The reality for many working in B2B marketing is often limited resources, lack of personnel, budget constraints, and insufficient collaboration with sales. In addition, end-to-end processes and a unified data foundation are usually incomplete or non-existent. So, how do you implement a profitable marketing strategy? How can companies choose the right marketing tool? And how do you progress from basic newsletters to a fully operational lead machine?
This checklist provides guidance on building a strategy to kickstart your digital marketing efforts.
1. Focus on Buyer Personas Instead of Target Groups
Identify your key audiences and create multiple, detailed buyer personas — potentially even for different business units. Unlike a general target group, a buyer persona is a specific profile that represents your typical customer. In B2B, a larger buying center is often involved. Think along these lines: a CEO, Sales Director, IT Manager, or Procurement Officer could all be separate buyer personas.
2. Gather the Right Data
Are your marketing efforts aimed at acquiring new customers, expanding into new sectors, increasing revenue, or launching new products? Your strategy will vary accordingly. Whatever your goal, the foundation of any digital marketing process is customer-related data. This data can be manually gathered or, more efficiently, imported via automated interfaces from internal company applications or third-party platforms into your marketing tool.
3. Select Marketing Tools
To use customer data effectively, you’ll need marketing platforms that cover essential functions and offer seamless integration with other systems in your company, such as a CRM system or web store. Begin by understanding relevant channels and defining processes with sales and e-commerce teams. But having the right tools is just the beginning. Marketers need to be empowered to apply automation effectively in practice. Critical features include a user-friendly interface, state-of-the-art functionalities, and, not least, GDPR-compliant consent processes.
4. Develop a Content Strategy
Craft a content strategy that provides valuable material tailored to each buyer persona. Create an editorial calendar for blog posts, whitepapers, e-books, case studies, videos, or infographics. Ensure your content is engaging, informative, and relevant. Score each interaction and determine a threshold at which a lead becomes sales-ready, indicating a high sales opportunity.
5. Personalize Your Outreach
A personalized approach and tailored offers are far more likely to convert than general information. Achieve this by segmenting your audience based on different attributes and using personalization tokens. With the right marketing automation tools and a growing database, you can build contact lists and trigger-based campaigns. This way, recipients receive personalized messages based on their interests and behavior.
Conclusion
Only once you’ve established a marketing strategy with defined buyer personas, understood customer needs, and identified relevant channels does it make sense to select a suitable marketing automation tool and deliver personalized content. Move forward step by step and start with what you have. Phase two will involve lead qualification, scoring, and comprehensive automation. Interested in learning more? For detailed examples of each step, download our whitepaper Digital B2B Marketing for Beginners!