5 Effective B2B Marketing Strategies for 2020

When it involves marketing strategies, you’ll find many tricks and techniques on launching creative marketing campaigns and driving conversions. While those are valuable conversations to possess, sometimes teams put the cart before the horse by refining those tactics while they haven’t yet addressed more basic steps on campaign strategy and metrics for success. One commonly overlooked area? Volume.

Consider your team’s productivity. By setting the proper expectations upfront in terms of volume and leads, and by prioritizing the acceptable metrics, you’ll position your pipeline for stronger sales. The trick is to extend volume strategically, so your team brings a higher number of quality leads. You’ll make better use of your team’s time and have stronger results and larger profits on an equivalent budget.

Here are five steps to a bigger and smarter B2B marketing volume.

1. Get Focused

This is where your engagement strategy begins. Undoubtedly, you’ve already put a lot of time focussing on your targets. Get laser-sharp on your industry segments, and identify geographical areas and therefore the size of the companies you’re targeting, also other qualifying information for your product.

The buyer personas within your segment is a critical component. You ought to develop your personas from good primary research involving tailored surveys, both online and through telecommunication or in-person conversations, together with your targeted industries and buyers. Your personas will still evolve on the basis of your learnings and approaches.

You’ll also have to map the buyer’s journey for your product. Too many teams make one among two mistakes here: They either attempt to recreate the wheel for every campaign, or they think in terms of transactions, instead of the buyer’s mind throughout their buying decision. By mapping the buyer’s journey upfront, you'll leverage those insights and develop campaigns that ask the buyers’ needs at various points of the choice-making process.

2. Know Your Data

The effectiveness and productivity of your campaigns are reliant on the clean and accurate data that feeds them. According to Sirius Decisions, 25 percent of the average database is inaccurate. This isn’t surprising, as long as teams often build up a base of data quickly without deliberate management. The result's wasted valuable time and budget going after the incorrect targets.

Keeping your data clean and current does quite more than empower you to personalize effectively and develop content that resonates. You’ll also maximize your budget by having your team pursue only the right people at the proper time.

3. Get a Marketing Automation Engine

You have two options here: you'll either buy a platform yourself or hire a provider as a managed service. Either may be a valid option, but remember that marketing automation isn't plug-and-play. It involves a steep learning curve and therefore the right staffing. If you select to use a provider as a managed service, you’ll get the advantages of the provider’s expertise without the hassles of managing or maintaining the system. If you select to deploy and manage your own system, just make certain to manage internal expectations for when campaigns can start to roll out, and plan on training your team.

You can choose between top-of-the-line platforms to more basic models, but you want your system to feed into your CRM. This is often critical for enhancing productivity and sales effectiveness; if your systems don’t communicate with one another, you’ll encounter a variety of unnecessary delays, misalignments, and hindrances. As an example, follow-up is going to be difficult, you’ll need to export files manually, and salespeople will update information that doesn’t make it into your master system, creating frustration with outdated records.

4. Have the proper Conversation

To accelerate your pipeline, you’ll want to tailor your outbound conversations as precisely as possible. You’ll have to discover where each prospect is within the buyer’s journey. Is the prospect only consuming content and getting educated? Does their contract come up for renewal next year, and they’re exploring their options?

Knowing where they are in the process helps you frame the conversation and shortens the time from contact to close. Remember that digital is merely a part of the journey—it’s not the whole journey. You would like to layer in a conversation with the prospect through teleservices to spot their stage within the journey. Your data and engagement statistics should be assisting you to strategize and escalate the trail to ROI. But don’t forget the importance of the human touch along the way.

5. Align Sales and Marketing

We marketers mention this very often, but more as a general goal than a practical tactic. The reality is that aligning with sales and building trust among departments will spark an instantaneous rise in productivity. Agenda items here include developing a standard set of definitions on what a lead is and agreeing on when that lead is qualified for sales. The teams also will have to agree on a uniform process and timeline for lead follow-up.

Without this alignment, you’ll have a disgruntled sales team who complains that marketing is giving them the incorrect leads, and an equally disgruntled marketing team who wants to understand why good leads are dying on the vine. But once they’re working in tandem, you’ll have a feedback circuit of continuous improvement.

The first step for a high rate of closed deals may be a rich pipeline flowing with leads. Specialize in boosting your team’s productivity and making the foremost strategic use of their time, and you’ll see an increase of lead volume that translates into an increase in ROI.

Designate has consistently increased conversion rates for its clients by engaging the most sophisticated metrics and tools to acquire, engage, and convert target audiences across domains. Get in touch to know how we can boost your ROIs.