The Essential Guide to B2B Marketing

The reality is that B2B and B2C marketing have more in common than they do points of difference. The same marketing rules apply. The same digital channels and activities will typically be part of the plan. In both cases, you’re building a campaign to attract and persuade people to take a certain action. And you’ll still largely be focussed on generating awareness, leads or sales.

Why then do we hear so much about B2B versus B2C marketing?

It’s because while the ingredients are the same, the recipe most certainly is not. Sometimes the differences are in the marketing activities themselves and sometimes they are in the different environments B2B and B2C marketers find themselves working.

At Rocket, a B2B campaign often looks something like this:

• We’re marketing a high-value product or a service.
• Often revenue events happen offline, making attribution difficult.
• It has a long and complex buyer journey involving multiple decision-makers.
• Research plays a vital role in decision-making prior to speaking to a salesperson.
• The buyer is highly motivated to protect their professional reputation. The buyer is typically not spending their own money.
• There is only ever a small percentage of the total market ready to buy at any point in time.
• The total market is limited, or the buyer has a specific job title or role.

It is these traits that make B2B marketing campaigns unique and challenging.

For many B2B marketers, there are few, if any, quick wins. Marketing is not a tap that can be turned on or off in a way that might work for an online retailer or simpler offering. A big-budget brand awareness campaign is unlikely to move the needle like it might for a consumer brand. And a bottom-of-funnel paid search campaign is often going to underwhelm in terms of the volume of leads generated.

Am I speaking your language? Does this ring true of your marketing challenge? If so, read on.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through nine things I see the best B2B marketers doing. Most importantly, I’ll outline why each area is important and what you can do to deliver in a very practical way.

Some of these nine points may not apply to you, and that’s OK.

But before you dismiss any one area as being irrelevant for your marketing campaigns, stop and consider whether focusing on this area will deliver your next big marketing breakthrough.

Don’t let the things you don’t do define the outcome of your next campaign.

About Rocket

I’m a Co-Founder of Rocket. We’re an independent digital marketing agency based in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. Our team of fifty talented marketers work with well-established businesses and successful brands to optimise their PPC, SEO, display, and social media advertising.

More than half of our client campaigns have a B2B focus. With more than a decade of experience working side-by-side with hundreds of talented in-house marketing teams, we understand the challenges and rewards of B2B marketing, both from an agency and a client-side perspective.

For each persona, you need to understand and document their unique problem and opportunity. You need to be clear on how they receive value from your product or service. You need to tailor your marketing in ways that motivate them to choose you and think carefully about what you can do to allay potential concerns.

On the other hand, brand building is a long-term investment. For many it will be hard, if not impossible, to clearly attribute sales revenue to it now or in the future. Let’s face it, this makes it a hard-sell for decision makers.

Despite similar challenges, B2C marketers have always invested heavily in brand building. Even though traditional media is poor at targeting a specific audience and measuring engagement, brand building has always been considered worthwhile. Often this is because the audiences are large and broad. As a B2C marketer you can afford to go big knowing that your audience is so large that your investment will be worthwhile.

Prior to digital, it was different for B2B marketers. Traditional brand building activities like TV, radio and print were poor at targeting and involved so much wastage it didn’t seem financially worthwhile given the often niche audiences needed for success.

B2B’s reluctance to invest in brand building despite the obvious benefits in doing so creates a huge opportunity for the smart B2B marketer.

Digital has opened up powerful targeting options and in recent years we’ve noticed a big change in the attitude of many marketers to investing in brand building. The best B2B marketers work hard to secure budget for awareness campaigns and think carefully about what they can do to create an awareness and positive perception of their brand amongst their perfect personas long before they become a potential customer.

Your brand-building campaigns are not trying to make a sale today or even tomorrow. They are tasked with the important job of ensuring that when your perfect customer is ready to explore their options, you are not only part of the discussion, but that you represent a brand they already trust.

Just because you’re in B2B does not automatically mean you have a complex buyer journey. Your prospects might go from awareness to decision in a day. Alternatively, your offering might require dozens or hundreds of steps over many months or years for a team of people to go from awareness to decision. The reality is it’s probably somewhere in between.

Understanding your buyer journey is critical to success. It’s also a powerful tool in expectation setting within your organisation. You need to understand, and then document this journey, and make sure that everyone in your organisation who has a say on marketing or an opinion on its results is clear about it.

Understanding your buyer journey means you can start to know:

• How to allocate your budget to different marketing activities
• How long it will take for various marketing activities to generate revenue (or earlier measurable milestones)
• Which channels are likely to drive activity at what point in the journey?
• How your messaging needs to change at different times and for different personas.

The most successful marketing strategies are rarely perfect the first time they are taken to market. They start with a solid idea that delivers some degree of success. Marketers then iterate their approach over many cycles to continue improving it.

The reality is that a lot of money is spent on digital marketing within your industry locally, and in many cases nationally and even internationally. Out of all this activity, you need to ask which of your competitors are running successful campaigns and which are wasting their money running campaigns that don’t deliver. If you can answer these two questions, you have a powerful advantage before you even consider how to approach your own campaigns.

