B2B MARKETING STRATEGY
Everything clear and ready?
STRATEGY AND ANALYSIS
Web & Digital Marketing Consultant
We often assume so. But is that so? Valuable insights about the needs of B2B customers are often spread across different departments. Target groups and channels are sometimes vaguely defined and promotional campaigns set up ad hoc. It is therefore not always clear to customers how you can make a difference for them. Take the time to consider the value you want to bring to the market today and tomorrow.
I start with the marketing strategy. There are a number of developments in the field of both marketing and sales that should not be missing in a modern marketing strategy. By including these developments, you can prepare your company for the future. This is not to say, however, that the strategy is once established and that it only needs to be implemented. Developments follow each other in rapid succession, A good strategy requires regular reflection and maintenance. Good strategy includes funnels & channels.
The B2B marketing funnel is very similar to Google’s well-known B2C marketing funnel. It is described in steps as the See, Think, Do, Care model. In the ‘See’ phase, a customer is introduced to the product for the first time. During the ‘Think’ phase, the customer will consider whether he needs this product and during the ‘Do’ phase, the actual purchase takes place. Finally, you can increase customer value in the ‘Care’ phase by, for example, regularly sending a newsletter.
More impact with an integrated approach
Get the most out of digital across the full breadth of the business.
I still see too many companies that have not drawn up a clear marketing and sales strategy. The importance of a good strategy is often underestimated. How will you estimate your turnover? Invest in marketing or sales?
Information is now more readily available and much more accessible. This allows potential customers to thoroughly orient themselves online before making a purchase. As a result, they only contact your company at a much later stage in their decision-making process. That is, if they have found you online and that what they have found about you is also sufficiently relevant to them.
It is therefore important to get to the attention of your prospects in time. And then to have sufficient contact moments, even if you are not yet in a physical conversation with them. The goal is to build a relationship well before the prospect considers becoming a customer of yours.
In addition, Internet technology has completely disrupted the once linear and predictable buying process of B2B customers. Your customers are active both offline and online and you have to respond appropriately. Not with an online approach, but with a well-founded marketing strategy: “There is no digital strategy, just a strategy in a digital world.”
The online disruption of traditional marketing requires companies to take a strategic and effective approach to their target groups. Without a marketing strategy, you as a company are completely at the mercy of the market.
FACTS ABOUT B2B STRATEGY & ANALYSIS
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Of buyers say B2B purchasing processes are getting longer and more complex.
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Of B2B buyers use multiple sources to compare and evaluate information.
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Of buyers have little contact with B2B suppliers because they receive too little relevant information.
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Of all B2B researchers and buyers were millennials according to the info from google.
In B2B, events deliver the most leads, while case studies help to accelerate and convert the most leads.
B2B Online Marketing Strategy
Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but about the stories you tell.
Higher turnover, more awareness, larger share of wallet, digital can boost every part of the business. Digital Ananth looks at which digital approach will really make the difference from the business objectives. What things you should or should not do. How to get ahead of the competition and the wishes of your target audience.
Based on this integrated approach, I help CMOs to achieve maximum success. I start with the customer and continue to the heart of the organization. At each step, I look at how I can ensure that marketing activities and investments contribute optimally to the result.
A distinctive strategy is just the beginning. Success stands or falls with execution, data and insights. That is why Digital Ananth not only handles the entire process, but I shall also help with training people.
Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed. That is why we are always looking for even smarter connections between technology, people and processes.
I build seamless experiences across all channels, media, and resources. In this way I create a world full of new possibilities and we really know how to give companies a head start.
Components of B2B marketing strategy
Marketing Goals
Marketing budget
Value propositions
Marketing actions
Use of marketing resources, mix of resources or marketing channels
Marketing planning
B2B MARKETING SOLUTIONS FROM DIGITAL ANANTH.
What I offer for driving leads to loyal customers.
