B2B Marketing Strategy: 7 Key Elements for 2024
Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2024 5:41 am
We present the 7 basic elements that we believe should be part of any strategy for the B2B market to ensure the success of marketing and sales actions.
7 Key Elements for 2024
At Aeroplano we design B2B marketing strategy programs based on 7 basic elements that, in our opinion, should be the basis of any market strategy. These elements must work together (with greater or lesser intensity) sweden whatsapp number data to ensure the success of marketing and sales actions.
Do you want to self-assess your company? In the following link you will find a self-diagnosis tool.
Tool access
In this article, we offer some basic brushstrokes of each of the 7 elements we refer to:
1. Market positioning.
2. Corporate website.
3. Marketing and sales technology stack.
4. Content strategy.
5. Demand generation.
6. Sales pipeline management.
7. Data analysis.
1. Market positioning.
Positioning defines the perception we want our customers to have of our business and is closely linked to the design and documentation of a clear strategy shared by everyone within a company.
B2B Go to market
Definition of market segments
The first step is to define which market segments we want to serve and what common characteristics define our Ideal Customer Profile , or in other words, what those companies to which we are going to direct all our commercial and marketing efforts should meet:
What size are they?
Where are they located?
Do you offer recurring purchases?
How complex is the sale?
What needs do you want to cover?
In which sector do they move?
What degree of technical specialization do they have?
Identifying decision makers in the purchasing process
The second step is to identify which people within an organization have influence in decision-making within a purchasing process , whether they lead it, influence it or can block it (financial directors are a fairly common case to which we do not usually pay much attention...).
Once we have identified the people, it is important to characterize them:
What are your responsibilities?
What capacity for influence they have.
At what stage of the purchasing process do they intervene?
What are your “pains”.
What is your training and your knowledge of the solutions we can provide…
In more complex projects with long sales processes that require a lot of education, defining a purchasing committee can help to convince all those involved in both the acquisition and the subsequent use of our solution. It may be the CEO who makes the final decision, but not the one who triggers it.
Middle management may also have some influence , especially if they are the ones best suited to complete the implementation of the solution we propose:
Let's imagine that we are manufacturers of industrial machinery and we intend to replace a competitor's machine that our client has been working with for years. The technical solution is adequate, the price is in line, but those who have to use it may think that the learning curve is high and be against changing suppliers. If we are aware that we may encounter this obstacle along the way, it is easier for us to be prepared to overcome it.
One of the most effective methods to characterize our buyer personas is through interviews with our clients . We can intuit what challenges they face, what words they use to talk about their needs or problems, what attributes they really value in a supplier…etc. But if we are guided only by our intuitions, it is difficult for our positioning language to be specific and relevant to our clients. We must use our clients' language and in their terms and, if possible, based on certainties and not intuitions.
Definition of messages
The third step is to define the messages that you will continually use in all your commercial and marketing actions when talking about your business. With them we will hammer our audience and position ourselves as what we are: a company with authority that generates trust and credibility.
2. Corporate website.
The website should be used as the central core of a company's online marketing strategy . It is still your visible face and is key to the positioning strategy even if you are not selling your products or services through it.
In reality, the web is the only online space where a company is able to control all the messages and content it wants to send to its target audience and therefore, it is essential to dedicate time to generating attractive and quality content before investing in attracting traffic to it.
What aspects are important when developing a website?
B2B website
CMS (content management system)
The web cannot be a static element. It must be constantly growing and evolving to continuously create value for prospects, potential clients and customers. A CMS provides tools to add and modify landing pages easily without having to depend on external agencies or IT teams.
Resource Center
We have indicated that positioning the company's value proposition through a matrix of appropriate messages and content is key. To attract quality traffic, it is necessary to expand information that addresses the needs and problems that our target audience experiences on a daily basis. All of this customer-focused content needs a place to live on your website. For those companies that have a novel solution that is not mature, it is important to focus on educational content that helps the audience understand what we offer and what advantages we provide. A resource center can be a good solution for them to access all of the information in an easy and fast way.
Conversion elements
A website receives a large number of visitors, but until these users fill out a form, make a call or contact us via chat, they are anonymous people who approach our company but leave no trace.
