The starting point of any great B2B marketing strategy is lead generation. In fact, 85 percent of all B2B marketers say that lead generation is their primary goal. The logic is simple: the more high-quality leads you bring in at the beginning, the more sales you’re going to have at the end.
But what separates a great B2B marketing strategy from a good B2B marketing strategy?
First, a great B2B marketing strategy has to be based on a solid understanding of your company’s place in the market. Think of your company as being part of an ecosystem – what role does it play? Who are its partners? A great marketing strategy also has to know exactly how your potential customers think. What are their pain points? What types of problems are they trying to solve?
That’s why many B2B marketing strategies focus on creating a “buyer persona” – a composite picture of your main customers. Keep in mind that the “buyer persona” is very different from the “ideal customer,” even though the two terms are often interchanged. Sometimes, in fact, your key buyer personas may look nothing like your ideal customers, especially for companies without an entrenched position in the marketplace.
If you think about this, this is not as counter-intuitive as it sounds. It means that all the “ideal customers” are with the dominant player in the industry. As a result, all the less-than-ideal customers are in the long tail of potential sales prospects. It’s your job, though, to make sure that you’re actually targeting the right customers.
Next, you’re going to have to develop the right type of content to “hook” these buyers. Great B2B marketing content is different than great B2C marketing content – it’s meant to educate and inform rather than entertain or amuse. There’s room for creativity and humor, of course, but the goal of your content should be to explain clearly how your company’s products and services can meet the pain points and unsolved needs of your prospects.
There are some companies that do B2B marketing exceptionally well. IBM Watson, for example, stands out for its approach to selling “cognitive computing” to big enterprises – including major pharmaceutical companies and any companies faced with the steep challenge of making sense of Big Data. Not everyone has the budget of IBM, of course, but just watch a few of the commercials from IBM Watson to get a flavor of how they inject humor, elements of celebrity to tell a very B2B story. It makes for some compelling content, especially because IBM Watson backs it all up with use cases, data and lots of examples.
Finally, as part of a great B2B marketing strategy, you’re going to need points of contact with your customers along each step of the buyer’s journey. It’s not enough to put leads into the top of the sales funnel and wait for buyers to pop out at the bottom of the sales funnel. You have to put a lot of work into making sure that you have touch points along the way – such as regular emails or, even better, in-person meetings. Your goal should be to quickly nurture these budding relationships, and push them along the purchasing cycle.
Putting all this together, you’re going to increase your conversion rate. Developing the right content for the right customer at the right time is an effective strategy that results in real customer wins, greater sales, and a very satisfied VP of marketing.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.