How to Create an Expert B2B Marketing Strategy
We see marketing as part of creating positively impactful customer experiences. Often the first encounter customers have with your brand is via your digital marketing. It must deliver a useful, meaningful and relevant experience.
As you can imagine, this isn’t something you can pull off using an ad hoc approach. Rather, building a multi-level digital marketing strategy requires research, planning, creativity, testing and measurement. However, by investing in a complete marketing strategy, your business will be able to successfully reach and develop a strong relationship with customers.
Table of Contents:
What is Marketing Strategy?
Simply put, a marketing strategy is your company's comprehensive plan for reaching the people who should be interested in your product or service and turning them into customers.
While one of the end goals is certainly to make a profit, conversions aren’t the sole raison d'être of marketing. The aim should be to engage people even if they don’t immediately need your products or services, while also identifying and nurturing your strongest leads. The best marketing strategies build awareness, develop long-term loyalty and enhance your brand’s status in the industry.
What to Include in a Marketing Strategy
To be successful, you need to build a holistic B2B digital marketing strategy that takes search context and the customer experience into account. It will include things such as search engine optimisation (SEO), social marketing and email marketing.
You need to balance various elements, such as your audience, communication channels, marketing technology, content type, messaging and budget to optimise performance and maximise results.
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What is B2B Marketing Strategy?
We believe that marketing should be on a human level, rather than strictly business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C).
The traditional idea of business marketing is that companies must use rational arguments to appeal to other organisations. Therefore, B2B marketing strategies and tactics were thought to appeal to professionals through logic, not emotion.
We believe the world is more nuanced than that.
While business buyers do need to demonstrate they're making rational, business-led decisions, there are also emotional factors at play. For instance, while you might provide a good product or service, do business like working with your company? Are there aspirational factors at play?
Research shows that business purchasers have similar concerns about things like brand status and brand fit that individual consumers do. You’ll frame your marketing content differently when addressing a professional versus consumer audience, but the underlying message is the same: “You want us”.
Marketing towards business buyers as though they’re only concerned with numbers might earn you a few short-term sales. However, you’ll win long-term customers with a more human-centric approach.
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How to Create a Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategy development is a process. Take a phased approach and don't try to launch everything at once. Rather, identify which parts of your strategy
can be implemented quickly and easily for short-term gains
need more time to mature to drive results
have a cascade effect and will maximise results for your effort
Consider your business goals and how different marketing strategies and tactics can help you reach them. Also, you must tie your marketing to measurable outcomes (KPIs like organic website traffic, sales revenue, cost per lead, or lead to customer ratio) to understand if your marketing strategy is working as intended. Measurement data make sure you're on a trajectory with your marketing performance. It helps you course-correct if it looks like your not going to hit targets.
Your B2B marketing strategy needs to pivot around the customer experience. The mistaken belief that a rational argument is all you need to win over business buyers means marketers often overlook the importance of B2B customer experience. However, research suggests that companies that focus on improving their customer experience can deliver 5X more revenue growth than their competitors.
Initially, we recommend that you focus on your inbound marketing strategy. These are digital content and communication tactics that spread brand awareness and draws interested prospects in. With inbound marketing, potential customers learn about and reach out to you. Since they are self-selecting, inbound leads will likely be more receptive to your message.
In comparison, outbound marketing – where you reach out to the customer via tradeshows, cold calling, etc – is generally more costly and yields lower results.
How to Implement Marketing Strategy
We suggest building and implementing your marketing plan using the Agile methodology of marketing strategy. It's a research-backed approach that promotes continual testing, improves communication and streamlines your workflow. Using an Agile approach instead of the traditional "annual marketing plan" means you can quickly adapt to changing market conditions.
We also recommend using an integrated marketing automation platform. It makes coordinating a multi-channel marketing strategy much easier. For instance, automation allows you to dynamically implement tactics in real-time based on customer interaction. Having a single marketing platform also helps you coordinate your different marketing channels and quickly gather data to measure performance.
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Audience Awareness
You want to base your marketing on building long term relationships with your customers rather than making one-off sales.
To succeed, you have to know your customer. You need to understand their values and motivation so that you can deliver relevant, personalised content.
This gets a bit more complex in business-to-business marketing since you’ll rarely be dealing with only one customer. Rather, you’ll be engaging with a decision-making team. You have to deliver personalised content that meets the needs of the individual team members to help them decide as a group.
What Is Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing is a vital element of your marketing strategy. It's what will help you more effectively build a relationship with an entire purchasing team. An account-based approach looks at all the relevant players in a business and tailors campaigns to connect with these individual prospects. However, this one-to-one approach is part of a coordinated effort to engage and convert the entire decision-making team of the account.
Effective account-based marketing involves audience segmentation. This is where you separate customers into distinct groupings based on shared characteristics. For instance, their role in an organisation. Having a better sense of what a particular group wants to see lets you tailor your marketing to address these requirements more precisely.