When building a website, all the components that facilitate the conversion of these anonymous visitors into potential clients must be considered. Within this category are contact forms, call-to-action buttons or landing pages for capturing potential clients.
CRM (Customer Management Software)
It is not necessary to emphasize the importance of having software that tracks all the touchpoints a customer or prospect has with our website. However, there are countless options on the market. The key lies in knowing what we ask of them and how we integrate them and who feeds them.
SEO
SEO covers a wide range of actions and is a very complex topic. SEO best practices for search engine optimization include:
Use of keywords (it is never unnecessary to do a study of words and search terms of our target client).
Inclusion of these search terms in URLs or in H1 and H2 headings.
Internal links within your website.
And of course, quality content, which is the basis for maximizing the conversion rate of those users who visit your website.
Responsive design
Searches through mobile devices of all sizes and formats are a fact. Therefore, designing a versatile website that incorporates all these formats and sizes is a necessity. If browsing through a mobile device requires scrolling through sidebars to consume information, it is easy to lose visitors sooner than we expect.
3. The marketing and sales technology stack.
marketing stack
There are currently thousands of marketing and sales software tools that cover all stages of marketing. The offer is endless, but what is essential is to have at least two tools:
CRM
CRM is a tool that allows you to trace the entire relationship with the client or potential client , record calls, include notes and track the status and evolution of any prospect. To maximize its performance, it is essential to spend time characterizing our ideal client and the purchasing process in the tool. This will allow us to correctly segment and filter our database and get the most commercial benefit. A CRM can be as complex as you want, but some of its basic functions are the following:
Synchronize and coordinate all email communications in a single space.
Assign accounts and contacts to your sales team
Create and track tasks
Evaluate the journey of potential customers through the purchasing process
Set goals and closing probabilities for open offers
The offer is huge and varied. But if we have to choose between two options, we would choose Hubspot or Zoho . They are versatile tools that represent a significant qualitative leap for companies that do not use CRM.
Web analytics
There are also a number of alternatives in this category, but Google Analytics is sufficient to analyse all the data generated by a website:
Traffic volume
Origin of traffic (paid campaigns, organic traffic, social networks, referrals, direct traffic…etc)
What is the user's behavior (number of pages viewed, time spent, where they usually exit, on which pages they convert, etc.)
The amount of information it provides is enormous and it is not easy to define the metrics and KPIs that best fit our needs for making decisions.
CRM and web analytics are two of the key tools. However, there is another very interesting technological pill, which is none other than marketing automation tools. While a CRM focuses on the relationship between the company and its customers and prospects, an automation tool allows you to design automated marketing campaigns with a high degree of personalization based on the segmentation you have carried out:
Activity segment
Products purchased
Contact profile
Situation in the sales cycle
…etc.
It is not an easy tool to integrate, but once a CRM has been integrated and its use has spread throughout the organization, communication automation should be the next step.
4. The content strategy.
B2B content strategy
The Philosopher's Stone.
It is often said that only 5% of a company’s potential customers are in “buying mode.” Identifying these customers and providing them with the right information to help them make decisions is vital, not only to close an opportunity but to accelerate it as much as possible.
But it is also important to consider that 95% who may wake up in a month, a year or three years.
In B2B sales , and especially in more complex sales processes, the purchase decision is not emotional and depends on many aspects involving a large number of factors and people. This is why decisions tend to take time, especially when they have long-term consequences.
The purchasing process is changing:
Your customers get their information on the Internet or through industry colleagues, not necessarily from your sales team.
They don't care about your company unless you've shown them that you understand the problems they face and have solved them at other companies.
The content you publish and distribute on your website, social networks or through specific actions should be the gateway to future conversations with your sales team.
Your customers are looking for empathy. To do this, there is nothing like talking exclusively about yourself, your company or the superiority of your products and talking about the challenges your customer faces. It is not bad to talk about yourself, but the most effective “self-promotion” is to talk about how much you can contribute to your customers to meet their needs. The goal is to be perceived as someone “valuable.”
Therefore, the content that really adds value to the sleeping 95% is that which directly addresses the purchase triggers, the pain points of our clients, the problems that are common to our ideal client profile or the questions that companies ask themselves during the purchasing process.
