How to Future-Proof Your B2B Marketing Strategy

There’s an urgency for fresh thinking about marketing strategy. The world of marketing has to shift rapidly, particularly when you consider the effect that the current Coronavirus pandemic is having on how people live, shop, work and interact. Some of these effects will be permanent. Everything from the way we communicate with clients to the way we collaborate with colleagues has changed over the past 12 months.

It’s vital that marketers spend their time only on the most effective strategies that provide true value to the organisation. 

Creating a rigorous, comprehensive approach to B2B digital marketing strategy means deriving value at each stage of the equation: from value creation to value capture and value realisation. Simplifying these concepts as defined by Harvard Professor David Collis, we introduce the ideas of platforms, presence and productivity as the pillars of a successful marketing strategy. Future-proofing your marketing strategies requires a defined focus on long-term results on three fronts:

• Value Creation, through Platforms, includes new business models, new markets, new ideas — the ongoing value an organisation must generate. 

• Value Capture, through Presence, is defined by the deep relationships we form with our audiences through a variety of channels for communication and engagement.

• Value Realisation, through Productivity, addresses the speed at which companies can adapt to changing circumstances. 

There’s a temptation, particularly when under pressure, to be distracted by the quick wins offered by building our presence. While capture is an important area of focus, it’s not the only thing. And it shouldn’t come at the expense of value creation (rethinking) or realisation (optimisation and efficiencies).  

The Evolution of Marketing Strategies

A marketing strategy is an overarching game plan for reaching prospective consumers and converting them into customers. It defines a key brand message, contains the company's value proposition, provides data on the demographics of their target audience, and other high-level aspects of bringing products or services to market.

An effective marketing strategy clarifies the company’s goals and objectives aligned to their brand and overall business strategy. Marketing strategy also informs what goes into a marketing plan and documents the specific marketing tactics to reach their target audience and defines the company's channel strategy.

The Dynamic Relationship Between Platforms, Presence, and Productivity

Value creation, value capture, and value realisation allow companies to build resilience through different perspectives and scenarios. The future of developing an effective marketing strategy lies in connecting and synergising the benefits of these types of value through platforms, presence, and productivity. 

To create value, businesses must adapt, innovate and define new business models. Platform thinking is our current framework for the way we achieve this. There is a great deal of untapped value in creating new networks and relationships, and in creating direct connections between humans and with your brand.

This idea may become lost as professionals seek to capture value in the margins offered by unexpected cultural shifts and new technologies. Presence - the mechanisms by which we transform relationships -  is undoubtedly an important part of the framework. However, concentrating our efforts here can create complex digital marketing ecosystems that create distance instead of making connections. We need to develop our customer journeys to be both more digital and more human.

Finally, for future marketing strategies to be possible, nevermind successful, they must bring these concepts together with productivity. The network effects of value creation and capture will give you both more interactions and greater visibility. An innovative product delivering a customer experience that is relevant and engaging demands efficient systems to scale. 

Focusing on just one type of value will only solve short-term challenges — it’s essential that companies view their marketing efforts as powerful facets that support an overarching and long-term business strategy.

Value Creation: Platform

Value Creation begins with building a sustainable business model and operating within an ecosystem which can be considered a ‘platform’ on which to build your business and marketing strategies. Value creation comes from a new interactive and collaborative focus on strategy - shifting from products to platforms, from funnels to flywheels, from broadcasting to collaboration.

Consider the benefits of transforming your brand to be a place where valued relationships between people can flourish. For example, by shifting your interactions from pumping out one-way content to conversational marketing, user-generated content and community development, you can create new experiences that clients can buy into rather than merely buy from. This ecosystem of interconnected buyers, sellers, vendors, staff members and other stakeholders is enriched by your brand's commitment to step out of the middle and serve as a conduit for connections. 

When you shift your focus away from the traditional funnel managed by the brand and start thinking about a new customer engagement engine, you not only broaden your reach but also get more eyes on your offerings. By deepening the relationships you already have, you build in loyalty and increase customer retention.  With consumers already part of your ecosystem, you can leverage the strengths of your platform to build brand advocacy organically. User-generated content can help reinforce the positive connections that individuals feel. 

Value Capture: Presence

Value Capture is competing for a share of a market, or for higher margins and is where marketing efforts focus on the detriment of creation (platforms) and realisation (productivity). We refer to this as presence because an essential part of value capture today is about being present and relevant in the lives of consumers. Being valuable, available and relevant means that people will naturally turn to you when they're looking for a solution to their problem.

In the current marketing landscape, we enhance our presence by taking an omnichannel approach and having an engaging strategy. It’s not only essential to embrace the wealth of emerging trends and technologies, it's also exciting and fun. However, while hot marketing trends have a place in the consumer conversation, they shouldn’t be the foundation of your overarching strategy. 

Steer Clear of (Only) Focusing on Hot Marketing Trends

Search Google for the latest trends in marketing strategy and your results will be full of lists of tools, tricks and tactics to try. From chatbots and voice search, to video marketing, interactive tools and immersive technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).

