arketing and selling to businesses (B2B) requires a vastly different approach compared to marketing and selling to consumers (B2C) which is why leveraging the best B2B campaign strategies in 2023 will be critical to success.
Typically, there are more than one key stakeholders from each target audience segment within the B2B sales cycle, involving both influencers and decision-makers. This complexity makes the sales cycle much longer with a lot more layers. As such, B2B marketing requires content, collateral and targeted messaging for each segment and key stakeholder at different stages of the customer journey.
Businesses are much less forgiving than consumers when it comes to financial waste and as such, B2B marketers must communicate clearly how their product or service solves a business problem. This message must then be amplified to the right audience, in the right place, and at the right time. In order to minimise complexity and save on time and investment, we’ve put together this campaign strategy playbook, specifically designed for B2B companies.
This Playbook will enable you to:
- Generate guaranteed leads
- Get to market fast and without stress
- Effectively amplify your solution and brand in the right way
- Spend more time marketing and less time talking about it
The Digital Shadow
The rule of seven suggests that a brand or offer must be seen at least seven times before a prospect will engage with it. But in a crowd, just because someone looks, it doesn’t mean that they’ve seen. This means you have to fight harder, in more channels, more frequently, and with more financial waste. More than anything though, you have to be a lot more strategic.
The Digital Shadow play offers prospects different content options depending on their buying stage and drives them to an online destination to take action. From that destination, the shadow kicks in and presents your brand across the websites and apps your prospects continue on to visit – including Facebook which over 50% of Australians log in to every day.
In this campaign go big and go hard driving traffic to your site from your main social channel/s: for example LinkedIn and Twitter. Then go big and hard on retargeting across those same channels, plus a whole lot more, to generate new leads and reignite cold ones.
What you will need is:
- A highly compelling, gated asset (e.g., an eBook) with a too-good-to-pass-up title
- Two highly compelling, ungated, blog articles also with too-good-to-pass-up titles
- Retargeting tracking codes for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and AdRoll placed across all pages on your website
- A database of emails (if you have one)
- A landing page for your eBook
- An exit pop-up on your blog pages
- An email nurture program
The Play
Drive traffic from decision-makers and influencers using LinkedIn targeting, and from the followers of complementary or competitive companies to your landing page and blog articles.
Gather leads from the landing page while retargeting blog (and other website) page visitors to encourage them to the landing page to become additional leads.
Leads then enter a nurture program which highlights your key differentiators, where they can learn more about your business so that by the time your sales team call or meet with them, they are informed and ready to purchase.
To get the best outcome, arm your sales team with a powerful script and call-to-action (or reason for calling) and additional collateral. Create scenarios to cover all outcomes including hard no’s, vague interest and interest in a different solution and have sales materials ready to send out.
For leads not yet ready to engage, don’t let them go cold. Set a calendar reminder to follow up with a friendly, no-obligation call each month for six months and continue to email them as part of a strategic email nurture program.
The Content Power Matrix
This play is a lot more aggressive but with fewer advertising platforms and a whole lot more content that packs a punch.
Rather than using a combination of gated and ungated content like in the last play, we go hard on generating leads from gated content only. Once leads are captured, a series of content-rich emails are triggered. They include more eBooks, more blogs, plus videos – all designed to take the prospect on a journey to becoming a client – all with limited human contact from your sales team. You will lose some subscribers, but this is a process of disqualification, so you’re left with a small number of high quality and sales-ready leads.
For the promotion, focus on just three platforms – LinkedIn, Twitter and relevant paid publications. And then go big on the email sequence. You will need:
- Two extremely compelling eBooks
- Four blogs
- Three customer success videos
The Play
The first eBook is aggressively promoted to:
- Decision makers via publications relevant to their industry and job title
- Decisions makers and influencers via LinkedIn
- Followers of competitors and complementary companies on Twitter
As leads are generated, they enter an email sequence of two emails per week. Their titles and content will be too good not to read, and by the last email, they will be sold on your capabilities and ready to talk.
If you’re hungry for even more, you can retarget your leads and your other website traffic for enhanced and expanded brand awareness.
The Kayo
The Kayo is the finisher. Pick the Digital Shadow or the Power Matrix – or even a combination of the two – and culminate the online campaign with a personal touch.
68% of B2B customers prefer to research independently online which is why offering relevant and compelling content online through one of the first two plays is absolutely critical to the success of any marketing promotion. Not only does this approach provide research materials for prospects but it also disqualifies low-quality leads thereby saving the precious time of salespeople and allowing them to focus on a small number of high-quality, and qualified, prospective clients.
Following up content with the opportunity to meet face-to-face at an event provides the opportunity for the sales team to focus their efforts on these high-quality prospects and gives them the opportunity to seal the deal with a lot less effort needed had they gone in cold.
For the remaining percentage of people who prefer not to research online but like a personal touch and to speak to a person with whom they have a relationship, an event or an opportunity to talk to someone as a result of a personalised introductory gift or meeting invitation, is a great way to get their attention. By picking an event, a personalised gift, or both as a finisher, prospects will never forget your brand nor be able to resist starting a sales conversation. Bam!
Business Benefits
By choosing one of these powerful, ready-to-execute campaigns, B2B businesses can get to market much faster, with less stress or the need for complex planning.
The only thing left to decide on is the topic of each piece of content which will resonate with key stakeholders within the purchasing decision. This is where you will need a marketing service provider like us – with experience working agency and client-side and with in-depth knowledge of B2B marketing. Our highly skilled team create powerful content that cuts through the noise and amplifies it to the right audience, at the right place, and at the right time.
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