A strategic approach to marketing and communications is vital to the success of any business, but it is especially important for B2B companies.
The B2B market is unique because businesses in this space sell products or services to other businesses rather than to individual consumers. This means that the strategies used to advertise and communicate with potential customers must be tailored to the specific needs of other businesses.
What are the key marketing and communication strategies for B2B companies? In this blog, we will explore some effective strategies and discuss how they can be implemented to help drive business growth and success. Whether you’re a small startup or a large corporation, these strategies can help you reach your target audience and build lasting relationships with other businesses.
Begin with the End in Mind
A successful strategic plan is always rooted in knowledge, so it’s important to begin with the end in mind, connecting data to insights from the start. Whether you’re launching your brand from scratch or rethinking your existing strategies, success comes from establishing well-defined marketing goals and big-picture objectives broken down into strategic, actionable SMART goals.
These smaller, digestible goals help you create a success pathway toward your larger objectives.
Develop Audience Segmentation & Communication Funnels
Once you’ve established your goals, the next step is to understand your target audience and their specific needs and pain points. This means identifying the different types of businesses you want to reach, and the decision makers within those businesses.
With a clear understanding of your audiences, you can segment your marketing plan into communication funnels for each. A communication funnel refers to the journey a potential customer goes through from the initial awareness of your product or service to making a purchase.
Creating a separate communication funnel for each audience helps ensure that your marketing messages and tactics are tailored to the specific needs and interests of each group. This will increase the chances that your marketing efforts will resonate with your target audiences, and ultimately lead to more conversions and sales.
Use A Content Calendar
To successfully manage any strategic marketing and communication plan, especially when using audience segmentation and different communication funnels, it’s critical to create and use a content calendar that will enable you to develop and execute your marketing objectives across all platforms.
Your content calendar should include all aspects of your marketing and communication efforts to reach your target audiences throughout the year, from monthly themes and new product launches to blog posts and press releases across your owned, shared, earned, and paid media outlets.
This helps ensure cohesion throughout your organization enabling everyone involved to plan and track upcoming marketing initiatives and the deliverables needed to execute them.
Know Your “WHY”
Your brand purpose is the “why” behind your company’s existence – your business’ higher purpose, the change you want to make in the world for your customers, community, or society at large. It’s important for every organization to know its “why” and craft key messages around the “why” to use consistently across all marketing channels and platforms and to each audience.
Once a company embraces its “why” and begins to use its “why” messaging in all its marketing and communication, those messages start to resonate with the target audiences, building brand authenticity and customer loyalty.
Integrate Your Strategy
Armed with its key brand messaging, a company should endeavor to deliver a unified message across all the channels it uses to reach its target audiences so that, no matter how or where a customer interacts with you, the message they receive is the same. One of the best ways to ensure consistent messaging is with an integrated marketing and communications strategy.
For B2B companies, an integrated marcomm strategy that includes (at a minimum) public relations, advertising, and careful stewardship of leads ensures that your company is building brand equity and reputation while still driving and nurturing the leads necessary to close sales. When you orchestrate all the moving parts into one cohesive plan, you ensure that the sum is greater than the parts.
Partner with Sales
A critical component of any B2B marketing and communication strategy is lead generation, which should be closely tied to the efforts of the sales team. To ensure alignment, it is important to establish clear communication and processes between both teams so that your strong lead gen strategy will garner quality leads that flow directly into the sales team’s pipeline.
By employing this crucial strategy, B2B companies can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing and communication efforts, resulting in more conversions and ultimately, more sales.
Showcase Your Expertise
While your business has a unique value proposition in terms of products or service, one of the most valuable attributes to market is your thought leadership. Sharing your knowledge of the industry in which your business operates is a great way to elevate your company leadership as experts in this space and make your brand more prominent in search results and create online buzz. Build thought leadership pieces into your content calendar and strategic communication plans.
Stay Focused
Stay focused on your customers and the marketing tactics that are relevant to them. While appealing to a broader consumer base is enticing for perceived brand awareness and clout, it’s wasted effort if it doesn’t actually move the needle toward more sales or growing your customer base. Staying hyper-focused on your B2B marketing is the most effective way of reaching your intended audience.
Hire An Agency
If you don’t have the budget or bandwidth to hire experts across all marketing and communication disciplines (strategy, PR, advertising, copywriting, SEO, web development, etc.), consider hiring a marketing and PR agency like Rocket Launch. An agency experienced with delivering results for B2B companies can provide the right blend of experts who are up to date on the latest trends, technologies, and best practices without having to pay for full-time support in each area.
Contact us today to learn more or start your launch sequence!