Learning how to create an effective B2B marketing strategy will work wonders for your business! But there are 5 key principles you need to stick with to make it a success.

We’ve outlined 5 fundamentals that will steer your marketing in the right direction.

1. 1. 1. Setting Goals.
      2. Defining Your Target Audience
      3. Choosing the Types of Marketing to Use.
      4. Setting a Budget.
      5. Ongoing Analysis and Evaluation.

Step 1: Setting Goals

There’s an ancient proverb: ‘without a vision, the people perish’. Well, the same can be said of your B2B marketing strategy. Without a vision, your business will suffer.

It’s vital you start out with a strong and achievable vision and stick to it. This is what makes the difference between growing a business and merely maintaining one.

Your B2B marketing strategy will be much more effective if you set clearly defined goals and commit to achieving them.

Ask yourself:

• What are the core products/services I want to offer?
• What size and types of businesses do I want to work with?
• Which sectors do I want to target?
• Where do I want the business to be in five years’ time?

Even with our best efforts, there are no guarantees. But making SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) helps ensure that your objectives are attainable within a certain time-frame.

Step 2: Defining Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience is the next step to creating a successful B2B marketing strategy.

This will help you home in on the businesses that will benefit most from what you have to offer. Think about who your product would help, rather than who it might help.

Taking this angle will, in time, lead to a steady stream of businesses approaching you for help.

When deciding on your target audience, keep in mind that they too are looking for ways to grow their business.

Think of your products/services as solutions that can bring growth to your clients. This will help you define your target audience in detail.

Be Intentional and Specific

Being intentional is vital when creating a B2B marketing strategy. A scattergun approach is not strategic. The closer you get to your target market, the easier you will find it to talk directly to them.

Having a clearly defined audience is also important when targeting the media. For example, when circulating a press release you could broadly release it via a news wire service in the hope of broad coverage. But spreading yourself too thinly will have a negative impact. Not just in terms of reaching prospects, but also with media relationships.

Untargeted marketing will:

• Damage your reputation with the media – they don’t want to receive irrelevant marketing material.
• Damage your credibility and dilute USPs – you’ll confuse your actual targets as they won’t see that it’s for them.
• Make you look desperate to sell to anyone – sell only to those who will buy and use your product or service.

Step 3: Choosing the Types of Marketing to Use

It’s a good idea to get to know where your target audience hangs out. Do they spend time on social media, reading trade press, listening to podcasts, or visiting trade shows? Do your research and style your marketing accordingly to reach them in a way that resonates with them.

Some factors to consider:

• The industry culture – e.g. serious, professional, fun, informal, traditional.
• The decision maker for your product or service.
• The key challenges faced by that industry – e.g. efficiency, waste, downtime.

Targeting prospects in a tailored way can make a massive difference to the success of your marketing strategy.

What to Consider When Deciding How to Create a B2B Marketing Strategy

• Advertising – digital or print, raises awareness but can be very transient and costly. Though it is gaining traction on social media. For high ticket items it is not a sales tool.
• Digital Marketing – anything online can reach a large audience at low cost. Real-time analytics for tracking performance is a key advantage but reaching the target audience can be difficult. It can also be transient despite being ever-present.
• Content Marketing – involves creating and sharing helpful content to engage a target audience. Vital for building brand awareness and credibility. This can be used in a variety of ways including email, social, press, website.
• SEO – a long-term strategy to improve a website’s visibility in search engine results pages. By looking at how customers search for and buy your products and services, SEO can drive customers to your website.

It would be a dream to be able to give blanket coverage to several different marketing approaches but setting a budget will help determine how to prioritise where your money goes.

Once you know your audience and what they’re likely to respond well to, you can start planning how this is going to work within the constraints of your budget.

Step 4: Setting a Marketing Budget

Let’s turn our thoughts to the finances: work out what your endgame is, and establish a budget that will help get you there. Understanding the return on your investment (ROI) is your next challenge.

But whilst the ROI of many marketing activities can be tracked and measured, not all can. A quote, often attributed to Henry Ford says: “Half my advertising spend is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

Don’t be fooled into thinking all your budget should go towards trackable marketing like Google ads or SEO. Brand building exercises like PR are also crucial. You need a strong media presence to boost awareness and credibility.

As a general guide, a well-balanced B2B marketing budget looks something like this:

• 40-50% planning/content creation.
• 20-30% on paid advertising.
• 10% on marketing workforce.
• 10% on software and tools (e.g. analytics, CRMs).
• 5-10% on events.

Prioritising Marketing Spends

When budgets are tight (and they always are) you can’t invest in everything all at once. So it’s a question of prioritising. But if you have a growth strategy, then think carefully about how to get the best return. Focus on the end goal, and work out how to get there. 

A more established business may be tempted to rest on its laurels when it comes to marketing. Once you’re getting a steady stream of custom, you may be able to reduce your marketing spend. But don’t think you can just stop altogether.

Think of some of the biggest brands in the world. Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s. Have they just stopped marketing because they’re doing well? There will always be competition. So you will always need to keep innovating and adapting to meet the needs of your target audience.

Marketing Budget Templates

Some excellent free resources available to help you get started with an outline budget:

• Spendesk: Marketing budget template for Excel
• Smartsheet: 12 free budget templates
• HubSpot: Free budget planners
• Capterra: Marketing budget template
• CoSchedule: Marketing budget plan

Step 5: Ongoing Analysis and Evaluation

As with any business, to truly grow, B2B marketing requires ongoing analysis and evaluation. What’s working well? What isn’t? Why?

For future development and growth, is essential to include this as part of creating your B2B marketing strategy.

Regular check-ins with your team, where feedback is valued and acted upon will help guide the future direction of your strategy. But it doesn’t give the full picture when taken in isolation.

Integrate Analysis and Evaluation When Creating Your B2B Marketing Strategy

When creating your B2B marketing strategy you need to integrate the following to give your strategy a clear direction:

• KPIs: at the outset, decide upon KPIs that align with your business objectives. Setting KPIs and sticking to them provides a benchmark for evaluating how effective your marketing strategy is over time.
• Digital data analytics: using analytics tools to track the performance of digital marketing campaigns provides an evidence base that demonstrates their success. Over time, patterns and areas for improvement become clear, helping to direct future steps.
• Content performance analysis: this is not as clear cut as digital marketing analytics, since content marketing is more about awareness and brand building. But some areas can be quantified including readerships and engagement with blogs and other online content. Identifying which types of content resonate most with your target audience will help guide your strategy over time.

Continuous Improvement

It’s easy to get excited about a new marketing project. But keeping the long-term picture in mind must not be overlooked when creating a B2B marketing strategy.

All the insights gained from your various evaluations need to be brought together. Looking at the direction of everything as a whole will help you make data-driven decisions and ongoing improvements.

This is where you can start to experiment with new tactics, channels, split-testing, and messaging approaches based on your findings. Regularly adjusting your strategy in this way will ensure continued interest from your target market.

Getting Help

Perhaps all this sounds great, but your business currently lacks the expertise to implement a comprehensive marketing strategy.

Consider engaging with a marketing professional or agency. It could be one of the best investments you make, so find someone (or a company) that understands your industry and has a track record of excellent results.

With over 30 years’ experience managing successful marketing campaigns for a range of B2B sectors, Allotts knows what it takes to create a winning marketing strategy.

Get in touch here to find out how we could help your business.