3 Things You Must Do Before Launching a B2B Marketing Campaign

Now, more than ever, it is important to make the most of your marketing budget. Consider the following three steps to take before launching a B2B marketing campaign to ensure that you spend your time and budget wisely, creating strong, meaningful campaigns that reach the right audience.

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1. Verify Your Contacts

Make contact verification a priority. As you build or select your database, use your time effectively to ensure you have the right contact as a target company to pursue. Databases can become quickly outdated and sending information to the wrong person, or to someone who is no longer there, is a waste of time and money. Without contact verification, the investment in a campaign can be wasted, considering the potential for leads generated lost. It could almost be said that companies can’t afford not to ensure their contacts are verified. 

The best way to verify contacts is to leverage internal resources, if available, or hire an experienced lead generation/telemarketing firm. While doing this, be sure to take full advantage of the time spent and think beyond your current campaign. Be strategic in these efforts and use your time wisely to also verify other important pieces of information that might prove vital to the success of a campaign or the future relationship with the customer or prospect. As you begin, develop a method to catalog your database to easily sort and segment for key characteristics. This will help you quickly determine current customers from prospects, as well as identify other key factors that could affect your marketing message. Factors could include identifying contacts by their role or industry vertical, knowing which customers only subscribe to a certain service or product line, or where prospects are in the sales pipeline.

For more support and information on verifying your company’s data, allowing your campaign to be more personalized, watch our Personalized is Profitable webinar.

2. Adapt Your Message

Analyze who you are targeting and why, and then adapt your message appropriately. For creating more compassionate, authentic messaging, read our blog on compassionate communication for marketing messaging. In developing a campaign to customers, it is good to leverage your current relationship and pre-established trust. Whatever your campaign may be, take this opportunity to include information about related new products and enhanced or additional services. Campaigns to this segment are a perfect opportunity to develop messaging to promote how they could truly benefit from using other products and services your company offers. Once a customer experiences how your company’s solutions successfully fulfill their needs, it is easier to help them identify the benefits of other products and services that could also meet their needs.

In tailoring a campaign to prospects, it is helpful to answer the questions: What is important for them to know about your company, and what is important for them to know about the products or services your company offers? It is important to understand how the product or service can benefit your audience and to accurately identify a point of pain (or multiple points) that they are experiencing. Once that information is determined it is easier to develop relevant content to answer these questions and help your messaging resonate with prospects.

3. Focus Your Approach

Once you know who you plan to target and why, focus on the best way to communicate your message. It is important to note that marketing to an existing customer base has been proven to be more economical than marketing to an entirely new audience. To that end, it is recommended to leverage your existing relationships with customers and promote up-sell and cross-sell opportunities where they can take advantage of product upgrades and enhanced services. Promote these different opportunities through a variety of different mediums, including direct mail, email, online and via customer-oriented events.

When targeting prospects, it is the best use of a company’s time and money to produce an integrated marketing campaign that showcases consistent messaging and a recognizable look and feel across the many different campaign components from direct mail to email, advertising and more. Reaching prospects through multiple coordinated touch points helps solidify the company’s message in the minds of prospects. In addition, it is valuable to direct prospects to your company’s website where you post case studies and customer video testimonials. Prospects respond well to marketing that incorporates testimonials and other forms of third-party validation that provide quantifiable data on results and improved processes.

Marketing with Purpose

When deadlines and sales goals loom, it can be easy to succumb to temptation and skip over these basic steps to try and execute a campaign on time. However, a campaign that reaches the right target is always more successful than one that was launched quickly in order to meet inaccurate deadlines but is ultimately directed toward the wrong audience.

Need help executing these steps? Leverage our firm’s resources and expertise. Contact Launch Marketing today. Be sure to follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook to keep up with the latest B2B marketing tips and trends.