In spite of best efforts to maintain an organization’s annual strategic marketing planning cycle, the chaos and uncertainty in the economic landscape caused by COVID-19 forced many businesses to pivot and rethink their B2B marketing strategy.
Every role in the organization, including marketing, has its own set of tools, content types, and channels to manage. Each function in the buying process has a stake in it, from sales to customer success to marketing. Ad hoc content creation, off-brand messaging, and a disparate customer experience result from a lack of communication or a clearly defined integrated strategy to execute on. B2B enterprises need a closed-loop marketing strategy approach to serve the needs of every buyer in the purchasing process, which means that every team inside the company should be aware of it and play a role in its success.
The strategic goal of many B2B marketers is to fill the sales pipeline and increase revenue. As a result, it’s critical to examine what generates leads and what converts leads into new clients.
Businesses could begin by doing an audit of their present B2B marketing strategy to get internal teams on board with a “one-team, same-team mentality.” This will assist them in evaluating current processes and establishing company-wide objectives. Here are a few pointers for businesses to get started with.
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Calculate the market presence of a brand
When the sales team says prospects “heard” about the brand from a variety of sources, it’s a win-win situation for any marketer. That is a lot of brand awareness. Businesses should do a high-level assessment of their brand’s market exposure, according to B2B marketing agencies. There are metrics that companies can determine, but many of them will be qualitative rather than quantitative.
Define the buyer’s journey and map content to it
B2B companies frequently struggle to reach consensus across the board on the various stages of the buyer’s journey. When sales and marketing teams define stages differently, the result is miscommunication, complex tracking and reporting, and a lack of visibility into the health of the pipeline.
Businesses should start by detailing each stage of the buyer’s journey, from awareness to purchase to repeat customers, to get internal teams on the same page. They should figure out what buyer activity looks like at each level, how they define each stage, and who is in charge.
Then they need to determine what content is used by which team at each stage, the goals associated with each stage, and the metrics they need to track after organizations have identified each stage of their buyer’s journey.
Businesses can establish a closed-loop marketing-sales funnel once they’ve defined their buyer’s journey, which includes agreed-upon sales and marketing definitions. This ensures that all internal teams are on the same page on the exact pain points that businesses should solve, as well as the content that will be given at each level.
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Identify new and innovative concepts
To acquire results and earn the trust of their target market, businesses should be consistent in their marketing strategy execution. However, it’s also critical to incorporate new, innovative ideas into the approach. Businesses should aim to identify new and creative concepts to explore throughout the audit. This can range from identifying new blog subjects that their prospects enjoy to launching new campaigns that truly resonate with their target audience to discovering a new channel, such as email, that decision-makers appear to favor.
While analyzing the metrics for B2B marketing campaigns is important for determining the strategy’s performance, organizations should avoid falling into the analytics trap. A common problem with audits is that marketers get too engrossed in the details and lose sight of the bigger picture and context.
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