You have probably heard in the past about marketing strategies but you never really gave it much credit. As business owners, we like to see cash flowing, so things such as a LinkedIn or Google ads campaign feel more material and practical. Strategy feels like long and boring docs to read and approve, terms you don’t understand…ahhh you just want to make sales!
I get it. Paying for a “plan” without a clear idea of what it really means in practice can feel counterintuitive. That’s exactly what this article is about.
Marketing Strategy: What it is and Why It’s so Important
A marketing strategy is a plan for how you will acquire, retain, and grow the value of your clients, so you can achieve business success. Think about your marketing strategy like your overall guide on how to make your business grow through marketing.
If you’re a business owner who’s passionate about what you do, I’m sure you’d love to see it grow and succeed. So, if an element like a marketing strategy directly influences that growth, you can see why creating a solid marketing strategy matters.
Marketing Strategy vs Marketing Tactic: a Distinction Worth Millions of Dollars
Many businesses confuse tactics with strategy, or mistake one element of a strategy for the whole plan. For example they hire a LinkedIn ads expert. They write a few ads without clear positioning and set up a campaign, without a lead nurturing system. When they do convert clients they don’t have a system to orchestrate referrals. They hope that such a setup will yield long-term results but they generally end up wasting a lot of cash and turning off ads once they measure their ROIs.
Especially in B2B this approach doesn’t work. Without a strategy, your marketing becomes a series of disconnected activities that don’t drive real growth. What brings growth is a solid plan and a clear direction.
How to Work out Your B2B Marketing Plan: A Step by Step Guide
This is the same sequence I follow to work out our clients’ strategies and I have used and perfected over the years. Here it goes.
1. Set your Goals
In the initial step define what you are trying to achieve. What does your business need to grow? This could be more leads, better quality leads, brand awareness, more engagement…. Your goals will dictate every other decision in the strategy so you need to define what you want to achieve: think “5 converted clients by the end of Q1”.
2. Market Analysis
Look at the market you operate in and try to spot trends. Is it growing or contracting? Any trends or any new law impacting supply and demand? What problems are your potential clients trying to solve? There’s a wealth of information on the internet today so use it to your advantage.
3. Competitor Snapshot + SWOT
Map your main competitors. Check their website and other assets and find out what they are doing well and where they may fall short. How are they solving clients’ problems? Once you have gathered info run a SWOT and map out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Are there any gaps where you can stand out relatively to your competitors?
4. Target Market
Define who is the specific group of people who gain the most value from what you offer. Avoid general definitions such as “female, General Managers, based in Australia…etc. They don’t mean much. You need to understand who really gains value from your offering, understand what characteristics have in common and group them. The more precisely you define them, the more effective every other element of your strategy becomes.
5. Positioning
Positioning is the driving force behind all your marketing. It defines how you want to be perceived relative to your competitors and answers one question: why should your ideal client choose you over everyone else? Craft your positioning correctly and acquiring clients will become significantly easier. Get it wrong and even a big budget will not have much impact. I wrote an entire article about positioning, check it out here.
6. Branding Strategy
There are a lot of definitions of what branding is. Since you are a business owner who probably just wants to make more sales, I’ll skip the deep dive into logo colours and “brand emotions”. What I will say is this: branding is one of your biggest assets, right alongside positioning. So focus on this: build your business “world” (visual identity, tone of voice, core values, mission) and deliberately associate it with the positive outcomes your clients are craving.
In other words: It does matter whether you choose the right colours for your business logo, but what matters the most is that your clients associate that colour/logo with a positive experience. That is what will make you money, not the colour alone.
7. Message
Establish how you will express your positioning to your target market. Your messaging needs to speak directly to your target market’s problems, in their language, and make it immediately clear why you are the right fit. Your messaging along with branding and positioning needs to be consistent across all your marketing assets, from website to social media to paper brochure.
8. Media
When defining what media you will use to reach your target market, the question you should ask yourself is: where does my audience spend time? LinkedIn, Google, YouTube, events: the options are many.
Pick one channel and dedicate resources to it rather than investing in all of them. Once you have leveraged one channel, become familiar with a new one and rinse and repeat the process.
9. Lead Capture
Especially in B2B, sales cycles are long, and most of your prospects won’t be ready to buy straight away, but they may in a few months. So you need them to keep you in the loop when the time arrives.
Create a system to capture prospects’ contact details such as name, email address and phone number. A classic example is a lead magnet connected to a landing page where you provide free value upfront to prospects in exchange for their contact details.
You can create thousands of lead magnets, from white papers, savings calculators, free trials and risk free implementation if you sell B2B software, or limited free work if you are a service provider. My advice when it comes to lead magnets is: provide real value, something your prospects will feel silly not to take.
10. Lead Nurturing
Establish a system on how to stay front of mind with your prospects once you have their details. This could be starting a newsletter, automated educational drip campaigns, SMS campaigns or even gated content or resource hub. No matter how you nurture your prospects, don’t make the same mistakes many businesses do: they try to sell all the time and get a high unsubscribe or abandon rate. Provide value instead, and do it consistently.
11. Sales Conversion
Many marketers shy away from this conversation but to me – perhaps because I worked in sales many years ago – marketing and sales need to work together.
Define how you will convert leads when they are ready to have a sales conversation. What does your first meeting look like? How do you follow up? What does your proposal process look like? Every step matters.
12. Customer Experience
Establish how you are going to provide your clients with a great customer experience. This could be things such as “Fully assisted and risk free implementation if you offer software”, or “First strategy workshop in your office no matter where you are based in Australia” if you are a service provider.
The goal is for your clients to have a great experience that drives retention and referrals which will keep building your reputation. Map the journey your client goes through from the moment they sign with you. Look for friction points and eliminate them.
13. Customer Lifetime Value
Selling to current clients is five times less expensive than acquiring new clients. So, establish how you will grow revenue within your current client base through expanded scopes.
Define in your marketing strategy at which point of the relationship with your client you need to include the upsell conversation. For example, if you operate on a retainer basis this could be your quarterly review. If you sell a one off service it could be cross-selling complementary services at the end of the transaction.
14. Referrals
Happy clients are your best salespeople, but referrals don’t happen on their own. It’s your job to orchestrate them. Build a simple system that makes it easy for clients to refer you, whether that’s a formal referral program or a follow-up process tied to a specific moment in your business relationship, for example, right after you deliver a win. Just make sure it feels like a genuine request, not a sales move.
15. Final KPIs, Budget Allocation and Action Plan
Now bring it all together. Define the key metrics you will track for each component of your strategy. Allocate a rough budget across the activities you decide to test (you will understand why I say rough at the end of this paragraph). Then build a simple action plan: who does what, by when.
Review your results quarterly and annually with a “remove-the-constraint” mindset, one I find business owners grasp quickly. Here is an example: you launch a LinkedIn ads campaign. The clicks are good, the landing page is getting traffic, but there are no conversions. Rather than concluding that LinkedIn ads “don’t work”, look for the actual constraint. In this case, it’s likely your landing page copy or layout. Test new approaches, gather results, and keep iterating until you find what works. Once you find the winning formula forget your ad budget and crank that spend up!
A Metaphor and Conclusion
Would an architect build a building without foundations? No, because the building would fall down. They might still put up a facade, but over the years it is going to crack and crumble because the structure to support it just isn’t there.
B2B marketing is no different. You can create and run random campaigns, but without the right structure (strategy) nothing is going to last. Always build the foundation first. Once that is in place, everything else you layer on top will have something solid to stand on.
I hope this article helps you and your team set the right marketing strategy and foundation for growth. If you want help working out your marketing strategy for your B2B business, get in touch.