There are dozens of formats in which to support the content: posts on a blog or on social networks, newsletters, success stories, Webinars, catalogues ...etc, all valid, why not?
What is truly important is that the content is capable of attracting the attention of our potential clients based on the moment of purchase they are in and generates authority.
If a prospect is close to making a decision, they will be more interested in learning about the company's experience through possible success stories . However, if they are in an initial phase, it will probably be more useful to know what value we can provide compared to our competition . And for this, there is nothing better than to stop saying that we are the best and move on to stating emphatically and with facts that we know what we are talking about.
Good content can help you:
Generate awareness and credibility in your company
Convert anonymous visitors into potential customers with names, surnames and position in the company
Help those who have entered the sales process make decisions
Increase the closing rate
Reduce sales cycles
Getting into the habit of writing quality content is not easy, it requires consistency and being aware that the return is not immediate. But it is certainly a sure bet to strengthen success in the sales process.
5. Demand generation.
B2B Demand Generation
So far we have talked about positioning (identifying the common characteristics of the ideal customer profile and the prescribers), the pillars necessary to be able to do quality marketing (web and technological stack) and the content strategy . The next scenario is the generation and capture of demand . Demand generation is understood as all those actions that we carry out to generate awareness in our target audience, regardless of whether they are in purchasing mode or not. On the other hand, demand capture includes all the actions that we carry out to convert, attract and convert those who have a specific need.
Both demand generation (which has to do with generating awareness about the company and its value proposition for when a potential client is ready) and demand capture can be addressed through three channels:
Organic channels.
Output channels.
Payment media channels.
Organic channels
Organic channels include all the tools you have available that do not cost you anything. Social networks, specific landing pages or your company's blog are a clear example. Their development is closely linked to the content management that we have already discussed and they are designed to generate credibility in your audience and reinforce organic positioning in search engines (mainly Google) or on social networks as you increase your audience.
7 Key Elements for 2024
At Aeroplano we design B2B marketing strategy programs based on 7 basic elements that, in our opinion, should be the basis of any market strategy. These elements must work together (with greater or lesser intensity) sweden whatsapp number data to ensure the success of marketing and sales actions.
Do you want to self-assess your company? In the following link you will find a self-diagnosis tool.
Tool access
In this article, we offer some basic brushstrokes of each of the 7 elements we refer to:
1. Market positioning.
2. Corporate website.
3. Marketing and sales technology stack.
4. Content strategy.
5. Demand generation.
6. Sales pipeline management.
7. Data analysis.
1. Market positioning.
Positioning defines the perception we want our customers to have of our business and is closely linked to the design and documentation of a clear strategy shared by everyone within a company.
B2B Go to market
Definition of market segments
The first step is to define which market segments we want to serve and what common characteristics define our Ideal Customer Profile , or in other words, what those companies to which we are going to direct all our commercial and marketing efforts should meet:
What size are they?
Where are they located?
Do you offer recurring purchases?
How complex is the sale?
What needs do you want to cover?
In which sector do they move?
What degree of technical specialization do they have?
Identifying decision makers in the purchasing process
The second step is to identify which people within an organization have influence in decision-making within a purchasing process , whether they lead it, influence it or can block it (financial directors are a fairly common case to which we do not usually pay much attention...).
Once we have identified the people, it is important to characterize them:
What are your responsibilities?
What capacity for influence they have.
At what stage of the purchasing process do they intervene?
What are your “pains”.
What is your training and your knowledge of the solutions we can provide…
In more complex projects with long sales processes that require a lot of education, defining a purchasing committee can help to convince all those involved in both the acquisition and the subsequent use of our solution. It may be the CEO who makes the final decision, but not the one who triggers it.
Middle management may also have some influence , especially if they are the ones best suited to complete the implementation of the solution we propose:
Let's imagine that we are manufacturers of industrial machinery and we intend to replace a competitor's machine that our client has been working with for years. The technical solution is adequate, the price is in line, but those who have to use it may think that the learning curve is high and be against changing suppliers. If we are aware that we may encounter this obstacle along the way, it is easier for us to be prepared to overcome it.
One of the most effective methods to characterize our buyer personas is through interviews with our clients . We can intuit what challenges they face, what words they use to talk about their needs or problems, what attributes they really value in a supplier…etc. But if we are guided only by our intuitions, it is difficult for our positioning language to be specific and relevant to our clients. We must use our clients' language and in their terms and, if possible, based on certainties and not intuitions.
