8 Strategies For B2B Marketing Success

Now is a great time to get your team thinking about both short-term goals and long-term activity. Here are eight concepts to focus them on.

 

 

1. Play The Volume Game: Do your team members know exactly what they need to do to hit your marketing team goals? High-performing marketing teams understand the volume of marketing activity and precise actions they require to hit their targets. In fact, the best marketing cultures rally around these numbers, which are closely tracked and understood throughout the marketing department.

2. Assess The Quality Situation: Imagine the net impact on marketing programs of a database that is only 75 percent marketable. A short-term fix is to assign someone on your team stewardship of the data. Having that person get a handle on the current state of the database and understand how to fix it quickly will prevent negative impacts of incorrect data on your campaigns. Be forewarned, however, that databases grow and change quickly, so your data quality efforts cannot be a point-in-time fix. High-performing marketing departments have assigned owners of the data, often part of the marketing operations function, and an ongoing plan for assessing and repairing data quality. Make this part of your long-term core strategy, and you’ll see positive results over time.

3. Take An Extra Step In Qualifying Your Leads: Are all of your marketing leads going directly to sales? Fully qualifying your marketing leads into sales-ready opportunities with the help of teleprospecting could dramatically improve the quality and conversion of leads that end up in your sales pipeline. Studies show that marketing leads sent directly to sales may not receive follow-up  because sales folks responsible for closing business may not have the cycles to fully qualify and convert marketing leads. Employing a teleprospecting effort, with a dedicated calling team, ensures no marketing lead is left behind. This approach requires agreement with sales leadership on the specific definition of a fully qualified sales-ready lead and can be a great boost to help everyone meet their goals.

4. Get Feedback: In addition to reviewing metrics from the sales automation tool, make sure your team members are constantly engaging with sales to discuss their perception on leads passed and opportunities created.

5. Assess The Targeting Situation: Ensure that you have crossed the “T” in targeting. With a large volume of marketing activity, both inbound and outbound, happening in your department, it can be easy to lose resolution on the target. To ensure you have all of the right target buyers in your database, encourage your team to analyze historical purchase data.

6. Personal Research: The emerging trend of B2B buyers decreasing their engagement with salespeople until they’ve narrowed their options to just a few solutions is not going away.

Now more than ever before, your company’s success requires content that is grounded in deep insight about buyers’ decision to choose you over a competitor, or to do nothing at all. Marketers on your team need to become experts in their target buyers, how they buy, and what is important to them in order to be successful.

7. Messaging Alignment: Marketing creates a lot of stuff. And it is easy to get in the habit of creating unnecessary new stuff to support new demand gen activity. One way to combat that is through planning. Once your team is aligned around the target buyer, conduct an inventory of the content you currently have. Have team members review all content, checking to ensure it maps to the messaging themes of the persona and establishing how the buyer expects to use that content in his buying process. The results can be captured in a simple matrix that will easily the identify gaps that exists and allow you to plan for content creation.

8. Measure, Analyze, And Hold Accountable: With the tools available today, there is no excuse for not being nimble and adapting in real time, yet busy marketers can easily lose sight of tracking the effectiveness of campaigns in real-time and miss the opportunity to adjust to hit goals.

For more details and consultation contact me on contacttim82@gmail.com