6 Things to Consider Before Building your B2B Marketing Strategy
Creating a solid approach to marketing is key to developing a strong sales pipeline. Before you can begin implementing various marketing tactics, it’s important to take a moment to make sure you have the foundation established for a long-term strategy that will achieve your results. This foundation includes having real answers to a few key questions about your business.
Here are 6 things to consider before creating your B2B marketing strategy.
1. Consider who your customers are
Who are your target customers?
This may seem like an obvious question, but if your response is “anyone” or a large industry (i.e. healthcare, government, retail, etc.), then it may be time to narrow your focus.
The best marketing efforts are tailored to a specific group’s unique needs, and by focusing on a broad industry, it will be more challenging to create tailored content if you’re just starting out. Instead, narrow down the group to a few key areas that would benefit most from what you offer. A narrower focus will allow you to really target that key group, and they will respond better to this tailored attention.
For example, instead of focusing on “healthcare”, maybe your business works with private practices for the elderly. Your ideal target customers are now defined as nursing homes or care providers.
Who are the key decision-makers?
For many B2B companies, you are selling not to an individual person, but a purchasing team where many people with conflicting priorities have a say in what they buy. In many cases, there are a smaller number of people (or even one individual) who approves the budget, and it is important to identify this individual. This person will be the one who you’ll create materials for that speak to their needs.
However, before you focus solely on the person in charge of the budget, remember that other purchasing team members also have an influence on the ultimate decision. Members of the purchasing team may include members from groups, such as marketing, IT, sales, and human resources. If you are selling to those groups, you will need to create an even narrower list of decisionmakers (i.e. for marketing: brand director, communications lead, marketing operations, etc.). When developing your marketing materials and campaigns, keep in mind the motivations for the various members of this group and speak to their needs and challenges. Not only should you know who the decision makers are, but you should also know why they would choose you.
2. Consider what products and services you offer
What services/products do you offer?
Deciding what you plan to market is a key step in developing a B2B marketing strategy. Do you plan to promote all of your services/products equally or are you focused on really expanding in this one area this year? These strategies will look very different.
In general, it’s best to develop a plan around your specific offerings instead of your company as a whole. This is because customers are more likely to engage with your marketing materials if they speak to a specific challenge that you solve rather than broadly promoting your company.
What are 3-5 key pain points that your services/products solve?
Customers buy based on what you can do for them, and this means solving key pain points. Even if you have aproduct with awesome features, if you can’t articulate why the customer will benefit from the product, they won’t be interested in buying it.
If you’re unsure on how to obtain this information, consider a focus group or publishing a survey.Ask recent customers why they chose to work with you or why they were in the market for your particular offering. You can use that as a starting point to develop the common pain points that you solve.
What specific goals do you want to achieve with a new marketing strategy?
There are many B2B marketing strategies to choose from and determining the best one for your company will depend on your specific goals. Example goals include: increasing the number of consultation calls, increasing free trial sign-ups, shortening the time from first contact to purchase, increasing average initial spend, etc. Where possible, attach a number and a timeframe to these goals to increase your chances of success.
3. Consider where your customers are
Where do your customers learn about new ideas related to your service/product?
The goal is to understand how your customers learn about your service or product and to develop an approach that places your company in that location. For example, if your typical customer learns about the type of offering that you have from industry conferences, then you know that you need to begin attending those conferences and ideally presenting at them. If your customer typically learns through word-of-mouth, then it is key to establish a network of contacts related to your ideal customer.
Where do your customers go when trying to make a decision related to your service/product?
While the act of learning about a new service/product may be passive, customers are trying to make a decision. This in turn leads to customers actively seeking out the new information. Almost everyone turns to the internet when searching for new information, which makes an inbound marketing strategy key, but where else do they go for information? If there are specific sites they visit, magazines, or key contacts, then you know to incorporate these into your marketing strategy.
4. Consider when customers make decisions
When do your customers make purchasing decisions?
The answer to this question is critical when planning a schedule for your marketing campaigns. Many industries and organizations have buying cycles when they purchase, and if you do not align your marketing efforts with this buying cycle you won’t achieve your best results. For example, if K-12 school districts are your ideal clients, then you know that they typically purchase during the summer months (before June 30) and start planning for next year’s purchasing during the summer as well. This means that you will need to start raising awareness during those summer months for the following year, and the first step may be through creating quality content, which should be published a few months before to start ranking on search.
Many industries have similar buying cycles, and it’s important to align your marketing efforts to this cycle.
5. Consider why you bring value
Why should customers choose you over other solutions?
This aligns directly with the 3-5 pain points that you created above. Yes, you solve those pain points, but how do you do it better than your competitors? Being able to speak to this specifically creates your key differentiators, which you should highlight in your marketing materials and sales proposals. Be sure to highlight why your approach is the best without publicly sharing your “secret sauce” that gives you a true competitive advantage.
Why are you changing your approach to marketing?
Answering this question will help you to develop your key goals (see above) and allow you to create a more tailored marketing strategy. If you don’t know why you are marketing, then you’ll waste precious resources for few results. However, if you can concretely answer why you want to change your marketing strategy, then you’ll know where to focus and make better use of your resources.
6. Consider how you plan to implement your strategy
The answer to this question is your marketing plan. The marketing plan should outline specific tactics to achieve your goals and reach your target audience. This is the final planning step before you actually begin implementing your new approach to marketing.