Thank you for listening to the first episode of the Continuous Marketing Strategies podcast. The main aim of this podcast is to provide insights that can help you implement high-impact business-to-business — often abbreviated as B2B — marketing activities, processes and reporting with a focus on achieving increased revenue. There will also be some episodes focussed on general topics of interest to B2B marketers such as career development, lifelong learning and the power of giving back. Episodes will vary in style from monologues to Q&A sessions to one-to-one conversations to roundtables and so on. However, the aim of these episodes will always be to provide valuable insights that can be applied to help improve your overall B2B marketing strategy and personal development as a B2B marketer.
Marketing is a serious revenue generating function that is proven to add continuous value to B2B companies. Therefore, it’s important to continuously learn about ever-evolving B2B marketing strategies, but also not to abandon tried-and-tested marketing fundamentals. It’s about “you”, not “I”, “me”, “us” or “we”. It’s about how you can help your customers with solutions to their problems and provide unique long-term value. You’ve likely experienced cold marketing and sales pitches that focus on how great the pitching company is in the first few presentation slides. It’s a marketing trap that’s easy to fall into, so let’s quickly get to the focus of this episode and get to the value.
To highlight some B2B marketing problems that can negatively impact revenue potential, I conducted an exercise where I put myself in the shoes of senior executives at B2B companies and — as a result — have proposed six questions that B2B executives could be internally pondering or actively investigating when evaluating the performance of their marketing strategy. The topics featured in these questions will also be discussed in more-depth during future episodes of the Continuous Marketing Strategies podcast.
Talking of future episodes, I would please like to receive questions from you — that I will try to answer on this podcast — about any B2B marketing problems that you’ve experienced or are experiencing. I would also appreciate any B2B marketing topic suggestions that you would like to be featured on the podcast. You can submit these questions and topic suggestions using the Continuous Marketing Strategies podcast page on the Continuous Marketing Limited website (www.continuous.marketing).
Let’s get to the six proposed questions and I’ll provide some high-level commentary on why these are problematic and — if you recognise these problems at your B2B company — how you can begin to find a solution with various continuous marketing strategies. As mentioned previously, these topics will be discussed in more-depth during future episodes of the Continuous Marketing Strategies podcast.
The first proposed question that senior executives may be internally pondering or actively investigating when evaluating the performance of their marketing strategy is:
“Who are our potential customers and what, when, where and why do they find out about us?”
I’ll repeat this again:
“Who are our potential customers and what, when, where and why do they find out about us?”
People source B2B products and services and make the decisions to buy them. Although, B2B marketers sometimes fall into the trap of creating characterless content targeted at accounts, companies and logos. Understanding consumer behaviour isn't just a business-to-consumer — often abbreviated as B2C — marketing fundamental. People often use the same marketing channels and research methods to find products and services to solve their day-to-day problems in both their personal and professional lives.
There's no shortcut in the pursuit of identifying, understanding and satisfying your ideal customers. This requires a ceaseless commitment to defining and evolving content, messaging and positioning for your target industries, companies and personas. Knowing where B2B problem solvers look for solutions is crucial, so you can be in the right place at the right time to provide unique value. A continuous marketing strategy that can help you demystify your target audience, is to develop an “inch wide, mile deep” content creation framework for your niche B2B market. This content creation framework should be continually driven by customer and market research to understand what, when, where and why they find out about the problems your company solves and the real stories of how your company provides long-term value to clients.
The second proposed question that senior executives may be internally pondering or actively investigating when evaluating the performance of their marketing strategy is:
“Why does our marketing department rarely engage with customers and not prioritise success stories?”
I’ll repeat this again:
“Why does our marketing department rarely engage with customers and not prioritise success stories?”
B2B marketers must continuously understand how and why customers get value from their products and services. There's a reason that multiple definitions of marketing include the word “customer” with some of the most credible definitions not changing for decades. Unfortunately, the distance between B2B marketers and their customers seems to be growing and there's a misconception that only the sales and support teams foster and maintain these relationships.
Great B2B marketers always try to walk in their customer's shoes. Satisfied customers are your most credible brand ambassadors and the best champions of your products and services. There are several continuous marketing strategies that can help you become customer-centric and create trusted client relationships that benefit both sides. For example, the creation of interesting user stories that prove value, finding new customer-led differentiation points and encouraging marketers to be a key stakeholder in continually understanding the evolving needs of your clients.
The third proposed question that senior executives may be internally pondering or actively investigating when evaluating the performance of their marketing strategy is:
“Our CRM system is a mess; how can we make informed strategic decisions and get valuable insights?”
