7 steps to a B2B marketing campaign that works and sells
How to run a B2B marketing campaign that works and sells _
One of the keys to success for business-to-business companies is knowing how to run a successful B2B marketing campaign. Every campaign is different, but with these seven proven tips, we want to help you generate new customers and additional sales with a great idea.
- Define your uniqueness - USP for short
- Define your target group
- Decide what you offer
- Define the message & a striking idea
- Set up a campaign workflow
- Set clear goals & KPIs
- Start your B2B marketing campaign, tests & measures
Introduction: What is a B2B marketing campaign?
Before we get into the steps involved in planning and executing an effective B2B marketing campaign, we need to define what a campaign is... and what a campaign is not.
A B2B marketing campaign is a focused, systematic set of efforts designed to achieve a specific goal. It could be generating awareness and excitement for a launch, generating leads for an existing product or service, rebranding the company, responding to important industry news or regulations, or even establishing a new brand.
A B2B marketing campaign is not just a creative campaign, a slogan and a few print ads. If you're not thinking about the customer journey, from initial identification and engagement through to close, you're doing it wrong. Branding and creative are incredibly important to the success of a B2B marketing campaign, but it can't be the whole show. A purely creative approach may work in the B2C space, but the dog-eat-dog world of business-to-business marketing goes far beyond that.
With this definition in mind, here is a step-by-step guide on how to run a B2B marketing campaign that is proven to work and sell.
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Step 1: Define your uniqueness
Before you even start thinking about the target group for your B2B marketing campaign, you need to think about your own company and its unique selling proposition - or "USP" for short.
- What would you like to sell?
- Why are you different?
- Why should anyone be interested?
If you can't define your unique selling proposition, you should really reconsider whether you want to run a B2B marketing campaign for that product or service at all. The strategic goal of a B2B marketing campaign is to define your superiority in a compelling way and use that message to target the right personas and prospects. If you can't define why you are superior, why should your potential customer?
Here are some examples of real USPs:
- "Our software processes 5 TB, 25% faster than the competition"
- "Our team of consultants has truly unique expertise"
- "Our product has a useful, patented function that none of the competitor products offer"
- "The total cost of ownership of our solution is half that of the competition"
- "Our product is plug-and-play, and the competition requires a team of consultants"
- "Our product lasts twice as long as the competition"
- "We offer free upgrades and lifelong support"
Define your best USP. This will form the core message of your campaign in step 4. In the meantime, you need to think about your target groups.
Step 2: Define your target group
The more you know about your target groups, the better you will be able to convey a customized message about your USP to them.
To run a high-yield B2B marketing campaign, you need to know at least the following:
- Is your product or service aimed at SMEs, large companies or an entire industry?
- Who in a target company can make the purchasing decision and what are the most important influencing factors?
- What types of prospects have become your best customers in the past?
- What are your pain points?
- What questions do your target groups ask?
- What are their media usage habits?
The results are traditionally referred to as personas or buyer personas and form an important basis in the B2B content marketing mix. To get the information you need to create personas, talk to your team first - your own sales reps are a great source of buyer persona data. Google Search Console, Google Trends and Google Search itself are also solid tools as they will tell you what types of search queries are being used in your industry. Targeted market research can also be helpful to ask potential prospects about their daily challenges and business realities. The best personas usually include a mix of all three.
Only after you know your USP and have defined who you are talking to, is it time to think about the message and creative you will base your campaign on.
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Step 3: Decide what you offer
Whether you're running a B2B marketing campaign for pure lead generation, brand awareness, interest generation, or any mix of goals, you need to make it easy for interested users to "convert" - that is, give them your contact information so the sales team can follow up. There are many ways to do this, from extremely high engagement - "Give us your phone number and a sales rep will call you! - to extremely low engagement - "Give us your email address to sign up for our monthly newsletter."
As a rule of thumb, the less the target audience has to engage, the more conversions you will get. However, these contacts may be of lower quality. Conversely, fewer target persons will commit to speaking directly to a sales representative in the first step. If you manage to do this, you will have directly captured a qualified lead. Congratulations!
