Integrated B2B Marketing Strategy
Contents
The State of B2B Marketing Today
Silos are forming not just between marketing and other functions, but within marketing teams too. As these silos form, customer insights are lost and managing the full customer journey is becoming more difficult.
To address some of this complexity, it’s critical to take a strategic approach across the customer journey – that doesn’t mean execution takes a back seat, but it does mean being more critical about what that execution should be, who it’s targeted at, and how it ladders up to the business goals which all parts of the organisation are working toward. That’s where the power of alignment really comes in.
To help get you on the path of alignment, over the next few pages we’ll show how strategy (in all its forms) can help you stop, think, and take back control. Good strategy enables you to connect the dots across your silos, brings stakeholders along on the journey, define the messages, activity and channels which will generate success, and say no to those which won’t – adjusting and optimising along the way, and putting you in the driver’s seat to achieve growth.
There is no doubt, the B2B marketing landscape is becoming increasingly complex. With the explosion of digital channels, content, data and specialist areas, it’s difficult for many teams to keep up and remain aligned.
We’ll look at three things you can do right now, to deliver against your plans.
01
Actionable Strategic Planning
02
03
Balancing Global and Regional Priorities
At the end of each section, we will provide questions to ask yourself and tips to consider when implementing against your plans.
Actionable Strategic Planning
As a marketer, to deliver business outcomes it’s imperative to have a strategic focus, so how can you do this when constantly tasked with short term KPIs and tactical requests?
It’s imperative marketers move beyond the frenetic cycle of quarterly targets and tactical tasks, to build a plan which delivers sustainable results and gets your teams off the hamster wheel.
Having a strategic plan to inform tactical execution is critical if you’re expected to hit increasingly aggressive targets, particularly with reduced resource and budget.
A defined long-term strategy helps you take back control of your agenda, align your marketing priorities to commercial business goals, think critically about your customers, your competitive landscape, and develop value propositions to cut through the noise, resonate and drive demand in market.
Questions to Ask Yourself
How aligned is marketing with the key stakeholders across the business?
Think beyond the Sales department (although they are generally primary stakeholders). Is marketing seen as a value driver? Does marketing have the influence to initiate projects or push back on requests?
Is your entire marketing team on the same page?
Do you have an integrated plan, and the right communication cadence in place to ensure the specialists within the marketing team understand what else is going on, and how their activity feeds into or impacts other parts of the marketing ecosystem?
Do your marketing program goals and KPIs align with the complexity and length of your customer journey?
- Or are they shoe-horned to work to a quarterly target cycle, expecting leads to convert in 3 months, when sales take 9 months or more to typically materialise?
- Are your metrics aligned to the point in the journey you’re trying to influence? Are you giving your messages and activity enough time to mature in market and build brand salience, or refreshing them before your audience has fully consumed and understood them?
Is there a single, united view of the customer?
Not just at a demographic or firmographic level, but at a motivational and behavioural one? Do you have a process and system for feeding new learnings and insights about the customer back into the full team, and across departments, so these aren’t lost in silos?
Is there clarity and alignmenton your competitive point of difference?
What problem do you solve for the customer, in a way that nobody else can? Is there consistency in the GTM approach, positioning and messaging?
Tips for Growth
Invest
Invest in building trust in your stakeholder relationships – think of them as your own buying committee. By understanding their point of view, and demonstrating value, you can slowly build influence.
Speak
Speak the language of business rather than marketing jargon, and articulate how your activity feeds into business metrics. This helps to build trust, confidence and influence with stakeholders who can make or break your marketing programs.
Change
Change the status quo – if you’re building trust, and you’re aligned to business goals, back yourself to adjust what has always been done, to what you believe will deliver outcomes for the business. Speaking in business language will help garner the support you need to get this through.
Start
Start by setting simple goals and get the full marketing team aligned on these. This helps to drive priority and focus team efforts away from the day to day tactical, and on the building blocks that drive the sustainable differentiation.
Remember
Remember to balance the need for net new to fill the funnel with the need to move them through the funnel.
Instil
Instil a culture of continuous improvement. Rather than execute a campaign and move on, take time to review the data, do the retrospective, and use that to educate the business and plan ahead.
Agree
Agree what outcome you are working to, and align on how to execute in a better, more efficient way across the full team. Focus on the key levers that will shift the business metrics, without getting distracted on things that won’t. With a focus on objectives, strength comes in saying no – deciding what not to do in order to deliver the objectives.
Having a strategic plan to inform tactical execution is critical if you’re expected to hit increasingly aggressive targets, particularly with reduced resource and budget.
ICP, Personas and Journey Mapping
B2B persona development and customer journey mapping has become an increasingly popular tool for visualising every experience your customers have with you.
However, knowledge of the full customer journey is often spread across business silos and isn’t always shared in a way that can be analysed and actioned to drive commercial value.
