Crafting a well-thought-out marketing strategy is crucial for meeting business goals and driving revenue. Lead generation and growth are key, so investing time in B2B strategic marketing planning is essential. Whether refining your strategy or starting from nothing, this guide covers everything you need to succeed.
Obtain Alignment on Your Organization’s Strategy
Before determining your B2B marketing strategy, you first must be clear, up-to-date and fully aligned on your organization’s broader strategy and goals. Why does it matter? Your organization’s strategy will tell you how it positions itself in the market, what type of messaging it wants to convey, what buyer personas it wants to reach and more. It gives you the building blocks for your marketing strategy and plan. Plus, if the entire team is on the same page, it can reduce miscommunication and obstacles in reaching set goals.
Reach a Consensus on Goals and Objectives
In large organizations, it can be difficult to fully agree on every priority, goal and objective. What you need to drive towards common ground is to adopt a shared view of what it will take to get there. This is a crucial step that helps to frame budgeting, planning and campaign component questions for marketing. Not only does it serve as the framework for the marketing plan, it also helps put into perspective what is possible to achieve with the resources available. While your team might have great, ambitious ideas, if it does not fit the scope of what is feasible, you might need to adjust them to stay on track and make it realistic to achieve results.
With a clear and confirmed organizational strategy and a shared view of priorities, goals and objectives, it is not time to move to the fun part – planning how marketing can enable your team to meet and exceed set goals.
Determine Buyer Personas
Buyer personas tell you what you need to know about your target audience including their pain points, demographic components, what they are looking for in a product solution and more. Personas are non-negotiable – if you want to plan and execute marketing campaigns that drive results, you need to know who you are targeting and how to reach them. The components of buyer personas also give you the information for marketing efforts, such as messaging. Messaging plays a huge role in effectively communicating with your target audience, so having a background of what prospects are looking for and incorporating that into your various marketing components will allow you more possibilities to engage audiences and convert them. The moral of the story – have detailed buyer personas or your marketing plan will not have a target for whom to reach.
Develop an Integrated Marketing Plan
Building an integrated B2B marketing plan can take time. All marketing components should have a place in this plan, complete with how to measure success, time allotted for each task, who is responsible and much more. While building your marketing plan, remember your overall business goals and answer this question: What marketing strategies and tactics will help me reach these goals? Whether your organization wants to convert a specific number of leads per month or obtain a certain number of partnerships, there is a marketing tactic to support your goal. It is a matter of determining the combination of activities that will generate the most results. This is what an integrated marketing plan is – a plan that allows components to flow together and feed into each other.
Here are examples of potential business and marketing goals and specific integrated marketing efforts that can help you achieve those goals.
Goal: Generate X Number of Qualified Leads in Q1
Lead generation is a key goal for organizations. To achieve a specific number of qualified leads, start with the buyer’s journey: generate awareness, move to the consideration stage and impact the decision phase. Improve your website’s user experience to boost visibility and engagement. Use a mix of gated and ungated content to capture leads. Once converted, use case studies and sales materials to turn leads into customers. Outline content in your marketing plan to support each step of the buyer’s journey for successful lead generation.
Goal: Increase Customer Renewals or Upsells
Customer satisfaction is crucial. Renewals and upselling indicate satisfied customers and steady revenue. Show value to current customers by highlighting new features and benefits relevant to their needs. For example, if you have added AI features to your cybersecurity platform, demonstrate how these features improve their security management. Use targeted content, videos, ads, and emails to communicate these benefits. Your marketing plan should detail the efforts to achieve this goal.
Goal: Increase Website Traffic
A large part of driving traffic to your website starts with organic traffic. To drive traffic organically, it is instrumental that your website pages rank high on search engine results pages. How do you get your pages to rank higher? Effective search engine optimization (SEO). Improving SEO, including selecting high-volume keywords, optimizing pages and metadata and incorporating links, helps drive more organic traffic. This is not the only way to increase website traffic. Your integrated plan could include paid channels as well. Planning advertising campaigns, such as Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads, can also provide more website traffic. To conduct advertising campaigns, you must have content assets to support them. Outline potential content assets to develop that will speak to audiences and garner their engagement. As you can tell, this goal needs a variety of components working together to help achieve it! Include all in your marketing plan.
Monitor Progress and Adjust
With your integrated marketing plan outlined and ready to go it is important to now execute it. Once you have readied the required resources and your team, execute your plan with confidence and conviction. As you progress throughout the plan, assess your progress and whether you are delivering at or above expected levels. Leverage data and dashboards to help you in this process. Analyze your data and business results to identify all actions needed to correct your course if you have gone astray somewhere and to amplify opportunities that surface.
Generate Results
B2B strategic marketing planning is not easy, but devoting your time to developing a solid integrated marketing plan focused on achieving and exceeding key business goals will keep your team working toward common goals and your business flourishing.
If you need support with building your B2B marketing plan or bringing your B2B marketing campaigns to life, we can help! Contact us today or request a free marketing consultation with our B2B marketing experts to see the results we can bring to your business.
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