Because they are neither strategic nor holistic, random acts of marketing cost businesses selling business-to-business (B2B) umpteen billions of opportunity costs due to missed leads, revenue and profits – not to mention the actual cost of ineffective marketing.
Here’s how can you avoid this B2B marketing epidemic.
Viewing Marketing as Macro Sales
Marketing ultimately boils down to strategy and execution. Effective marketing makes it easy for your salespeople to get in front of more prospects, resonate more powerfully with them, and close deals faster. Even if they pound their phones and email, individual salespeople can only reach so many people in a day—maybe 100–while marketing can reach tens of thousands and more.
The Opportunity of Prospect Self-Education
B2B prospects increasingly self-educate on what will solve their problems and who is best to do so by searching the web. If you’re not coming up in a Google search or getting your message in front of prospective clients via email, direct mail, advertising, PR, or some other form of marketing, you’re not self-educating them and they will likely reach out to your competitors.
That is why it’s important to create compelling messaging for your target markets by promoting your value proposition and differentiation so you get noticed with both inbound marketing (demand capture) and outbound marketing (demand generation).
Where to Start
Whatever your industry or target market, the place to start is always the same: development of a strategy that identifies how to achieve your sales and marketing goals over the next 1-3 years. To be truly holistic, your marketing plan should include as much of the following as you can:
- Input from internal stakeholders and clients
- Revenue, customer retention and profitability goals over the next 1-3 years
- Potential sales per product and service category
- Pricing analysis with an evaluation of cost-plus vs. market-based pricing
- The right marketing mix of inbound and outbound) to achieve your goals
Content Is King
Content is crucial for increasing lead generation and sales, but only if it’s well written and resonates with your prospects. With so many pumping out content in a misguided attempt to increase keyword rankings, the quality of the writing goes a long way toward conveying your thought leadership.
It’s recommended to resist the temptation to use AI, hire interns, our outsource writing overseas. Truly professional writers deliver your message in a compelling and succinct style to ensure that content resonates with your target audience – and reflects your brand’s voice.
By comparison, content written by inexperienced writers often have quality issues and may also result in too much “top-of-funnel” or even “out-of-funnel” content. This refers to the types of content prospects seek in their buyer’s journey (i.e. sales process) – as they get close to a buying decision, they want more detailed information. If you are overweight with “top of funnel” content, your prospects may look for answers to tougher questions elsewhere.
Marketing as an Investment vs. Cost Center
In the old days, marketing was considered an expense because it was challenging to attribute any sales to the design of your website, marketing collateral, tradeshow booth, social media, etc.
Today, you can measure a wide variety of B2B marketing KPIs and tie sales attributed to your marketing efforts.
Successfully executing a strategic marketing plan requires a team, whether internal marketing employees, a B2B marketing agency, or both to cover the following skills:
- Marketing due diligence and customer/prospect research
- Competitive intelligence
- Strategic planning
- Brand storytelling
- Web and graphic design
- Content marketing (original thought leadership content)
- Content syndication (link building)
- Onsite and offsite search engine optimization (SEO)
- Google Ads, LinkedIn Campaigns, Microsoft Ads, and other pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
- Email and direct mail campaigns
- Public relations (PR), including article and speaker pitches
- Social media
So you don’t fall prey to random acts of marketing, beware of flashy presentations from marketing agencies. It’s better to have a marketing partner that will help you generate results based on your goals, which is why starting with a marketing audit and plan is critical to your success.