Seven crucial steps behind the perfect B2B marketing strategy

Creating a B2B marketing strategy requires a structured approach. There’s a distinct difference between this and an end-user campaign, and by far the most important aspect is understanding what your target market is looking for, writes Lorenza Minghetti, Zella DC’s Head of Corporate Communications.

Rather than the wide sales funnel route that typifies B2C (Business to Customer) marketing, B2B (Business to Business) is all about staking your claim as a subject matter expert and building long-term relationships with clients.

Seven steps to the perfect B2B marketing strategy

This is niche marketing, with a customer (and potential customer) base that’s far smaller than direct consumer sales. The key drivers can be defined as:

• Gaining trust
• Getting to know individual customers
• Serving a need
• Filling gaps

Ultimately, your sales goal is to enter a partnership with your client that will need to be nurtured in the long term. Here are seven crucial steps to get there.

1. Carry out in-depth research about your focus target market

Before you even begin to put a marketing strategy together, you must know your potential customers’ needs. Good research aims to understand multiple aspects, such as:

• What fit do your company’s products or services have with industry needs?
• What challenges do they face?
• What are the most used procurement models?
• Who are your strongest competitors? Why do companies choose to buy from them?

2. Define your customer profile and alternative personas

Once you understand their requirements and challenges, you should create a typical customer profile. However, while this is important, you should also look at potential sales streams that might sit outside this portrait.

Are small and medium businesses your usual target? If that’s the case, are you missing out by not going for the big guns? Perhaps not, but it should still be considered. Could the effort it needs to woo larger enterprises pay dividends in the long run?

3. Analyse your business and your competitors

Compare what you do better than your competitors – and vice versa. What can you do to upset the status quo?

This is especially important for startups that are entering the market. However, the importance of this – even for companies that have a solid market presence – should never be forgotten.

4. Develop your selling proposition

Now it’s time to define your objectives. All of these should be specific, measurable, achievable and time bound.

For example, you might want to increase lead generation by 15 per cent over three months. Or perhaps you want to target a different industry that you’ve identified as having good sales potential.

5. Outline your KPIs

Using all the above stages will help define your KPIs (key performance indicators) and related metrics.

Try to keep these specific and not too numerous. This will make for easy monitoring and give clear feedback on the success of the strategy over time.

6. Develop a customer journey map

Effective B2B marketing takes time. Creating the typical journey that this follows allows everyone to be clear as to the expected time frame it will take to culminate in a successful sale.

While there’s always the odd deviation from the norm, an effective road map helps with overall implementation.

7. Identify the relevant, channels, resources, tools and tactics needed

Effective B2B marketing should be integrated across multiple channels. We often dedicate all our efforts to online resources, but you should pay adequate attention to offline marketing as well. Choose tactics that complement each other.

For instance, a billboard campaign should drive up online searches. Therefore, do you need to have a paid search strategy running in conjunction to maximise the effect?

Throughout the creation of a B2B marketing strategy, you should always be asking the question, “How will this end up grabbing the attention of the decision-makers (AKA, the buyers)?”. Extensive reach doesn’t necessarily make for a quality strategy. It’s all about the niche connection that ends up connecting with the right people.

As you can see, creating a quality B2B marketing strategy takes time – both in the development stage and the journey that it takes to culminate in a sale. Taking the time to carry out the necessary research before committing is crucial to success. Diligence in the planning stage is what will reap the rewards you need.

So, be sure to pay enough attention to what will ultimately determine the success of your campaign.

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