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Customer-Focused Marketing Strategy
Here’s a customer value-driven marketing strategy example.
Let’s say that you have a target company that you want to work with. Taking an account-based perspective, you first identify the key players in the organisation. Then you segment this audience based on their roles and decision-making needs — are they CEOs, product managers, lead designers, etc.
Your goal isn’t to make a hard sales pitch to the first person you encounter in the company. Instead, you want to create relevant content to engage with each account member on an individual level. Also, some of the information you provide is designed for them to share – to bring the entire purchase team on board.
For instance, if you first connect with a junior or middle manager or CEO's PA, you want them to become an advocate. Your content should help them explain, from their insider perspective, the value of your services to their organisation.
If your initial contact is the CEO themselves, you still don’t want to go straight into a hard pitch. Rather, you want to woo them. Your content should focus on building a foundation for a long-term relationship based on a strong proposition of expertise.
Whether or not they’re the final decision-maker, each person in the account is an influencer in the decision-making process.
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Customer Journey
Another foundational part of your marketing strategy plan is understanding the customer journey from your audience’s perspective.
A customer journey map provides a model to understand how various prospects might interact with your business at different touchpoints. It’s a dynamic model that can be adjusted to take into account performance data and the different content needs of various audience segments.
It helps to answer questions such as where a prospect might first encounter your business. How they might attempt to communicate with your company. What roadblocks they might encounter along the way. In B2B marketing, it’s important to consider how decisions are made in client organisations and to take an account-based approach -
Customer Journey Stages
While the sales journey is usually depicted as very linear, we know that it's not. As research by Gartner shows, there are different “buying jobs” that B2B customers must complete to their satisfaction to successfully finalise a purchase. Instead of smoothly flowing down your sales funnel, they’ll loop around touchpoints — often more than once — in whatever order they need to complete their task.
A prospect might have anywhere from ten to fifteen interactions with your business before they’ll make a final decision. Customer journey mapping is what helps you determine what message your company will present at each of these touchpoints.
Using an account-based mindset, create personas to help you to think through the different needs of each team member and how this can affect their journey. As a marketer, your job is to create and lead them to the resources they need to fulfil their role on the decision-making team.
By mapping out what your customer journey could and should be like, you develop a clear sense about the kind of content different business purchasers might want and which channels they’ll use. This lets you prepare all of those interactions along the way.
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Digital Marketing
Digital marketing strategy implementation and practice depend on having good search engine optimisation (SEO). This is what makes your business visible online organically instead of depending solely on paid-advertising. Strong SEO is also key in for appearing in voice searches, where users hear a single, most-relevant, result for their query.
For this reason, we advise that you start by focusing on your website.
Your website content should match the search intent of your target audience. It should answer the questions that potential buyers are asking. Your site also needs to be organised with proper titles, subtitles, metadata, image file names and captions. Well-structured site information supports technical SEO and helps make your website easily discoverable.
An effective online marketing strategy also addresses how you’ll get people to your website using different marketing channels. For instance, social marketing, email marketing and organic search.
A lot of companies consider their website to be a mere digital billboard for their business. Don’t be among their number, or else you’ll be missing opportunities to connect.
A website is part of your customer experience.
Think about the layout. What do people need to easily find relevant information on your site and feel supported throughout their purchase journey? Can your website dynamically update based on user-information to create a personalised experience? Does it have self-service opportunities such as to book meetings or arrange calls?
From the moment they arrive, your website should tell customers “We made this site with you in mind.”
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Content Marketing
As defined by the Content Marketing Institute, it is “...a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Rather than a traditional direct sales pitch approach, content marketing strategy uses more indirect forms of persuasion. It concentrates on attracting new prospects to your brand using a compelling value proposition. Its ethos of customer service helps to establish a relationship based on trust.
More than 86% of companies in the market use some form of content marketing in their overall strategy — though not all of them use it effectively. This is why a coherent strategy is vital. It will help set you apart by allowing you to create content that’s as unique as your customer base, thereby increasing engagement.
How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy
When creating content, look for the intersection between:
What you are expert in
What you want to communicate as a business
What your customers are searching for online
Areas of overlap will become your content pillars and you’ll want to cover each of them at regular intervals through the year. Examine your content pillars in the context of your customer journey. This will help you produce the different types of content that you need for your various touchpoints.
Use good SEO practices as you write by researching intent keywords and key questions, using them to structure each piece.
Also, consider your content format. For example, sometimes customers will want a download because it’s more practical to share a PDF — complete with notes — with their colleagues over email.
To help manage your content strategy, we advise that you organise your content ahead of time in a calendar. This will ensure you cover everything in a structured and systematic way.
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Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing and it’s still going strong. For instance, 40% of B2B marketers rated the leads generated by their email marketing strategy as high quality.
The ability to quickly automate and personalise email campaigns is the driving force behind modern email marketing.
