In 2024 I started playing pickleball. Like so many others, I was amazed at how much fun and success I had right off the bat. Yet a few months later, as I started to play with better picklers, I found out just how much more I needed to learn to be really good. In order to improve my game I started to regularly participate in clinics, get tips from pros and better players, watch instructional videos and then drill each skill to commit it to muscle memory.
When I mentioned all this effort to another player, they aptly said: “That’s the thing about pickleball; it’s easy to learn and hard to master.”
It occurred to me that the same can be said about audience-centric marketing. Many companies have a real belief in its value and tackle initial tasks such as working through their segmentation and ideal customer profiles (ICP) with gusto. But without sustained effort and focus, they fail to take all the actions necessary to master audience-centric B2B marketing and win in the market.
Here are four key pickleball lessons that I learned this year that have direct parallels to successful B2B marketing:
1. Understand who is playing: Building a buying group profile.
I quickly learned in pickleball to start every game with a little assessment of my partner and my opponents. Strong backhand? Low mobility? Loves to lob? Not knowing means going into a match underprepared and therefore at a disadvantage.
B2B marketers typically understand the need for identifying a buying persona, but often perform only a surface analysis such as identifying industries and key titles. Or they have an overly complex perspective of the buying group and are unable to logically organize their findings into activation. Underemphasizing buying group IQ is a crucial mistake since it is necessary for designing your game plan.
Drilling for audience-centric success in 2025.
Use both observation and conversation. Look at current client and market data and go beyond title and company size to find the patterns. Are they all high growth companies? Are they all complex? Regulated? Very established markets? Talk to your sales, customer support and PR teams to understand buyers, users and influencers. Consolidate and document all your findings.
Pro tip: Train marketing and content teams on these personas and reshare them whenever you’re strategizing a new program or campaign.
2. Perfect the key shots first: Building your content strategy.
As a pickleball beginner my goal was to simply get the ball over the net and in. I was soon advised to become proficient with the most important shots and then use the insights I had gathered about match players to know when to successfully use each one. It was good advice. It’s now pretty easy to identify and beat the guy who spent all his time working on a fancy backhand slice.
In B2B marketing, boardroom boredom drives marketers to believe that target audiences are as familiar and passionate about their bread-and-butter topics as the company itself is. As a result, marketers underuse simple but valuable assets while putting effort into creating new content that may not be needed.
Drilling for success in 2025.
Conduct an audit of your existing assets. Note content format, target audience, content goal, previous performance, questions answered, CTA and ideas for repackaging or repurposing the content for different audiences. Once you have a clear picture of what you have, you can start planning how to fill gaps for your target audiences.
Pro tip: Avoid the temptation to build a fancy asset before you understand exactly how it will be used and if it solves your most urgent content need. Often, a small set of thoughtfully conceived and built assets that are well formatted and deployed is all you need.
3. Set up the winners: Understanding the buyer’s journey.
When starting to play I quickly heard about “bangers.” These players hit every ball as aggressively as they can, trying to make each shot a winner. While intimidating at first, it didn’t take long to spot and beat this tactic. The best players understood that each point is a journey that uses a combination of shot types to set up the right circumstances for a “put-away.”
In a B2B buyer’s journey each marketing tactic should be a setup for the next. However, B2B executives are notoriously impatient. Even with all evidence to the contrary, they’re looking for a silver bullet tactic that has immediate and decisive results. A contributing factor is that sales cycle times are often grossly under-reported. If your systems associate the start of the journey with the date Sales enters the opportunity in the CRM, you’re likely missing 60%+ of the activities buyers take on the road to conversion. Doubling whatever is typically thought of as the sales cycle is probably closer to the truth.
Drilling for success in 2025.
Regularly find the newest employees from any department and have them “mystery shop” your buyer’s journey. What search terms did they use? What external information sources did that lead them to? How did your company show up in those external sites? Was your website easy to navigate and understand or did they find themselves clicking in circles? Did it have dead ends? Avoid dismissing their critique as not representative (e.g. “our buyers work in a different department”). Their free feedback will unearth blind spots and insights.
Pro tip: Use their feedback to strengthen the paths through your content on your site and within your content assets. Make sure each content asset offers a clear next step—and an opportunity to go back and find crucial information they may have missed.
4. Prioritize footwork and court position: Continuously monitor and optimize.
In a recent clinic the pro asked us to observe and critique each other after a short rally with him. My big takeaway was that the least experienced players stood glued to one spot, reaching as far as they could on each shot, and the better and more successful players read the ball and moved their feet.
B2B marketers need to continuously read the ball. A cut-and-paste approach (each target segment has the same program, or each year looks the same as the last) without an intentional decision to do so is lazy and unlikely to perform.
Marketers need to always optimize on two levels.
The first is improving the metrics in a single channel. How do I increase email open rates? How do I get higher ranking on my SEO? Measuring and improving activity level metrics is the easier of the two. There’s no reason not to make that part of a weekly or monthly review.
Second, and more difficult, is optimizing for the outcome across all the channels targeting a single segment. This means assigning activities in your marketing operations platform to distinct segments and then analyzing the patterns and characteristics of successful journeys within that segment.
Drilling for success in 2025.
Examine your dashboards and readout decks today. Are they organized by marketing channel or by target segment? If there are no dashboards that have the target segment as the title you need to start now. Determine what questions you need answered about that segment. They may include brand recognition metrics, database health metrics and demand funnel metrics.
Pro tip: Don’t fall into the trap of not asking the question because you don’t have the data to answer all the questions on day one. Understanding and prioritizing specific data needs and deficiencies is the right first step.
The Iron Horse insight.
I always ask good players, “what is your best advice for improving quickly?” By far the most common answer is, “play with better players.” It’s fun to easily win against lower-level players, and there is value in building confidence. But it doesn’t force you into the uncomfortable situation where your deficiencies are exposed and you’re compelled to build new skills or risk being “pickled” (losing a game without scoring a single point).
B2B marketers need to perpetually be on the lookout for better approaches, taking an unvarnished look at both successful and unsuccessful campaigns and finding big and small improvements. Find agencies and firms that can provide honest “outside in” evaluation and partner with them to execute improvements based on best practices.
