The 7 topics that every B2B Marketing Strategy must address

Success (in B2B marketing and in all walks of life) is about achieving results.

However, more than 60% of companies do not comply with this requirement and decide their actions mainly on “intuition”. The result: isolated actions, great efforts and poor results.

In this note I want to give you a little push to take that step towards developing a strategy for your company. Let’s start by defining what it is:

What is a B2B marketing strategy?

A marketing strategy, and in this case B2B, is the step-by-step process to follow to achieve marketing objectives with the budget and resources available to achieve them. When putting together a strategy, it is necessary to do some in-depth work to get to know the business in depth: the market segment in which it operates, its competitors, the characteristics of its different buyers, etc.

The key to this process is to extract information that allows us to find strong differentials that make the company stand out from its competition. This is essential both for the development of the strategy and for the success of its execution.

Having a defined and documented strategy will help your company to have reference material so that members of your marketing department can refresh the steps to follow when they need to, or when new team members need to get up to date on the current state of the company in this area; it will also allow you to back up the results obtained in your annual reports.

The 7 pillars of your B2B marketing strategy
In our consulting experience working with B2B companies, we have found that there are 7 pillars that every marketing strategy must have:

Knowing the target company and the buyer profile

Having a Target Company helps us to be clear about what types of companies we are going to focus on (taking into account aspects such as number of employees, turnover level, industry, infrastructure or technological platform).

The buyer’s profile is key to knowing how to interact with those key people who make decisions in the purchasing process, or who have a significant influence. After all, we are in a business-to-business market, and we always talk to a human being to close the deals .

Understanding the value proposition
Having a clear value proposition that everyone involved in marketing understands allows us to translate the company’s differential and transmit it in attractive and persuasive messages, so that recipients can have a concrete idea of ​​all the benefits they will obtain if they decide to do business with us.

Understanding business objectives

It is key to ensure that the marketing strategy is aligned with the company’s interests. Marketing work cannot be isolated from the company’s overall objectives.

A good method to achieve this goal is the use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), a methodology used by Google to manage the objectives buy telemarketing data of the company and each department. If you want to know more about this method, read our article: “How to define your marketing objectives with OKRs and SMART”

Aligning Marketing Objectives to Business

Once we understand the the manager will figure out how to quickly find direction the company is following, we can set marketing objectives that support business growth. For example, if your company is seeking internationalization, we must set international marketing objectives by creating a network of communication channels that build your awb directory company’s presence in other countries, something very different from what local marketing objectives aim for.

Knowing the Buyer’s Journey
The Buyer’s Journey is the set of stages that a buyer goes through to complete a purchase (awareness, consideration and decision).

Understanding the stages of this journey and how our buyers experience them is very useful to understand the roles played by influencers in determining the purchasing decision.