For instance, marketing automation makes it possible to personalise emails with tailored content based on what you know about your recipient.
Moreover, you can create behaviour-based workflows, where your email is responsive to people’s interactions with your business, sending them relevant and timely messaging at critical points in the buying process.
Email Marketing Strategy Best Practices
It’s important to follow email marketing strategy practices. We advocate doing things in a very permission-based way. We never suggest you buy a list of email leads since it:
Violates basic data ethics
Skews your marketing performance data
Creates a negative customer experience for your brand
Effective marketing is built on trust. The people on purchased lists haven't opted-in for your marketing or expressed an interest in your services. By emailing them, you’re violating that trust straight out the gate. You’ll be starting the relationship with the people you want to do business on the wrong foot. Instead of getting you the leads you want, your emails will generate complaints. Build, don’t buy. Make it easy and valuable for your target audience to sign up and grow your own lists.
When you build your list, you get the opportunity to know your audience. Who they are, what they’re looking to achieve, what their purchase journey is like, etc. Use this background to engage with them.
Explain what types of email subscribers will receive and how often. From there, follow through by producing a regular cadence of content that's targeted at the people you want to attract.
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Social Marketing
There are now more than 44 million social media users in the UK - about 66 per cent of the population. With such a high rate of saturation, social media has quickly evolved from a “nice perk” to a necessity in marketing strategy.
YouTube is huge. A video marketing strategy gives your business a way to connect with an international audience.
Twitter can improve your ability to engage with your users by providing them with snackable, on-the-go content.
Depending on your industry, a Facebook marketing strategy can be an important tool for generating leads and nurturing customer relationships.
Developing an Instagram marketing strategy is worth it if you operate in a more visual sector (e.g. architect, interior designer, etc).
LinkedIn is THE business social platform, promoting human-to-human interaction among professionals.
What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?
A huge benefit of social marketing is that there are many things you can do to grow your network without spending money.
A social marketing strategy lets you make the most of social platforms. For instance:
Focus on joining appropriate groups that match your target audience. Don’t be spammy when you're there, rather take part in conversations on a human-to-human level. Get involved and stay involved — comment and like and share.
To borrow from academia: Publish or perish! We suggest balancing native content (i.e. written directly for the platform) and links to your website or third-party content of interest.
Make sure you’re bringing your A-game by maxing out your company profiles. Use great imagery, headlines and descriptions. Consider having your profile(s) written by a professional copywriter. Remember that it’s all searchable, so go back to your SEO terms.
Social media marketing can also be a worthwhile option if you want to invest in paid advertising.
For instance, LinkedIn lets you very precisely market content that you think will be of interest to your target audience. For example, if you have a list of 20 companies that you want to work with you can type in just those 20 companies as the target audience viewer for your ad. Going back to account-based marketing and audience segmentation, you can then further refine your targeting by seniority, job function or subject.
Social Marketing and Remarketing
Combining social marketing and remarketing on your website creates a powerful virtuous circle.
If a desired visitor from social lands on your website but doesn’t immediately convert, remarketing allows you to serve ads to them across the web.
As you know, you need several interactions and touchpoint moments along someone’s purchase journey. With remarketing, you can offer this prospect relevant content at different points in their purchase journey to continue building brand awareness.
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Data Driven Marketing and Analysis
You need tools available to measure the impact of marketing strategies, such as tracking codes, analytics and lead attribution. These are what will help you make informed marketing decisions.
However, don’t heedlessly cull a tactic, a piece of content or a channel based on the hard data alone.
We caution against taking an absolutist-stance with analytics. You need to examine performance in a larger context.
For example, you have one month of performance data and it shows that Twitter is not generating conversions. You might be inclined to write the channel off as a waste of resources and money.
But the information conveyed by this data is only part of a complex picture. Is Twitter failing because it just doesn't suit your company, because your audience isn’t there? Or is it failing because you're not doing it particularly well?
Also, consider if a month is really enough time to get your company established on the platform. People often expect immediate results from a marketing channel, overlooking the fact that it takes time to build an audience.
In this example, Twitter might not be your top priority, but it could be something you come back to further down the line when you have the resources to look at changing things up. With testing and tracking, you may be able to refine your approach and make Twitter a top converting channel. Abandoning that channel completely based on data alone would cut you off from taking that avenue in the future.
As you can see, when used correctly, a data-driven approach will build a more balanced marketing strategy plan. It helps you identify problems and test possible solutions.
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Now Is the Time to Start Building Your Marketing Strategy
There are lots of different forms your marketing strategy can take and lots of ways marketing automation and amplification tools can help. The choices you make will depend on your marketing goals, your audience needs, your digital channels and your available resources.
If you feel overwhelmed, 1827 Marketing is here to help. Schedule a demo and see how our marketing strategy, content creation and automation services will work for your business.
Practical strategies for aligning content with customer intent, ensuring your marketing efforts translate directly into increased B2B conversions