Your demand generation cannot be successful if it has not been thought out and put into an action plan beforehand.
However, more than 60% of companies do not comply with this requirement and decide their actions mainly on “intuition”. The result: isolated actions, great efforts and poor results.
In this note I want to give you a little push to take that step towards developing a strategy for your company. Let's start by defining what it is:
What is a B2B marketing strategy?
A marketing strategy, and in this case B2B, is the step-by-step process to follow to achieve marketing objectives with the budget and resources available to achieve them. When putting together a strategy, it is necessary to do some in-depth work to get to know the business in depth: the market segment in which it operates, its competitors, the characteristics of its different buyers, etc.
The key to this process is to extract information that allows us to find strong differentials that make the company stand out from its competition. This is essential both for the development of the strategy and for the success of its execution.
Having a defined and documented strategy will help your company to have reference material so that members of your marketing department can refresh the steps to follow when they need to, or when new team members need to get up to date on the current state of the company in this area; it will also allow you to back up the results obtained in your annual reports.
The 7 pillars of your B2B marketing strategy
In our consulting experience working with B2B companies, we have found that there are 7 pillars that every marketing strategy must have:
Knowing the target company and the buyer profile
Having a Target Company helps us to be clear about what types of companies we are going to focus on (taking into account aspects such as number of employees, turnover level, industry, infrastructure or technological platform).
The buyer's profile is key to knowing how to interact with those key people who make decisions in the purchasing process, or who have a significant influence. After all, we are in a business-to-business market, and we always talk to a human being to close the deals .
Understanding the value proposition
Having a clear value proposition that everyone involved in marketing understands allows us to translate the company's differential and transmit it in attractive and persuasive messages, so that recipients can have a concrete idea of all the benefits they will obtain if they decide to do business with us.
Understanding business objectives
It is key to ensure that the marketing strategy is aligned with the company's interests. Marketing work cannot be isolated from the company's overall objectives.
A good method to achieve this goal is the use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), a methodology used by Google to manage the objectives of the company and each department. If you want to know more about this method, read our article: “How to define your marketing objectives with OKRs and SMART”
Aligning Marketing Objectives to Business
Once we understand the direction the company is following, we can set marketing objectives that support business growth. For example, if your company is seeking internationalization, we must set international marketing objectives by creating a network of communication channels that build your company's presence in other countries, something very different from what local marketing objectives aim for.
Knowing the Buyer's Journey
The Buyer's Journey is the set of stages that a buyer goes through to complete a purchase (awareness, consideration and decision).
Understanding the stages of this journey and how our buyers experience them is very useful to understand the roles played by influencers in determining the purchasing decision.
We need to have a communication strategy for each profile and stage of the journey they are in.
Define how we are going to measure it
Once the tactical plan that will accompany the achievement of marketing objectives is set out, the key performance metrics or KPIs must be defined, basically because if we do not measure the result of our actions we cannot know if we are achieving our objectives .
Creating committed teams
Last but not least, a strategy can be perfectly thought out, but if there is no team to thailand viral telegram carry it out, it will remain theoretical. With today's dynamic markets, the real-life effectiveness of a strategy needs to be proven as quickly as possible, and this is done by a team that understands the purpose of what they are doing, and sees value in what they do beyond the financial reward.
Conclusions:
A B2B marketing strategy with well-defined objectives and action tactics is very important, but the speed with which a company can test its effectiveness in the field is undoubtedly decisive: the market is constantly changing and if your company takes 3 months (or more) to devise and execute a strategy, it may need to be changed before it goes live.
We emphasize the importance of a well-coordinated team committed to the company: a strategy without an interdisciplinary and multi-level team to drive it will not be useful either: in the ideal case, not only the CEO and marketing are involved in the execution, the role of sales is crucial to get our message to the people we are interested in.
Finally, we want to emphasize the importance of knowing the customer perfectly: understanding how they behave, how they communicate, what they like and what they don't, what and how they search when they want to find information about their problem or need, will allow us to put together a good content strategy that touches on their pain points and encourages them to want to know more about the company. Having good content is especially important for SMEs with a limited budget.