B2B MARKETING STRATEGY OF THE FUTURE
Future proof your business with right marketing strategies.
Disrupt and optimize your B2B marketing with a smart strategy.
The big challenge in B2B compared to B2C marketing is the much longer decision making process.
For business does not make impulse purchases. Every single purchase is carefully considered and prior to the purchase, the various competing solutions are examined in detail, just as the possibilities of adapting the solution to the individual company are examined in more detail.
The entire decision-making process and sales time from the first initial contact and to the sale is finally closed much longer. At the same time, it is also much more resource-intensive, as every single lead must be looked after and nurtured throughout the decision-making process – and a single mistake or a forgotten follow-up can throw months of work right out the window.
The big difference in B2B marketing
There is a greater focus on the quality of the product or service to be procured. There will typically also be a budget framework for the procurement, and the decision will typically require a much more thorough research and comparison – and perhaps even negotiation – with competing products and services.
The process is often much longer from the first time a B2B customer encounters you and until they make a purchase. And the steps in the individual parts of the customer journey are usually several, and it requires significantly more information from the customer at each step. For what your B2B marketing really needs to do is equip an advocate for your product to take on the internal discussions around which product to choose.
If your company works in several different industries, there can also be a big difference in how the purchasing processes take place in the individual industries. As well as which parameters are important in their assessment of the specific products and services.
You can often not settle for a single strategy, but have to adapt the strategy to the different industries or market segments that you work with.
Therefore, B2B marketing requires a completely different approach and a much larger marketing budget than when selling to B2C customers.
Driving factors of B2B marketing strategy
Below we take a closer look at the most recent developments that should not be missing in the marketing strategy.
The very first thing I start with is to define your most important customer segments and what characterizes them. Here I am thinking not only of demographics and geographical location, but to a large extent also behavior.
Because in a B2B context, there is rarely near the same concrete demand for a specific product or service as there is under B2C auspices. Instead, it typically searches for some issues, symptoms, or needs that the company has in the initial stages of the customer journey – and only later do the searches become more specific.
Therefore, it is a good idea – just like in B2C marketing – to define some typical people or archetypes that characterize the job roles or managers in the companies that typically help to make decisions about purchasing your type of products or services.
Here, it is not necessarily only the decision-makers who have to create people. Too often, they only enter the process at a much later stage when others in the company have already made the initial exploration of the market.
Based on this, I start figuring out what ads and what types of content to develop for the various participants in the decision-making process in each industry.
With the overview of your potential customers in place, it’s time to take a closer look at the demand and competition in the market.
It is divided into 2 parts:
Demand and volume in the market
Competitors and their visibility online
Demand and volume
Here I do not think about what specific products the companies are looking for, but what searches they make when looking for products or services like the ones you sell.
Here, a good, old-fashioned keyword analysis can give you a lot of insight into your potential customers’ online behavior. That is, which keywords do the different people use, and which keywords are the most important to create visibility for.
To provide you with the necessary data for the analysis, Below are few free and paid tools which i use.
Ubersuggest.io
Keywordtool.io
Storybase.com
Semrush.com
Ahrefs.com
Searchmetric.com
I also use Google’s own Keyword Planner.
Visibility of competitors online
It is also important to find out which competitors are in the market as well as how well they are performing in the search results. It tells me something about how visible they are in your customers’ optics.
Here you can use one of the three bottom tools in the list above to get information and keep track of which positions your competitors have on the searches that you also want to be visible on.
Calculating where the most sales opportunities lie is essential to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of sales. This way you can determine the correct focus. In the coming years, large companies will increasingly use advanced data to make strategic choices. The time when lead generation was mainly dependent on local field knowledge is quickly disappearing. Market leaders will create detailed profiles of their potential customers based on advanced data, in order to determine how best to approach them.
