Deploying marketing that positively impacts your brand, pipeline, and revenue requires more than ever before. The days of being able to drive results through a website alone are over. And it’s not enough to do a little of this and a little of that in hopes that something will work.
Today, you need a solid strategy paired with the appropriate tactics and technology, and it all has to be expertly connected and coordinated. Specifically, you need the following core elements to deploy B2B marketing that will move the needle.
A Documented Marketing Strategy
Your marketing strategy should be locked down and agreed on by all stakeholders within your organization. Core to that strategy should be foundational work that details and documents:
- Buyer persona profiles that include demographic and psychographic data, their pains, and how you solve those pains.
- What makes your company remarkable and differentiates it from the competition.
- A disruptive, emotional, and memorable message.
- The planned investment and the expected results, with clear alignment between the two.
Select and Execute the Right Tactics
In today’s multichannel world, you need to be actively using foundational marketing tactics such as your website, email marketing, social media, and SEO. However, you also need to be looking at where your prospects are and integrating other channels to engage with them on their terms. This could include podcasts, videos, speaking events, conferences, paid advertising, direct mail, and more.
In addition to using tactics to engage prospects and generate leads, you need to make sure you’re using the right ones to follow up with leads and produce sales opportunities.
Orchestrate the Tactics Into Campaigns
It’s not enough to select your tactics. They need to be organized and choreographed within personalized, omnichannel campaigns that target specific buyer persons. These campaigns might include inbound, outbound, account-based, or customer campaign strategies – or a blend of two or more approaches.
Once launched, you should have an established optimization methodology to fine-tune campaign performance over time and drive increasingly better results.
The Right Marketing and Sales Technology
From the right CRM and CMS to dashboards and automation, success depends on having the right technology in place to support your team’s efforts and your organizational goals. But it’s not just about having the right MarTech platform – everyone needs to be using it to automate and analyze marketing and sales efforts while realizing maximum efficiency. It’s the single source of truth for everything marketing- and sales-oriented.
The Right Resources (and Enough of Them) to Execute
Routinely evaluate your team to determine if you have the right people in the right seats with the right skill sets to do what needs to be done. If you don’t, develop a plan to shore up key gaps. That could include contracting with outside resources or hiring resources with needed skills.
This can be a hard process for many leaders because it requires a measure of honesty and awareness, and it can often lead to difficult conversations and decisions concerning current team members who aren’t the right fit. However hard they are, though, these conversations are necessary.
The Correct Metrics
To have success, you must first have agreement on what success looks like. In addition to setting clear goals and benchmarks, you should establish KPIs that you will monitor, report, and review on a regular basis.
Processes in Place
From how the work gets done and is distributed to how you monitor and measure success, you must establish processes that everyone on your team is brought into and follows. Part of your process should include a regular rhythm for meetings that have a clear purpose and are scheduled for the same time and on the same day.
- Hold a strategic session every 90 days to review larger company initiatives and align marketing to your business strategy.
- Meet every 30 days to agree on what can be accomplished over the next month, reset priorities, check resources, and determine what will be delivered.
- Run a weekly revenue team meeting that includes marketing, sales, and delivery so that revenue issues are identified and fixed, metrics are tracked, and everyone is rowing in the same direction.
Taking a more strategic, results-oriented approach to lead generation and revenue growth should be at the top of your list heading into Q4 and your 2025 planning. The elements outlined here will help you establish the foundation for a strong B2B marketing program that will positively impact your business.
What To Do Today: Start at the top. Everything revolves around your buyer personas. Schedule a workshop with your team to discuss and document your primary personas. Dig deep to get to their motivations and challenges rather than exploring superficial information like the type of car they drive or how many kids they have.