You’ve figured out your personas and their buyer journey. You’ve got your campaigns ready to go. For most B2B marketers the next step is critical - how can you make sure that the audience you’re speaking to contains a high enough percentage of your perfect prospects to make the effort and spend worthwhile?

Go too broad and you’ll not only be experiencing a lot of waste, but in many platforms the poor engagement levels caused by failed targeting will see your campaigns suffer even further. Go too narrow and your engagement levels will be fantastic, but you’ll be reaching only a small percentage of your total audience.

Don’t forget to also create your own powerful targeting options by driving people to your website for future remarketing or by giving them something of value in exchange for their email address.

The key to targeting is to understand your prospects at a deep level and then review constantly the tools you have inside and outside of your organisation to get in front of them with the right message at the right time.

If you are in the business of selling a simple product with a simple buyer journey and all your transaction are online, then without too much effort you should be able get close to understanding the direct impact each of your marketing efforts have on revenue.

When decision-makers struggle to accept this, bad things happen:

• They can shun marketing activities deemed not measurable. This is a big mistake. There are plenty of obviously valuable actions never measured. For example, prospects will see ads they don’t click on. It doesn’t devalue the interaction, in fact, TV advertising is built on this exact model.

What should you say to your audience to get them to take action now? How can you shift their perception of the value you can offer them? How can you describe the ways you solve their important problems, so you stand alone from the competition? And what are you offering them in exchange for their attention, time or money?

We’re not talking about creating beautiful or creative prose. We’re not talking about using shocking or provocative messaging just for its own sake. What we’re talking about is using words to craft an offer having the most deliberate impact on the people you most want to influence.

Words, and the message they convey, are typically the most important part of any campaign and should be tackled at the start. It’s the promise in the words that matter to readers. It’s about how the words speak to them.

B2B marketing can forget this sometimes. It can be easy to focus on features, jargon and technical details when you’re marketing something used by other businesses. However, the reality is that you’re still in the business of influencing people and a technical approach will typically only get you so far.

• It’s going to be hard and expensive. The internet is full of content. If you want your content to have a chance of success, it needs to stand out from the pack and deliver genuine value.
• It’s unlikely to be a case of creating a couple of pieces of content and sitting back. You’ll get the best results by engaging with your prospects throughout the buyer journey with multiple pieces of quality content.
• You can’t outsource the creation of content to non-experts. What makes you special for prospects is your deep understanding of their problem and the ways you can solve them. You need senior people involved.
• Writing the content is only the beginning of the journey. You should spend more time and money promoting content than you do creating it.

Finally, here’s a tip about creating great content. You want to be more like Hollywood than a news network.

News networks are in the business of creating topical content every single day. It’s exhausting and takes a lot of resources. It also tends to create a lot of content which gets tired fast and needs to be replaced. Most businesses do not have the resources to do this successfully.

Hollywood however is in the business of storytelling. They’ve understood for a long time that all movies follow one of a small number of stories. Even more, they understand that evergreen content generates the best return on investment. Sure, sometimes it’s good to create something new, but it’s hard and inherently risky. Browse the highest grossing movies of the past few years and you’ll notice a pattern. The list is dominated by remakes and sequels. Hollywood will keep pumping out the same content, with only small variations until no-one is interested. This is how you should approach your content. 

Think evergreen (Hollywood) rather than everyday (News).

It makes no sense. This is especially true in complex B2B environments.

According to the Harvard Business Review “when Sales and Marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: Sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower”.

Keep them apart and you’ll not only lose the above, but you’ll also give people in both teams the ability to blame the other for poor performance. You’ll find it hard to ever know where the real problem exists.

Ever heard a salesperson use the quality of leads as their excuse for missing their sales targets? Ever heard a marketer tell you that revenue is down because the sales team aren’t making their calls or doing their job properly?

By keeping these teams separate you are encouraging an ‘us and them’ culture. There is not a single reason this is a good idea.

Here’s some tips to get your teams working together more effectively:

• Have them analyse and agree on the customer journey together.
• Have them develop buyer personas together.
• Have marketing work with sales on creating content (or at least on idea generation).
• Share marketing, sales and customer feedback in real-time with both teams
• Have them sit together where possible.
• Arrange recurring meetings to plan upcoming periods and review and analyse results.
• Have them collectively own relevant metrics across both sales and marketing.

If you’ve gone to the effort of reading to the end of this guide, then you’re on the right track. You’re either already a very good B2B marketer or you’re on the road to becoming one.

Which of the nine things great B2B marketers do resonated with you as an area for improvement for you or your organisation? Write it down as a goal for this quarter and get to work!

I’d also very much like to hear from you if you think I’ve missed anything important that describes your life as a B2B marketer.

If there is anything the team at Rocket can do to help, or any question we can answer to help give you clarity, don’t hesitate to be in touch at rocketagency.com.au or 1300 059 620.

Good luck in the continual journey of being a great B2B marketer.

All the best,

James Lawrence
Co-Founder, Rocket