When you are marketing goods and services to other businesses, you are talking to a sophisticated audience.
They may not always have a clear understanding of what they need at a particular time, but they will be invested in learning more and finding the most appropriate and effective solutions. Developing an effective B2B marketing strategy recognises that the buying process is different to when you are selling to an end consumer.
Ultimately, your strategy will reflect the specific needs and expectations of the industry you are selling, but there are several broad principles you can follow that will help you.
Develop clear objectives.
Your objectives should reflect your company’s overall strategic goals. These will inform the tactics you opt to use. Your strategic goal may be to secure more sales to a particular industry or sector, while your marketing objective will define what achieving that goal will look like. Each marketing objective that makes up your strategy needs to be specific and measurable.
It also needs to be time-bound. For example, you may wish to secure three per cent of the overall market share, and you intend to achieve as much within four years. You need to make sure that your marketing goals are achievable.
It’s admirably ambitious to want to grow the turnover of your company tenfold within the next six months, but if your goals are unrealistic then your strategy will fail. Set realistic targets that, if achieved, will deliver tangible benefits for your business.
Choose your actions and set your key performance indicators (KPI)
This is where you begin to put flesh on the bones of your marketing objectives. To do this, you will need to have a detailed understanding of the audience you are targeting. Think about them and the world in which they operate.
What tactics are most likely to be effective when it comes to grabbing their attention and encouraging them to choose you over your competitors? This kind of consideration will inform your choice of channel. You must think about the audience, their needs, and their expectations, rather than opting for the channel which best suits your message.
If you’re using online communications, then there are a myriad of different digital analytic tools available to help you gain a deeper understanding of your audience. You need to be delivering content and developing campaigns that reflect the interests of your target market.
You will need to choose and define your tactics, and each specific marketing objective will have the most appropriate tactic. This might be to create extensive online content making use of the latest SEO data which you’ll support with social media activity and PPC advertising. You should then decide on how the performance of this tactic will be judged. This is your key performance indicator (KPI) and each tactic will need one.
Your actions will also need to take into account your overall budget. What marketing objectives do you want to prioritise? Remember, it’s important not to rush straight to tactics without having a clear sense of strategy.
Integrate your marketing.
Your marketing needs to be cohesive and consistent rather than ad hoc and scattergun if you’re hoping to maximise your return on investment. It needs to be coordinated across all of your chosen channels whether offline or online. You need to consider what channels your customers will see.
Although you might be able to make snappy video content for Facebook, will that be as effective at reaching your key decision-makers as longer-form content on LinkedIn?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of each channel?
Which channels are most likely to help you achieve your business objectives? You should also consider how well the channels work with one another. Are they offering something complementary, or do you risk duplicating your efforts?
Keep your branding consistent.
Branding needs to be consistent, with clear rules for visual identity and tone of voice right across online and offline channels. Any in-house and outsourced agency teams need to have access to the same guidelines. Those guidelines also need to be understandable and easy to use. By repurposing the same content for use across multiple channels, you can keep your message consistent and ensure your budget is being spent efficiently.
Create your assets and begin your campaigns.
Your channels have been chosen and your message has been developed. Now it’s time to create your marketing assets and put them in place. Your content, whether that be long-form writing, social media posts or email marketing, should be creative, focused and include strong calls to action.
These calls to action should reflect where the target audience stands in the buying process and the content should give them a strong reason to move forward as you suggest.
Measure their performance.
Once you’ve begun deploying your tactics you will need to assess how well they’re performing. This will be an ongoing process that ensures you are staying on track towards meeting your objectives.
By using analytics and then applying what you find to your content, you can make better decisions about what does and does not work. Why is some content highly effective and others less so? Could it be improved by tweaking it, or would your marketing budget be better spent elsewhere?
You may find that over time your initial marketing strategy is streamlined. Even with the best-planned campaign, your initial strategy will still contain a great deal of guesswork due to the limitations of the available data.
As time goes by, you will be able to formulate a more effective strategy based on substantive engagement and conversion data. Your audience should dictate how your strategy develops, and you can assess what they’re most engaged with by using metrics and analytical data.
What channels, media and topics are resonating most with them? Remove the material that isn’t performing and double down on the material that is.
At Appetite Creative, we create B2B marketing strategies that foster engagement and deliver tangible results. We can help you define and then develop a B2B marketing strategy that helps you achieve your objectives. Contact us today to find out how we can help.