How to build a B2B marketing strategy

First of all it’s great your considering building a marketing strategy for your B2B company. Obviously I’m biased but I think it’s absolutely vital to your marketing success to have a clear and well informed strategy in place.

A proper strategy not only gives you a clear roadmap of where you’re going with your marketing, it gives the team structure and guidance of what to do and when. You’ll also have targets and forecasts in place so you can easily review what is working and then adapt when you get valuable insights.

I believe an effective strategy is even more crucial for B2B organisations as the value of potential clients can be significant for you therefore getting your marketing budget to work harder can be highly profitable.

The first thing to do is clearly outline your goals. What exactly are you trying to achieve? This could be a % revenue increase, it could be to launch a new service or in a new market. Whatever it is you need to clarify that as it will underpin your entire strategy.

Once you’ve done that you then need to audit your business from a marketing standpoint. That includes things such as reviewing your website for both user experience and conversion performance, as well as other areas such as SEO, Social Media and Email Marketing.

By knowing exactly where you stand now you can start to consider how to move forward. The audits will bring to light key gaps in your existing marketing or business infrastructure which you can prioritise within your strategy.

Next is the research phase. Before we go ahead and create our strategy we need to have a good understanding of the wider market, industry trends and our competition.

Regarding the market you’re looking at things such as what products/services are in highest demand, what is most profitable and what audiences need your business most. Linked in with trends you’re looking at growth areas and innovations which have taken off or are in development.

Finally with your competitors you simply want to understand what they do well marketing wise and where they lack. This can give you valuable insights in what to take and adapt from what they do but also where opportunities lie to take advantage of and gain a market share.

Now we’re ready to start putting together the strategy itself. Informed from our audit process and research we can set about outlining the key areas for our strategy to reach out goals identified at the beginning. 

Your strategy needs to be an actionable document so for each aim you’ll want to detail exactly what marketing channels and campaigns will deliver that. For instance if you want to increase sales qualified leads by x% each month, and you’ve identified Google Ads as a channel to help do that you can then set out the monthly spend on Google Ads and additional requirements such as landing pages and lead follow-up processes.

It’s this detail which ensures your strategy doesn’t just sit in a Dropbox folder but actually gets used and implemented by the team to deliver results for your business.

Ultimately a successful strategy comes down to the work you put in at the start by clarifying your goals, auditing where you are and researching the wider market. That information means you’re much more likely to create a strategy which meets your specific business needs.

That being said a strategy should still always be a dynamic document you come back to regularly review and adapt. Quarterly is a good timeframe for this as you’ll have been able to have gathered enough data in that time to assess what’s working and where you need to improve.

By continuing to iterate and optimise your strategy on a regular basis you should be seeing more and more positive results from your marketing activity and investment. This is the power of a good strategy.

As always if you have any questions hit me up on Twitter or if you’d like help creating your marketing strategy request a consultation call with me today.

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