you provide an answer about something unrelated and you start to build that relationship, you receive trust, brand awareness, and familiarity with your services," RJ explains.
"Ultimately, who are you going to end up purchasing from? Someone who stepped in at the last minute with a paid ad through Google, or someone who's been giving you information over the last six months when you're trying to find solutions to different problems – the answer is clear."
If you're looking to expand your marketing game, consider partnering with some of the best digital agencies listed on DesignRush.
Build Trust with Ease Using Owned Asset Optimization
Owned asset optimization (OAO) is a business strategy that maximizes the impact of digital assets that businesses own.
It allows them to customize their narrative, earn attention, and create long-lasting relationships with clients. OAO uses consumer behavior insights to create brand experiences that foster deeper connections.
RJ explains how Terakeet uses consumer behavior data to align messaging across a brand’s network of assets:
"To get a better understanding of who the customers of our clients are and who their desired customers are, we process information along with other owned assets that they might have such as customer profiles and market research.
From there, we move into an analysis period where we have the proprietary software that will run through this process for us.
It starts by mapping the content that exists to search queries because we lean into organic search and consumer behavior in organic search as a primary tool for understanding consumer needs.
We look at organic search and search behavior as the world's most honest focus group.
Even best friends won't get the most honest query that Google will get from an individual – that's where consumers share all their deepest secrets."
Check our list of top marketing analytics tools that will assist you to understand your audience:
"It allows us to get broad data as to how the trends are, how people are behaving, and what they're looking for.
The vulnerability that people expose within search makes us feel confident in that, even over a focus group or survey where the witness may be led a bit and feel a certain responsibility to answer in a certain way, these are the most honest and vulnerable people we've got.
We take that information, and from there, we've got an idea of who you need to target to achieve marketing results.
You can marry the existing content with this and identify gaps in places where you don't have content – that's where you start to build a comprehensive strategy for what content to produce next."
We agree everything comes back to the asset itself, the piece of content that drives the value. Listen to the remainder of Vianca's conversation with RJ on Spotify:
READ NEXT: How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy
