B2B is very difficult because your buyers or consumers are not common people, but market competitors. The marketing tactics that may work on a common customer won’t work on them as they are players themselves. It is risky to tackle such customers and especially ones with high expectations. As a common consumer, even I make sure to check the prices of all the competing brands before deciding on any one of the road trip planner.
Do you ever feel that sometimes despite having all the latest technologies and facilities, your marketing team still fails at a campaign? Meanwhile, some other business takes advantage of this and captures the market share you had wanted for years! Situations like this should have made you wonder where your B2B marketing team has been lacking.
It is the strategy. Your marketing team lacks a well thought out marketing strategy. Here are the best 7 ingredients your marketing team should have in order to turn your marketing strategy into a success story. Increasing B2B sales shouldn’t be a problem if professionals guide you. It is not just about aiming for something to happen; it is about thinking ahead and planning well enough.
Set Definite Goals
Every strategy you make is worthless if you have no idea about its outcome. The team needs to have a clear idea of what is expected.
Your team also needs to be clear about the difference between business goals and marketing goals. For instance, if you want to increase the traffic to your website, this should be tackled under the marketing goals. However, if the aim is to increase the sales too, then that comes under ultimate business growth goals. However, the team must align the sales and marketing goals in order to achieve business goals.
Clarity Regarding Target Audience
This might look like the easiest marketing task, but researching the specifications and needs of your target audience and potential customers is a crucial responsibility. It should be included as an essential part of the B2B marketing strategy.
You can take the help of psychographics (belief system, inspirations, motivations, phobias) to understand your customers. Research has shown that psychographic research is much more effective than research conducted based on demographics (gender, earning, location, and age group of the customer).
This research will integrate your B2B into a unit that is backed up by the same knowledge source, i.e., the customer information focused on targeting the right ones.
Consideration of the Buying Process
When you know your customers well, you can easily map out their buying process. Mostly, it involves five phases. First, buyers gain awareness related to your product. Then they research the market for similar available products. When they find any, they consider the differences in products, in comparison to their prices. Finally, they make the purchase. And the thing which is more important than the purchase itself, is them staying loyal to your brand and product.
Setting out a Final Marketing Strategy
You know your target audience, you know what their buying process and preferences mean to your business. Now, the rest is easy (comparatively!)
At this stage, you have to assign different content and marketing-related tasks to your team to accomplish at different stages of your marketing. They can cover different buying stages separately, or make a single funnel to make the content slide through the whole process, facilitating every step.
This is the part of the process where you have to implement all the mapping you have been doing previously, so it is natural to come across some loopholes too. The trick is to find and fix them as you go with the flow. Don’t let the minor things be a hurdle in the path of your team’s work speed. A team will be stronger if it is on the same page during all the highs and lows coming their way.
Aligning Sales with Marketing
Now is the time to integrate all the efforts of the team to form a single unit that is working for a single purpose: for increasing the traffic, resulting in increased sales of the desired product.
Aligned effort can bring better results. Those marketing teams are the most successful which are in coalition with sales. The team members work best when they see that their work empowers the success of the sales department.
The hard work could produce a better outcome if the effort is combined in the form of a synced team that knows what it is doing.
Document the Process
As we discussed earlier, there are going to be so many ups and downs during the whole B2B marketing process. Great marketing leaders document every detail so that they have a schedule regarding the expected accomplishment dates, etc.
It would be a good idea to create a marketing calendar too. As the starting and ending dates of the campaign are mentioned, it becomes easier for the team to schedule other important announcements, product release dates, events, etc. Also, the team can set deadlines for content writing, approval, and publishing.
But, keep in mind that this calendar is constantly going to change during the whole campaign. Nothing ever goes exactly as planned. So keep your dates and schedules a little flexible.
A Success Measurement Plan
After putting in all the effort and hard work into a campaign, it sounds only right to check the success efficiency of a strategy. Your marketing team should be able to calculate the results. They must know that using tools like Google Analytics can be very helpful in report compilation.
When your marketing team has a solid B2B marketing strategy it answers so many questions. But at the same time, it will allow you to put into question your existing strategies, helping you grow by providing insights.
The task can be as small as me writing a note about finding fashion trends 2020, but it gives me direction as to what to accomplish on that particular day. Therefore, make sure your marketing team has clarity about what to accomplish and how.
