It's a new year, you have returned to work with your batteries recharged, you are ready to fire up! You have a beautiful, freshly minted, marketing strategy. The highly paid consultants have left, the new plan has been rolled out at your all staff meeting, new drink coasters have been distributed to the team printed with your new mission statement!
And the next quarterly marketing campaign is ready
to roll and it looks...well, ummm, exactly like the last one...and the one before that. Sound familiar?
Translating strategy to real, campaign level action is hard to do. There are lots of opportunities for disconnects along the way. Successful B2B Marketing is about creating a lead generation machine that generates quality leads that convert to revenue. It's a process, a methodology you can follow.
- 1. Focus on the buyer and their problems. Problems that cause real business pain make buyer's take action. Ask yourself what problems your buyer's experience and which ones you solve really well. Focus your campaigns on this pain point.
- 2. Be clear about your marketing "maths". How many sales do I need to make plan? How many proposals do I need to submit, meetings I need to have, prospects, leads, site visitors and contacts do I need to make my numbers? If you don't understand the velocity your funnel needs to flow at, how do you know how many campaigns to run?
- 3. Quality content is the lynchpin that engages casual website visitors and converts them into a genuine lead and "pulls" the lead down the funnel. It is a central part of creating the momentum your lead engine requires.
- 4. Ensure you have inbound marketing tactics and capabilities. Your buyers are educating themselves online all day, every day. This is a fundamental shift that marketers need to understand. Your campaign tactics must account for this shift. Your campaign design must include ways to get found by your target buyers. Website optimisation (blogging, on and off page SEO, landing pages etc) as well as social media tactics are vital. Sure outbound techniques have their place, but their ability to influence is rapidly declining.
- 5. Campaign execution must stretch across the full span of your buyer's journey and should always include a recycling tactic that allows you to stay in touch with buyer's not ready to purchase just yet. Almost all B2B businesses have long complex sales cycles that stretch across many months, sometimes years. Equally many marketing campaigns are quarterly at best. How do you plan to exert influence over the buyer at the different stages of their buying process if you ignore whole sections of their journey? Inevitably campaigns end up marketing to the bottom of the funnel using special offers and discounts in an attempt to get buyers to consider your offer. Rather late in the day don't you think?
- 6. Finally and crucially, no one gets it right all the time. Sometimes campaigns work, sometimes they don't. The key is measuring and analysing your campaigns at every step of the way and then making incremental improvements, measure and analyse again, improve, rinse and repeat.
Pulling together these key areas is the key to developing a sustainable lead generation engine that will create a steady stream of qualified leads for your sales team. We have written an eBook that talks about these points in greater detail. We would like to offer you a free copy, we hope you find in valuable. What techniques do you use to convert your strategy to real, effective campaigns?
