It’s often said that B2B marketing is harder than B2C because, unlike individuals, the businesses you’re marketing to need to be certain that purchasing or subscribing to your product will impact their bottom line positively. And so because of this, there is a lot more bureaucracy on the business’s end, and there needs to be a lot more strategy on your end.
This is why you do not want to be the B2B marketer who is just winging it, trying to reach your prospects using disconnected marketing efforts just to see what sticks.
Having a detailed strategy behind every marketing move, across all relevant channels, is key to fueling convincing your target businesses that they can trust you over your competitors.
Thankfully, you don’t have to wing it because this article teaches how you can create a winning multi-channel B2B marketing strategy for consistently commanding your prospects’ full attention, driving leads towards your business, and convincing them to invest their resources into your products.
What is a B2B Marketing Strategy?
This is a carefully crafted comprehensive plan outlining how you’ll attract, engage, and convert businesses into loyal customers. It’s simply a detailed plan to reach other businesses, foster relationships, and drive sales.
How Do You Create a Winning Multi-channel B2B Marketing Strategy?
Know Your Target Audience:
You can’t possibly shoot an arrow without having a target in mind. The first thing to do is to be crystal clear about who all your effort is targeted at, and this begins with defining your buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. It goes beyond basic demographic information and includes details about a customer’s preferences, behaviours, motivations, and goals. The purpose of creating buyer personas is to better understand and empathize with your target audience, enabling you to tailor your products, services, and marketing strategies to meet their specific needs and interests.
This is a practical example to illustrate how this concept works:
Your company sells cloud-based data analytics software for a retail chain. Your ideal customers will most likely be data analysts and business intelligence (BI) managers in retail chains looking to improve customer insights and optimize store operations.
Their pain points will most likely revolve around difficulty with collecting and analyzing data from multiple sources, lack of actionable insights, inaccurate forecasting, and low customer satisfaction.
To solve this problem, they will engage with data analytics blogs, retail industry conferences, and webinars on customer behaviour. Also, they will mostly likely be in online groups like LinkedIn groups for retail analytics professionals.
Can you see why defining buyer persona is the foundation for creating targeted marketing campaigns across multiple channels? It provides the framework for customizing your messaging, content, and outreach strategies to resonate with each persona’s needs, pain points and information consumption habits.
And it’s what we’ve helped several businesses achieve at Wolfer Digital. Several business owners have struggled to create a buyer persona, and through research, consultations and collaborations, we have developed their persona profile to uncover their deepest pain points and map out their buying habits, demographics and psychographics.
2. Connect Marketing Goals with Company Goals.
Setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound) marketing goals within the context of the company’s objectives is key to crafting a successful B2B marketing strategy. So you have to map marketing goals to each of the company’s objectives.
If your company’s objectives include increasing revenue, improving customer retention or entering new markets the question you should be asking is, “How can my marketing efforts contribute to achieving this specific objective?”
After answering the question, ensure that your marketing goals are measurable to facilitate easy goal-tracking. Setting goals that cannot be measured is pointless. Key Performance Indicators are great tools for measuring marketing goals across different marketing channels. For example, when measuring progress with an email marketing goal of increasing deliverability, KPIs can be open rates, click-through rates or unsubscribe rates.
After setting SMART goals, prioritize your goals. Speak with the relevant stakeholders to align marketing efforts with urgent company objectives. Identifying goals that most significantly move the needle helps with goal prioritization too. Achieving a few goals with laser focus beats spreading yourself thin on many.
A simple example of a marketing goal mapped to a company objective can be this:
- Increase market share by 10% in the next year.
Company Objective:
Increase market share by 10% in the next year.
SMART Marketing Goals:
Increase conversion rate from leads to customers by 5% in 4 months (measured by customer acquisition data).
Generate 1,000 qualified leads per month within 3 months (measured by lead forms, and email opt-ins).
To prioritize these goals, lead generation should be first because it significantly impacts achieving the company’s objective while conversation rate can be optimized after a strong lead pipeline has been established.
3. Identifying and Evaluating Marketing Channels:
Their different marketing channels (Social Media, Email, Blogs etc), each with its unique style, which is why you have to create a multi-channel B2B marketing strategy that reaches your target audience just where they are.
This requires identifying the right channels, evaluating existing channels, and finding new opportunities for growth.
Defining your customer personas makes identifying the right channels easy because you’ll get a sense of where they hang out online and the information sources they trust. If your audience persona loves LinkedIn, you have no business leveraging Instagram as a marketing channel. Researching the channels your competitors are using is another way to uncover any gaps that your strategy can close.
Evaluating existing channels looks like measuring your current marketing efforts to draw empirical conclusions about the effectiveness of your existing channels. This will help you determine what you should improve on. You can do this by tracking your current performance through your KPIs, and asking your current customers how they found you and their preferred communication channels.
Beyond evaluating existing channels, successful B2B marketing strategies can incorporate finding new channels to explore. However, this has to match with where your ideal customers are spending time. If industry trends show that your customers are moving to X (Twitter), you should adapt your marketing strategy to meet the needs of your Twitter target audience.
Please, note that you don’t have to run marketing campaigns across all channels. If your company is still in its budding stages, you can fully leverage two channels excellently, rather than execute mediocre marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
The main point to keep in mind is to be data-driven, focused on your target audience, and constantly strive for improvement to maximize your reach and impact.
Conclusion:
Knowing your target audience, mapping marketing goals to company goals, identifying the right channels, appraising existing channels and identifying new opportunities for growth are key steps to take when creating a roadmap for driving traffic, converting leads to loyal customers and ultimately driving sales.
However, all of this can be overwhelming, and Wolfer Digital’s team exists to take that overwhelm off you. Our dedicated team is available to help your B2B brand realize its full potential with strategic and performance-driven digital marketing campaigns across various channels.
Shoot us an email at info@wolferdigital.co.uk