You can leverage these tactics and tools to enhance the bond between brands and consumers, but be aware that the landscape is continually shifting. It's easy for marketers to become stuck in the value capture part of marketing strategy without rethinking the category (value creation) or doing enough to scale with an efficient operation (realisation/productivity). You may lose focus on the long-term growth opportunities for your brand for the sake of a fad.

New trends have their place, and one or all of them might be suitable for your business. However, their use has to connect both to your existing strategies in other disciplines, such as content and social marketing, and to your longer-term objectives. You can't think of trends as a checklist of things to do. Be strategic instead and create a system of "repeatable, tactical investments" powered by quality content.

Focus on Quality in Content

For a long time, digital marketers regarded content marketing as the most cost-effective way to reach their target audience using search engine optimisation (SEO). Today, however, content in all of its diverse forms must deliver a useful, meaningful customer experience. Producing high-quality content allowing marketers to highlight a company’s expertise is a must. 

Search engines such as Google provide consumers with quick answers to their burning questions, ultimately enhancing the customer experience. Producing content that signals to search engines and consumers you’re an expert on a subject creates greater domain authority and can offer a brand SEO dominance around specific, targeted keywords. 

Talk has moved on from the concept of cultivating a 'know, like and trust' factor to branding your content around 'EAT' - experience, authority and trustworthiness. The company’s brand is now intertwined with the personal branding of its thought leaders and employees. 

Marketers must be able to provide a personalised and targeted approach to capture and engage future generations of digital natives. They also need to be optimising their content to provide 'definitive answers' to feature on voice search and Google's search 'Position Zero'.

Strategising at more than one level offers distinct opportunities for brands to bring together content creation, marketing automation, social amplification, remarketing and PPC campaigns to remain thoughtfully engaged with customers. Using our marketing automation technologies, the team at 1827 Marketing builds ecosystems for brands with scalable, conversational, collaborative content creation and delivery.

Value Realisation: Productivity

Value Realisation is creating a scalable business structure that includes processes and technologies, allowing the company to make value for itself, its customers and partners. We could also refer this to as productivity. With increased productivity, you will be visible with advocacy built-in, which means scaling up your presence and interactions. This enables productivity and efficiency through the use of business intelligence and automation — the definition of performance marketing.

Your company’s digital marketing stack, and how you implement it across the company ecosystem, is key to deriving long-term value and competitive advantage. With thousands of digital marketing software solutions available on the market, it’s inevitable that marketers will suffer from a feeling of overwhelm.

Even simple tactics such as publishing brand posts on social media may require two or three different cloud-based technologies — at least if you listen to digital marketing gurus. In this nexus of marketing and technology, it is all too easy to become disenchanted with the true value provided by these communication and distribution platforms: reaching the right person, with the right message at the right time. 

Think of value realisation as optimising both sides of an equation. On the one side, you have efficiency built into input productivity with ROI on output productivity on the other side.

Enhancing Efficiency: Input Productivity

 Having the right tools and technology to enable efficient workflows means not relying on a nightmare of spreadsheets, manual processes, and manual scheduling to power the machine.

Marketing automation is no longer optional if you want to compete in this dynamically changing market. Competing in this context means using planning tools, scheduling tools, AI for repurposing content, and AI social amplification tools.

Having these tools won’t mean a lot if the right team doesn’t support them. Technology is useless without multi-skilled teams who can identify the content your audience will respond to, who can also create and repurpose content such as articles, video, and infographics. Agile thinking across the organisation also takes into account the processes. 

Output Productivity: Customer Analytics

As the economy is shrinking, business leaders become more concerned about marketing spend. Marketers need to track the effectiveness of a campaign. They must answer the question, “What is our ROI?” to justify their marketing spend.  

Analytics enable experience by tracking customers and meeting their needs in the moments that matter. Analytics also allows savvy marketers to track the effectiveness of a campaign and compare creativity. They also need to understand where their sales are coming from, using a variety of marketing attribution models.

Enabling effective analysis and getting a full 360-degree oversight, marketers need to measure data across the board in a single platform, rather than using Google Analytics, Facebook analytics or Twitter analytics separately.

This approach means seeing the relative effectiveness across different channels and allows decision making in an omnichannel environment. It answers questions like; “Is email still working for us? Which social platforms are most effective at delivering business results?”

Implementing marketing attribution models helps reduce the guesswork involved in determining the effectiveness of specific marketing tactics.

In Conclusion

In 50 years’ time there might be different approaches to value creation, capture & realisation, but right now B2B marketers should focus on platform, presence and productivity. This three-pronged approach allows marketers to attack the challenges around digital marketing on all fronts. With value creation as the goal, we need to build platforms designed for collaborative relationships, an engaging digital presence enhanced and not dominated by trends, and the systems that allow both to scale efficiently. 

At 1827 Marketing, our use of marketing automation and AI, along with how we create content at scale, allows us to deliver true efficiency to your marketing strategies. A focus on platform, presence and productivity allows marketers to attack the challenges around digital marketing on all fronts: platform, presence and productivity. Content marketing and marketing automation are a vital part of putting these into practice.