For most B2B marketing campaigns, however, the right answer lies somewhere in the middle. Generate premium content - an eBook, technically relevant whitepapers, an industry research report, a guide - that's worth "selling" for the "cost" of some contact information. Make sure it's of great value to the user, and use your outbound efforts (such as traditional communications and social media) to introduce it to as many prospects as possible.
Since downloading a whitepaper or study report doesn't necessarily close the deal right away, you'll need to include additional steps in your campaign to nurture your new leads. We will come back to this later.
Step 4: Define the message & a striking idea
Every brand is different, every industry is different, and every potential buyer is different. What works for a B2B marketing campaign to sell civil engineering services might - but probably won't - work for selling products to control a machine.
Think carefully about your own brand and the target groups you defined in step 2. How can you formulate a message or product benefit that aligns with your own mission and brand values, while ensuring that it offers what your potential target groups are looking for? How will you illustrate this message in a compelling, thought-provoking and, most importantly, striking way?
Here are two recent examples of creative and striking B2B marketing campaigns. They promote similar benefits - many unique selling points and ease of assembly of products in construction - but they take very different approaches because of the existing brands and the target audiences they want to appeal to.
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Step 5: Setting up a campaign workflow
You can't know how to run a B2B marketing campaign without knowing how to build a workflow. These are fantastic visual ways to show the steps your target personas take in your campaign, from initial engagement to final conversion. The sooner you create your workflow, the sooner you can start creating the benefits or campaign landing pages, digital ads and all other actions.
Here's an example. In this campaign, display ads were used as the primary method to reach prospects with distinctive creative. It was supported with retargeting ads. You can use any number of tools to reach prospects, from Google-based digital advertising and demand-side platforms to sponsorship and print advertising. You are only limited by the behavior of your target groups, your budget and your imagination.
It doesn't always have to be digital! Especially in this day and age, when everyone is talking about digital communication, we are seeing increasing success with direct advertising, among other things, if the budget is available. Sending a prospect something really cool - a useful sample product, a printout of a reference or a report - is a great way to stand out from the crowd of competitors, as traditional mail is being used less and less these days. In your target groups' mail folders, which are getting thinner every day, you are sure to attract attention.
Step 6: Set clear goals & KPIs
What do you want to achieve with your campaign? How will you measure success? What are the potential points of failure? A B2B marketing campaign cannot be successful if you don't answer these questions in advance.
Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable and relevant.
In other words, "get more leads" is not an acceptable goal for a B2B marketing campaign. "Make verified contacts with 10 of the top 25 companies in our target industry", "generate 500 brochure downloads, 50 of which are sales qualified" and "generate XY euros in additional sales within six months" are acceptable goals.
Don't forget to think about how you will document your progress towards your goals. A company-wide marketing automation platform or CRM can be helpful to store and reference your campaign data, but the best way to do it is to create a custom dashboard e.g. in Google Data Studio to track KPIs.
Step 7: Launch your B2B marketing campaign, test & measure
Most B2B marketing campaigns don't start with a big kick-off or a trade fair. They just ... go live. Ads start running, emails go out and teams start executing the campaign workflow plan.
Looks like your work is done!
You can't launch a B2B marketing campaign and assume you're in "set it and forget it" mode afterwards. You need to constantly test and optimize to make sure you are achieving your goals. Is a landing page not performing? Is no one clicking on an ad? Delete it and try something else. Email not opening? Change your subject line or sender address. When you're running a B2B marketing campaign, there are a myriad of variations at play.
Keep an eye on things and remember: you don't learn from mistakes when you've made them, but when you've understood them.
Why well thought-out campaigns achieve more than mere advertising
We hope our thoughts on running a B2B marketing campaign have been helpful.
If you follow the steps here, we can't guarantee success... but we can promise you that you'll be much better off than a competitor who assumes that running a B2B campaign is just a pretty print ad and a snappy slogan.
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Christopher Mohr & Moritz Blank
Christopher Mohr
0711 72847-15
c.mohr@diegruppe.de
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Moritz Blank
0711 72847-30
m.blank@diegruppe.de
LinkedIn