Using data, you can also analyze where the biggest sales opportunities lie and how much time you spend on them. It also allows you to determine how best to approach your target group. Many companies already do this on the basis of lead scoring. This means that a marketing automation system assigns scores to each lead based on certain criteria. Think about:
Website visit and pages and blogs read
Downloading a white paper
Clicking from an email
With lead scoring, you can better determine which lead is qualified to be approached by sales. The algorithms underlying lead scoring are getting better and better and will be able to predict the behavior of individual leads in the future. And while predictive lead scoring algorithms are still in their infancy, some companies experimenting with them are already seeing a 15% to 20% improvement in their lead conversion rates.
In the past, sales relied entirely on experience and instinct to determine which prospects got the focus. In the future, more and more advanced analyzes will be used for this. The most data-driven organizations will also combine data from different departments, such as marketing, sales and service, but also from finance, production and HR.
Automated hyper-personalization is a trend, especially in B2C. But the possibilities for B2B are sometimes overestimated. With B2B, it often concerns a very specific customer demand and that makes it difficult to set up such systems.
For automated hyper-personalization you are forced to take into account hundreds of variables due to the specific requirements of the customer. And because of the relatively small number of customers, it is no longer profitable. It is therefore easier (and most likely better) to continue to approach each customer personally.
It is also interesting to know how a customer wants to be approached. Research by McKinsey shows that this is highly dependent on whether it is a first purchase or repeat purchase. The results can be seen in the figure below.
marketing strategy sales pitch B2B sales strategy sellian smarter business development
The classic salesperson who is used to always selling the same thing to the same customers has had its day.
Particularly where customers want to purchase the same products or services, there is no longer a live salesperson involved. This offers opportunities for the deployment of e-commerce web shops, with lower transaction costs for sales. This frees up sales capacity for use with new customers or for specific new products and services.
The way in which customers are approached also plays an important role. With the current technological developments, calling is no longer the only means of contacting prospects. You can also connect via email, live chat, personal video message or webinars.
By testing what the most effective methods are and how someone wants to interact in a certain phase of the buyer’s journey, the efficiency of the sales department will increase. Your lead nurturing will then become more and more successful; a good example of a sales strategy and the possible positive effects.
Gone are the days when salespeople pick up the phone with the question: “Is it convenient for me to call?” The purchasing process is no longer about Always Be Closing , but about Always Be Helping .
Customers don’t want you trying to sell them something, they want to be informed about what they are going to buy. It’s about talking to the customer, not to the customer. It is about the dialogue with your target group and the relevant knowledge that you share. Successful companies use the most recent internet technologies in this dialogue to help them do this. Online communication today has a huge impact on the customer journey. As many as 70% of B2B buyers use online communication during the buying process, according to research by Altimeter .
Marketing automation such as HubSpot software and SharpSpring software can monitor your customers’ online dialogue. This allows you to share the right content at the right time to speed up the buying process. In this way you can sell smartly, while having a good sales conversation remains a requirement!
INTEGRATED B2B MARKETING STRATEGY
Right to the heart of the (marketing) organization.
Research
Research provides necessary insight into the behavior and needs of your target groups. Who are they? How can we reach them? How do we ensure great customer experiences and unbreakable customer relationships?
Omnichannel strategy
Together I draw up an omnichannel strategy (X channel strategy) to realize your marketing objectives and create great experiences.
Data
Take the step with us towards a data-driven marketing organization. With data and marketing intelligence I help you to demonstrate the success of digital (real-time).
Technology
What is the smartest strategy within the ever-expanding MarTech landscape? Together I look at cost efficiency, ROI, scalability, manageability and security.
Marketing Organisation
Also, build an agile and effective marketing organization. I help you make all decisions, such as in-house vs. out of house, make vs. buy and central vs. decentralized.
Roadmap & Exploitation
Design a marketing roadmap with me that is completely in line with your business objectives and priorities. And of course I also help you to implement it.
I help you map out your B2B digital landscape and translate business objectives into marketing objectives. Discover how you can gather complete support for your lB2B marketing strategy.
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