Unlike B2C, B2B sales journey is a long and complex buying process where multiple stakeholders are involved in making purchase decisions. The key difference is, while B2C is a one to one communication where the decision maker is a single person, B2B needs to engage all the relevant departments in an organisation who are collectively involved in the purchase making decision. Hence it becomes important to keep the engagement going over a sustained period of time and devise a strategy that talks to every person in the organisation, at different authority levels, with different sets of qualification that engages them and drives them down the conversion funnel.
In this post I would highlight 5 key requisites that are essential to build and implement to get started on a B2B marketing strategy.
1.Team up- sales and marketing - Alignment between sales team and marketing is crucial to ensure that they both work towards achieving a common business goal hand-in-hand. More often than not, misalignment in identifying a prospective customer across various funnel stages may lead to wastage in marketing dollars. In today’s world, a marketing effort doesn't end at creating awareness about the brand or passing lead to sales, but it is imperative to engage in a constant feedback process. Sales can provide feedback on where they see opportunities, what an ideal lead looks like and what is working and isn’t, the pain points and marketing can complement the sales team on addressing them through providing and enabling the sales team relevant support & content. Experienced sales rep will already know about follow-ups and maintaining relationships, but with the help of the marketing team, those services can be expanded, tailored and laser focussed. Challenges can be mitigated when both the team can sit down together and collaborate to work towards achieving a common goal. Hold regular meetings and exchange feedback, ensuring all marketing efforts in the pipeline are shared with the sales teams and similarly enabling the sales team with the support they need where they identify an opportunity. This is a great way to collaborate effort between different divisions of the company to work towards achieving a common goal.
2. Invest in building marketing stack tools for delivery, measurement, attribution and lead nurturing - With the advancement of technology and progression in the AI&ML field, targeting, tracking and attribution, advertisers are armed with tools to deliver and get a holistic view of their marketing campaigns and the marketing budget they have spent. Was it a white paper that influenced the purchase decision or an analysts report that changed the perception, or a trade event that finally converted a customer? Analysing the path to conversion and attributing weightages to the channels that lead to a conversion (or any goal) will allow to optimise your marketing efforts and marketing budgets. While there are various types of attribution methodology, which type of attribution should your org use depends upon the type of business you are involved in, typical sales cycle, and whether the attribution model can factor both offline and online touches. For example, while multi-touch attribution works well with digital medium, adoption of a Unified marketing measurement (UMM) provides actionable insights by analysing both offline and online campaigns. Popular CRM platforms in the market are Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Piedrive, Salesflare etc. Popular marketing automation platforms are MailChimp, Marketo, Hubspot, Salesforce Pardot, Oracle Eloqua, IBM Marketing Cloud. Predictive analysis softwares are Dreamdata.io, Splunk Enterprise, Windsor.ai and many more! There is a plethora of marketing stacks available, such as - CMS, SEO, ABM, Paid Social, Organic social, SEO etc, but it is worth researching which of these makes sense for your business from a productivity and budget point of view.
3. Invest in rich and relevant content across various stages of buyer’s journey and profile - Content is king, and it holds very true when it comes to B2B marketing. 72% of marketers said that having a good content strategy was a major key to their success. A good content helps in brand awareness, educating the customers about your product/services and also identifies your brand as thought leader in the industry vertical it is in. Content could be the form of a white paper, infographic, podcast, video or a blog post but ensure that it is updated so that it is relevant , helpful and solves a business problem. A prospect could be at a various stage of their journey and hold a different authority level, syndicating the right content to the right buyer at the right stage of his buying journey will engage the prospect with your brand and that is what a good content marketing strategy should aim to achieve.
4. Lead Gen and Nurture strategy - According to statistics, 85% of B2B marketers say lead generation is their most important marketing goal (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics) Building a quality first party database of your target audience of various demographic and psychographic profiles helps a company get more insights about its audiences and the type of content they are consuming and problems they are trying to solve. Content is one of the most efficient ways to gain feedback and helps understand what an ideal lead type looks like. There are many ways to generate leads, through outbound channels such as gated content syndication on website, social media, retargeting website visitors, blogpost, email marketing or by simply buying leads through external vendors. Once the leads are generated, lead scoring will help prioritize which types of leads need immediate sales followup and what needs further nurturing to move them further down the funnel. Nurturing is an opportunity to build credibility and demonstrate your expertise in the niche market you are selling your products or service to.
5. Set Goals-Test-Measure-Learn-Repeat - Set a goal and measure only those metrics that matter the most (MTMTM). Analyze the right metrics in order to measure results effectively. Start with a small budget or a small audience base to test access the results. When embarking into any new methodology, it is important to A/B test so that the effectiveness could be appropriately compared and accessed. This will allow you to iterate your marketing efforts and make ongoing decisions based on hard data rather than intuition. While the ultimate aim of any business is to close deals and win customers, to achieve this, the marketing programs are broken into sub campaigns that collectively impacts the final goal.
Final Thought
Business needs are driven by various factors, and Marketing is an inextricable part of an organisation tasked to create a great way to create brand awareness, perception lift and help the sales team identify leads that are close to conversion. Whatever strategy an organisation adopts, it is important to remember that at the end of the day you are still talking to humans or an individual, so personalising communication will create a deeper relationship with your customer .
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