The modern B2B marketing landscape is filled with lackluster, disorganized campaigns that do little to engage current and future customers. In contrast, an effective well executed B2B campaign can do wonders for your business - but what sets a good B2B campaign apart from a bad one? Let’s take a look at some of the key elements together.
1. Define Objectives for Your Campaigns
One of the most important things to do when you first start planning your B2B marketing campaigns is to set out some objectives. You should begin by asking yourself - what am I trying to achieve with this campaign? Objectives provide a good launching point for you to start following goals, which can be useful when measuring your success in your quarterly marketing reviews. Here are three key objectives that every B2B campaign targeting prospects should have:
- Raising awareness and capturing mind-share
- Acquisition of new prospects to find your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
- Engagement of your current leads, which your automatic nurture campaigns can target
2. Adjust Your Message
Target Different Stages of the Pipeline
When it comes to messaging, one size doesn't fit all. That’s why another key piece of improving your B2B campaigns is to focus your messaging towards different lead stages. For instance, MQLs should not be targeted with the same message as existing customers. Your MQLs that are not ready to buy should be nurtured with different content than those who are in active conversations with your sales team. You wouldn’t want to make the mistake of targeting an existing hot opportunity with nurture content.
Target Data-Driven Buying Personas
Who you target in your B2B campaign depends on a variety of factors, but as a general rule - it’s important to focus on different personas for your product or service. Narrowing down how to target your prospects is a critical factor in the development of B2B campaigns. These personas can be as high level as Technical and Business Decision Makers who are involved in complex buying decisions, or other professionals in the industry who might find what your selling useful for their business. Look into your marketing database and see what data points you have that can be used to define more specific personas. Use parameters such as: Job Title, Seniority, Industries, Company Size and Geographies to narrow down your search.
3. Speak to Your Prospects Needs
Now that you have read a bit about what you can do to improve your B2B campaigns, here are a couple more questions you can ask yourself that will help you target your prospect’s needs:
- What does your product or service help your prospects achieve?
- Which pain does it alleviate and what problem does it solve?
From this point on you can start to define and build strong content from these answers. Remember: not everyone is aware of their pain points. Help them discover what their needs are through your engaging content.
4. Deliver Your Campaign Across Multiple Channels
Multi-channel B2B marketing campaigns are effective because it deploys your message through many avenues. Whether it be social media, email campaigns, or on your website, pushing your content out to where more people can see it ultimately increases awareness and exposure.
When you’re launching multi-channel campaigns, you also have the added benefit of testing out different platforms, which can expand your reach. By doing so, you familiarize yourself with what works best for your business. For example, for your prospects to get in touch with you, they might prefer to read a blog, listen to a webinar, or read an infographic.
5. Automatically Start Nurturing Leads
Another way to improve the quality and effectiveness of your B2B campaigns is to nurture your leads until they are ready to buy. Lead Nurturing is the process whereby you build long term relationships with your leads by providing them with relevant information. You can also incorporate a Multi-Channel marketing strategy, where you can deliver nurture content in other formats such as video, webinars and text messages. In doing so, you provide your leads with a complete content experience. Nurture campaigns go hand in hand with your marketing automation platform. You can automatically start your nurture campaigns for your MQLs if they don’t move down the pipeline right away. Your marketing automation platform should be able to trigger these nurture messages every time someone new comes in.
6. Measure Results and Focus On the Right Metrics
Focus on Engagement
There are many reasons why you should measure results beyond your campaign’s open and click rate. Focusing on engagement can reveal much more than vanity metrics. Engagement insights (i.e. if prospects are sharing your content) will tell you where to put your B2B marketing resources, time, and effort. Here’s a little tip: to drive engagement, you can make sure your Call-to-Action (CTA) always triggers the desired action.
Focus on Revenue
In your CRM, make sure you attribute your Campaigns to Opportunities. Depending on what tracking abilities your marketing organization has, you can align your campaigns with different attribution models. These determine the value of your campaign strategy as well as how your success metrics are calculated. Here’s a few attribution models you can focus on:
First Touch Attribution
The first touch point your prospect engages with before converting gets credit for the sale.
Last Touch Attribution
The last touch point your prospect engages with before converting gets credit for the sale.
Multi-Touch Attribution
Credit for the sale is divided among several different touch points the prospect engages in.
Ultimately, concluding whether or not your B2B campaign is successful depends on your objectives and goals. What metrics you assign to measure success is also objective dependent - but there are generally three basic revenue metrics to keep in mind:
- Pipeline Generated in $ amount
- Revenue Closed in $ amount
- Conversion % of Pipeline Generated to Revenue Closed
7. Trust the Marketing Operations Process
How do you put this into practice? How do you scale your campaigns? One of the fundamental elements of a high quality B2B campaign is implementing and ensuring a good work management and collaboration process. Campaigns often involve many pieces, and knowing where the responsibility lies with each staff member is key. Define your roles & responsibilities within your marketing organization and all your other stakeholders.
Quality Assurance (QA) for Your Campaigns
Whether you’re collaborating with the team on content or making sure deadlines are met, it’s important that you set up a quality assurance process to make sure standards and requirements are followed. Establishing criteria that ensures an effective execution process is critical.