While tactics and technology are often the focal point, a solid strategy should always be the foundation of a B2B online marketing program. Every component should be tied back to strategy, goals and metrics that set the program’s course.
It’s essential to create a strategically aligned game plan designed to attract prospects, convert leads, engage customers and measure results. How you go about defining your B2B online marketing strategy is up to you and the format, components and process vary from company to company. But here are some essentials that should be included in your strategy and planning process.
Align with your business strategy and goals
While this may seem like a no-brainer, it’s easy for marketing to focus on goals and achievements that aren’t necessarily tied to the goals of the company. For example, doubling your website traffic, gaining followers on social media and receiving tons of downloads of your latest eBook aren’t of much value if they don’t help the company achieve their revenue goals. While those achievements may help to accomplish the goals of the company, they’re simply a means and not the end. So it’s important for marketing to stay focused on the ultimate purpose of the online marketing program—achieving the strategic business goals and revenue targets of the company.
Set goals and define KPI’s
With that said, you still have to establish goals for your online marketing efforts to know what is working, what is not working and what needs to be adjusted. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) play a critical role in helping you track the ongoing performance of your B2B online marketing program. Obviously the end goal is revenue, so with that as a starting point, determine how many new customers are needed, how many leads it will take to get those new customers and how many visitors, downloads, shares, etc. it will take to generate those leads. Come up with a list of KPIs for each component of your program—website, social media, email marketing, content marketing, blog and landing pages—and create a dashboard of metrics and track your progress daily.
Analyze your marketing and benchmark against the competition
How does your marketing stack up to your competition? While there’s no need to be preoccupied with what your competition is doing, it’s important to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their brand and online marketing efforts. What are they doing well? What can you do better? With simple observation and by using an advanced online competitive analysis tool found in many marketing automation platforms, you’ll be able to identify opportunities and develop strategies for improving your own marketing.
Develop buyer persona profiles
Creating buyer persona profiles is a way to help you visually picture the type of people you are trying to reach and understand on a deeper level—their wants, needs, interests, questions and pain points. B2B purchasing decisions are typically made with a lot of consideration beforehand—especially for larger purchases. So you need to understand how and why a buyer makes a decision to choose your company, a competitor or make no purchase at all. Personas help you better understand this decision making process so your content and messaging will be more relevant, valuable and ultimately persuasive.
Map content to the customer lifecycle
Once you have identified your personas and the journey they typically follow from visitor to prospect, prospect to lead, lead to customer and customer to evangelist, you can start to identify the types of content and topics that will resonate most with those personas at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Content should play a role in every stage of the lifecycle to help create awareness, generate leads, convert leads into customers and turn customers into evangelists.
Produce a content roadmap
Now that you’ve identified your personas and their content needs, you need to create a content roadmap to keep your efforts on course. Your content roadmap is a quarterly plan for the content you’re going to create (whitepapers, eBooks, webinars etc.) and the topics you’re going to cover on your blog, social media and emails. The roadmap also identifies who is going to be responsible for the creation and when it will be published. In addition to specifying your content efforts a quarter out, it’s also important to include long-term plans for content and keep a running list of other topics that you might want to cover in the future.
Create premium offers and inbound campaigns
Premium offers and inbound campaigns are at the heart of B2B lead generation. With your audience and content needs identified, you need to create premium offers such as eBooks, whitepapers, webinars, demos, free consultations, etc. that will attract prospects at various stages of the buying cycle. A premium offer should have enough perceived value in order for a visitor to be willing to give you some personal information in exchange for it. Not everyone is ready to buy (in fact, only 3% of first time visitors are) so it’s important to have offers that speak to the different needs of each audience and create inbound campaigns that attract prospects to your website and landing pages.
Determine what defines a qualified lead
Almost nothing can make the sales team more frustrated than following up with unqualified leads that they receive from marketing. Because what marketing defines as a lead may not be what sales or business development defines as a qualified lead. So in order to stay focused on the best opportunities and avoid sending unqualified leads to the sales department, it’s necessary to sit down with both marketing and sales and determine what constitutes a qualified lead. Once you’ve got that definition from sales, it could be that what they deem as unqualified might just need some nurturing efforts from marketing over the course of several weeks or even months before they’re ready to be passed off to sales.
Optimize your website for lead generation
The role of the website in B2B marketing has undergone a significant change over the last several years. While previously intended to be little more than an online brochure for non-ecommerce businesses, much more is expected of B2B websites in today’s online dominated marketing landscape. Many B2B websites were not designed with lead generation and content marketing in mind and thus lack the features, content, functionality, landing pages, search engine optimization, marketing automation and analytics necessary to attract visitors, generate leads and create new business opportunities. So is your website optimized for online marketing? If not, you’ll need to transform your current website or it could be time to develop a new website altogether.
A successful B2B online marketing program is intentional and meticulously planned and executed. And it all starts with a solid game plan that serves to set the course and guide the tactics that drive your efforts. So while it can be tempting, you can’t just jump straight to tactics and expect to get results—at least not the measureable and long-term results that your company desires.