Achieving success in marketing necessitates a tailored approach, particularly in the realm of business-to-business (B2B) marketing, where a universal strategy is often ineffective.
The evidence lies in the outcomes experienced by organizations that have embraced a personalized marketing strategy, resulting in significant lead generation, revenue enhancement, and improved return on marketing investment (ROI). Below are four essential steps to develop a customized marketing program aimed at fostering sustainable, double-digit growth for your business.
Marketing Due Diligence
Realizing double-digit growth in marketing is contingent upon a clear understanding of your current standing regarding key performance indicators (KPIs). These include metrics such as keyword rankings, inbound linking domains, organic and total search traffic, lead generation, sales linked to marketing-generated leads, and the lifetime value of newly acquired customers.
This comprehensive analysis is part of the necessary marketing due diligence, best conducted through a detailed marketing audit. This audit will pinpoint effective strategies, areas needing improvement, and additional marketing initiatives that can yield results, particularly for optimizing B2B search engine optimization (SEO).
A comprehensive marketing audit should assess:
- Website: evaluating brand narrative, thought leadership, content quality, design, user experience (UI/UX), and overall performance
- Onsite SEO: including keyword analysis, strategic content creation, and crawl issues
- Offsite SEO: examining linking domains, Google PageRank, and potential for free and paid directory listings and articles
- Social Media Presence: focusing on platforms like LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
- PPC Campaigns: analyzing Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn campaigns, and other “pay-per-click” campaigns, a.k.a. search engine marketing (SEM)
- Outbound Campaigns: encompassing email, direct mail, and advertising efforts
- Events: both in-person and virtual engagements
- PR: including press releases and articles
- Marketing Automation: website infrastructure, marketing automation (HubSpot, Zoho, etc.), and use of other technologies
- Reporting: how you measure and communicate marketing progress
- More: product marketing/management, channel programs, pricing, and anything else not listed here that’s part of your marketing activities
B2B Brand Storytelling
A tailored marketing strategy should be founded on a comprehensive understanding of your target audience, the challenges they encounter, and the solutions you provide. This value proposition is essential for engaging them and driving lead generation.
To effectively craft your brand narrative, consider initiating a workshop that encompasses a series of interviews with company executives and key personnel from customer-facing teams, particularly those in sales and marketing, over a span of 1-2 days. These discussions will yield valuable insights into the components of your brand messaging that will resonate with your audience. Key topics to explore include:
- Targeted Prospects: identify the types of businesses you aim to reach based on demographics (size, industry, specific challenges) and the roles within those organizations that engage with your company
- Prospect Objectives: align your goals with theirs by addressing the obstacles that hinder their progress
- Prospect Buyer’s Journey: understand who the decision-makers and influencers are, what motivates them (i.e., personas), their reasons for seeking solutions, and their decision-making processes
- Unique Selling Propositions: articulate how your offerings provide greater value compared to direct competitors and alternative solutions (including indirect competitors such as apathy)
- Market Opportunities: identify potential markets that you have yet to target, such as those dissatisfied with their current providers, those hesitant to purchase from anyone, and those who have not yet considered your solutions but would benefit from them, representing opportunities to find blue oceans of opportunities
- Core Brand Narrative Elements: clearly define the problems you address, the methods you employ to solve them, provide evidence of your past successes, and highlight the measurable positive outcomes of your solutions as integral parts of your brand story
When executed effectively, the brand narrative workshop culminates in a comprehensive guide detailing what to communicate and to whom across all your marketing efforts. This guide can be leveraged by skilled copywriters to enhance your messaging.
Agile Marketing
Marketing is an ongoing endeavor: competitors are always evolving, new entrants emerge, traditional methods lose their effectiveness, and fresh opportunities arise. Embracing agile methodology, marketing must be executed swiftly, consistently enhanced, and continuously refined based on key performance indicators that align with your business objectives, particularly in lead generation, customer acquisition, revenue growth, profitability, and overall business value—this encapsulates the essence of marketing.
This is why generic, cookie-cutter marketing strategies or those that prioritize design over function do not foster sustainable business growth. Agile marketing helps ensure you’re your marketing efforts are strategic, efficient and results-oriented, with the flexibility to course-correct when certain marketing activities are having less than their desired impact or market dynamics change.
B2B Marketing Outsourcing
When you are prepared to implement a more effective marketing strategy for your software company, you don’t have to navigate this journey alone. Collaborating with a B2B marketing agency enables you to tap into their extensive experience with numerous companies at a fraction of the cost of hiring in-house staff.
To increase the possibility of generating sustainable, double-digit results from investing in the services of a B2B marketing agency, it’s recommended that you find one that excels in the following:
- Marketing Auditing & Planning: deep-dive due diligence into what’s working for you, what’s not, and
- Market Research: the most effective plans incorporate the voice of your customers, or you may not speak to what prospects value most
- Brand Storytelling: resonating powerfully with prospects by educating them on how you can solve their problems and help them achieve success, while avoiding failure
- Professional Copywriting: the ability to extract and communicate your thought leadership by professional interviewers and writers
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the ability to leverage your content for maximum rankings and lead generation through onsite and offsite SEO
- Ability to Produce Results: a demonstrated track record of helping companies like yours harness all of the above for significant, measurable results
So you don’t fall prey to shiny object syndrome, beware of flashy “dog-and-pony” shows and being “pitched” by marketing agencies. You need a marketing partner that will help you generate results based on your goals – not theirs – which is why starting with a marketing audit and plan is critical to your success.
