How to Successfully Execute a B2B Marketing Strategy
Editor's Note: This blog post is an excerpt from the eBook Marketers Making a Difference: Volume 3 about creating a comprehensive B2B marketing strategy. It was written by AG Salesworks' Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Richard April.
The successful execution of a marketing strategy will require some specific set of skills to produce the content, a process to manage and monitor the appropriate social communities, and a strong set of tools to keep all the moving parts together.
If you are fortunate enough to have prolific writers on your marketing team, then you are probably all set, but if not you may want to consider hiring folks with journalism experience to help with content development. In addition to team members with strong writing skills, here are a few suggestions to ensure you meet your content development goals:
- Create an editorial calendar to manage content development. This will provide visibility to manage topics, themes, guest posts, frequency, etc.
- Use Google Alerts to track keywords in relevant industry headlines are delivered while the news is breaking.
- Subscribe to online publications, columns in leading papers, and blogs that are specific to your market.
- Follow relevant industry analysts, publishers and editorial staff on social media for their real time take on news.
- Look for partnership opportunities with media sources that cater to your target audience.
Managing and monitoring social communities effectively can be extremely time-consuming, and while there are some excellent tools to help manage them, a solid process in conjunction with these tools will yield the best results. There is no shortage of literature about the benefits of social media, but for B2B marketers focusing on the relevant social communities, it is important to ensure that you only invest in the social communities where your prospective buyers are active. The buyer persona research should have given you a good idea of which social media communities are relevant for your buyers, but it is still prudent to develop a process to test which ones will yield results for your business.
Ensure that whoever you have running your social media marketing efforts is measuring the effectiveness of their efforts based on a set of metrics that is in line with your marketing strategy. For example 500 “Likes” may be interesting, but 5 prospects sharing that your latest eBook was very informative on Twitter, to all their peers, is significantly more interesting. Make sure your social media marketer also understands the value of monitoring social communities and that social media is not a megaphone: these are great venues to listen to your prospects (and customers for that matter), and you can gain great insight from listening and engaging via social media.
With all the moving parts, a strong set of tools is going to be essential to keep track of everything, but I would caution against over-engineering a set of complex solutions that require extra resources to set up and/or maintain. As the solutions mature and evolve, they are becoming more streamlined and easier to deploy, use, and integrate with each other. For me, the latter is perhaps the most important aspect to consider. For example if your marketing automation solution does not integrate seamlessly with your CRM system, you are potentially creating some serious issues and limitations that will cause problems for you later. If you do not already have these systems in place, think about integration, user adoption, and ease of use. It goes without saying that if the systems are in place, ensure that they are being used effectively to support the success of your marketing efforts.