I’ll repeat this again:
“Our CRM system is a mess; how can we make informed strategic decisions and get valuable insights?”
One of the biggest frustrations in B2B marketing is working with a disorganised customer relationship management system — commonly known as a CRM system — that's not configured to collect and measure meaningful data. Due to over-automation, some CRM systems are not providing accurate and easy-to-access information about customer buying journeys and where revenue comes from. This misleading data leads to ineffective marketing channels being attributed to won opportunities.
Your CRM system should be an invaluable company asset that helps guide key strategic decisions. Unfortunately, it can be a data dumping ground that gets so out of control it becomes a potential liability. A continuous marketing strategy that can help optimise your CRM system is the introduction, maintenance and improvement of data points and processes that generate valuable insights and reporting. With the aim of providing accurate and easy-to-access information about customer buying journeys and revenue origins.
The fourth proposed question that senior executives may be internally pondering or actively investigating when evaluating the performance of their marketing strategy is:
“What's the origin of our revenue and why is it difficult to find and report on the first customer touchpoint?”
I’ll repeat this again:
“What's the origin of our revenue and why is it difficult to find and report on the first customer touchpoint?”
When targeting net new business, the first customer touchpoint is a crucial indicator of marketing channel success. If this is not thoroughly understood, fruitless marketing activities are reinforced and continued. A heavily automated CRM system that just measures — the also valuable — last customer touchpoint becomes a rigid barrier to progression and achieving a company culture of open accountability and continuous improvement.
It's crucial in B2B marketing to understand where high intent interest from net new business prospects is being generated and how existing customers are interacting with your marketing channels. A continuous marketing strategy that can help you take the guesswork out of performance analysis is the implementation of data points and research methods that will empower you with deep customer-led insights into where your business comes from and how it's retained. As a result, you can concentrate on profitable marketing activities and thoroughly scrutinise futile projects.
The fifth proposed question that senior executives may be internally pondering or actively investigating when evaluating the performance of their marketing strategy is:
“We seem to have underperforming channels that are expensive, yet we continue to invest in them?”
I’ll repeat this again:
“We seem to have underperforming channels that are expensive, yet we continue to invest in them?”
In B2B marketing, a comfort zone can develop with marketing channels and tactics. If you're justifying investments and projects based on “this is the way it's always been done” or “our competitors are doing this, so we might miss out”, you have a problem. The previously mentioned CRM system issues are another contributory factor. Would B2B marketers spend money so recklessly in their personal lives or if they owned the company? Probably not.
B2B marketing departments are under increasing pressure from multiple internal stakeholders to deliver projects quickly. Unfortunately, these rushed activities are often prioritised by who shouts the loudest — in many cases deviating from the marketing strategy — resulting in a self-defeating spiral of relentless low return on investment activities. A continuous marketing strategy that can help you is developing a “Five Ws and How” culture in your marketing team. The “Five Ws” being “who”, “what”, “when”, “where” and “why”. This open culture can provide increased accountability and guidance when decisions are made to justify strategic projects and can help to determine the deliverables that really should be prioritised.
Finally, the sixth proposed question that senior executives may be internally pondering or actively investigating when evaluating the performance of their marketing strategy is:
“Why is our marketing team mostly measuring success from a brand awareness perspective?”
I’ll repeat this again:
“Why is our marketing team mostly measuring success from a brand awareness perspective?”
The justification for some marketing activities is “increasing brand awareness.” Yes, this is important, but what about the content, positioning and messaging for the other stages of the buyer's journey? The best B2B marketers evaluate their performance on how they are contributing to revenue objectives. Deceptive data and vanity metrics lead to inaccurate insights and repetitive cycles of uninformed decisions and performance evaluation.
The bottom line is businesses survive on revenue and this needs to be deep-rooted in the mindset of B2B marketing teams. In the digital age, it's easy to generate and manipulate vanity metrics. Incredibly, in some companies it may be deemed a risky strategy to evaluate your performance on revenue. A continuous marketing strategy that can help you reveal the true strengths and weaknesses of your marketing activities is by analysing performance with a revenue-focused lens. The creation and optimisation of attentive content across the “AIDAS” stages — these stages are “A” attention, “I” interest, “D” desire, “A” action and “S” satisfaction, so “AIDAS” is “A”, “I”, “D”, “A” and “S” — is a fundamental part of a high-impact B2B marketing strategy that aims to increase revenue. Brand awareness is never enough.
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