Developing your ideal customer profile (ICP) and personas, and understanding how to tap into your organisation’s insight, experience and data will help
you map your full customer journey.
ICP
Personas
Questions to Ask Yourself
Do you have a clearly documented Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
Or more than one…? Is this used to help filter who you target your positioning and messaging to, who
you pull into the funnel and why?
Do you have personas which are rich in detail?
Do they help you understand the motivations and drivers of your target audience within your ICPs?
Have you got a clearly documented view of the customer journey?
Is this shared beyond marketing, and into the broader business? Is it a living document which adapts and changes as your business and customer does? Are you clear on why the above are important, and how they can be used in a tangible way to impact your day-today activity and results?
Do key stakeholders in your business think from the point of view of the customer and their needs?
Or do sales, marketing and others think more about what they need customers to do to move through the journey? This is a common trap, and one worth watching out for – by running journey workshop sessions with the broader team, you can help them see the world better from a customer point of view.
Knowledge of the full customer journey is often spread across business silos and isn’t always shared in a way that can be analysed and actioned to drive commercial value.
Tips for Growth
Recognise
Recognise an ICP is not the same as a persona, but like personas, you can have more than one ICP, particularly if addressing segments of the market with different needs, or those that align to a different part of your value proposition.
Develop
Develop rich personas to get beyond the surface level and understand the motivations and drivers of your audience. Using an empathy map
is a great way to do this so you start to uncover the way they think, feel and behave.
Change
Change the status quo – if you’re building trust, and you’re aligned to business goals, back yourself to adjust what has always been done, to what you believe will deliver outcomes for the business. Speaking in business language will help garner the support you need to get this through.
Start
Start with global personas if they’re available, but consider what needs to change to ensure they adequately reflect your local personas. Often market maturity can have a big impact on the persona’s challenges, what will and won’t resonate with them.
Rally
Rally teams outside of marketing to care about the customer journey – seek out the areas of common ground and start there to build advocacy for why it’s important.
Engage
Engage and involve the broader team. A customer journey should be a full organisation initiative, so get insights from frontline team members across sales, service, customer success – and keep revisiting this to keep it fresh and embed it in practical ways to your planning.
Advocate
Advocate using data to focus on the customer journey, and to help build and iterate it. Remember, data can come in many forms – analytics, anecdotal feedback from the field, primary research with customers, and more.
Remember
Remember a customer journey should be created at a persona level. This helps to develop the journey through the eyes of the right persona, and how different people in the buying committee influence the full journey.
Focus
Focus on identifying areas of the journey where you can influence or where the most value can be gained in supporting. Although we know the journey is not linear, thinking about it this way helps to simplify the complexity so you can identify the priority areas.
Balancing Global & Regional Priorities
Managing relationships and expectations in an increasingly global and centralised workplace from global, to regional offices and in-country teams, is becoming a reality for many B2B marketers.
Reporting to a global HQ, how can you gain local autonomy, flexibility and control, ensuring HQ understands local market dynamics so we can
focus on driving initiatives that are highly relevant to your region.
Questions to Ask Yourself
How active are you in educating your stakeholders (particularly those out of region), about your market?
APAC is such a diverse region, do your global and other stakeholder truly understand the differences within the region, and how this impacts sales process, messaging, or brand maturity?
If they don’t understand it, they won’t be able to support in delivering to your unique needs.
As a local or regional team, what areas do you have control over?
Are you fighting the right battles to ensure you can adapt to meet local needs and nuances – either through budget allocation, message iteration, or channel selection? Compromise will always be needed, so it’s important to be clear on areas you can concede on and those you can’t.
How well do you know the cultural context of the market you’re operating in, or your team are working in?
And how does that influence their decision-making process, and other motivations that drive their behaviour? For instance, does the culture require strong personal relationships to progress big deals, how important are references? What style of communication is common – direct or passive?
Do your global and other stakeholder truly understand the differences within the region, and how this impacts sales process, messaging, or brand maturity?
Tips for Growth
Invest
Invest time in educating global stakeholders about your region, the cultural diversity, market maturity and nuances. This helps to grow share of mind about your region and build trust as you adapt messaging and assets to your local needs.
Decide
Decide what you can control, and what you can’t – don’t get too caught up about trying to control everything. Often, the greater the degree of control corelates to the level of relationship you have with sales (given it’s the regions who are accountable for targets) so harness that proximity to sales and use it to guide what you believe will have the most commercial value.
Communicate
Communicate about what you are keeping or which elements you’re adapting when using global messaging or campaigns. This helps to build trust and confidence in how you’re leveraging the global material.
Choose
Choose your battles and determine what’s going to have an impact on your metrics – and focus there first to build influence and trust.
Consider
Consider other regions such as Americas (vs global) or EMEA being your allies so as a group you can be much more influential with global. You can also look to some of these regions to share ideas and
success stories.