Definition of messages
The third step is to define the messages that you will continually use in all your commercial and marketing actions when talking about your business. With them we will hammer our audience and position ourselves as what we are: a company with authority that generates trust and credibility.
2. Corporate website.
The website should be used as the central core of a company's online marketing strategy . It is still your visible face and is key to the positioning strategy even if you are not selling your products or services through it.
In reality, the web is the only online space where a company is able to control all the messages and content it wants to send to its target audience and therefore, it is essential to dedicate time to generating attractive and quality content before investing in attracting traffic to it.
What aspects are important when developing a website?
B2B website
CMS (content management system)
The web cannot be a static element. It must be constantly growing and evolving to continuously create value for prospects, potential clients and customers. A CMS provides tools to add and modify landing pages easily without having to depend on external agencies or IT teams.
Resource Center
We have indicated that positioning the company's value proposition through a matrix of appropriate messages and content is key. To attract quality traffic, it is necessary to expand information that addresses the needs and problems that our target audience experiences on a daily basis. All of this customer-focused content needs a place to live on your website. For those companies that have a novel solution that is not mature, it is important to focus on educational content that helps the audience understand what we offer and what advantages we provide. A resource center can be a good solution for them to access all of the information in an easy and fast way.
Conversion elements
A website receives a large number of visitors, but until these users fill out a form, make a call or contact us via chat, they are anonymous people who approach our company but leave no trace.
When building a website, all the components that facilitate the conversion of these anonymous visitors into potential clients must be considered. Within this category are contact forms, call-to-action buttons or landing pages for capturing potential clients.
CRM (Customer Management Software)
It is not necessary to emphasize the importance of having software that tracks all the touchpoints a customer or prospect has with our website. However, there are countless options on the market. The key lies in knowing what we ask of them and how we integrate them and who feeds them.
SEO
SEO covers a wide range of actions and is a very complex topic. SEO best practices for search engine optimization include:
Use of keywords (it is never unnecessary to do a study of words and search terms of our target client).
Inclusion of these search terms in URLs or in H1 and H2 headings.
Internal links within your website.
And of course, quality content, which is the basis for maximizing the conversion rate of those users who visit your website.
Responsive design
Searches through mobile devices of all sizes and formats are a fact. Therefore, designing a versatile website that incorporates all these formats and sizes is a necessity. If browsing through a mobile device requires scrolling through sidebars to consume information, it is easy to lose visitors sooner than we expect.
3. The marketing and sales technology stack.
marketing stack
There are currently thousands of marketing and sales software tools that cover all stages of marketing. The offer is endless, but what is essential is to have at least two tools:
CRM
CRM is a tool that allows you to trace the entire relationship with the client or potential client , record calls, include notes and track the status and evolution of any prospect. To maximize its performance, it is essential to spend time characterizing our ideal client and the purchasing process in the tool. This will allow us to correctly segment and filter our database and get the most commercial benefit. A CRM can be as complex as you want, but some of its basic functions are the following:
Synchronize and coordinate all email communications in a single space.
Assign accounts and contacts to your sales team
Create and track tasks
Evaluate the journey of potential customers through the purchasing process
Set goals and closing probabilities for open offers
The offer is huge and varied. But if we have to choose between two options, we would choose Hubspot or Zoho . They are versatile tools that represent a significant qualitative leap for companies that do not use CRM.
Web analytics
There are also a number of alternatives in this category, but Google Analytics is sufficient to analyse all the data generated by a website:
Traffic volume
Origin of traffic (paid campaigns, organic traffic, social networks, referrals, direct traffic…etc)
What is the user's behavior (number of pages viewed, time spent, where they usually exit, on which pages they convert, etc.)
The amount of information it provides is enormous and it is not easy to define the metrics and KPIs that best fit our needs for making decisions.
CRM and web analytics are two of the key tools. However, there is another very interesting technological pill, which is none other than marketing automation tools. While a CRM focuses on the relationship between the company and its customers and prospects, an automation tool allows you to design automated marketing campaigns with a high degree of personalization based on the segmentation you have carried out:
Activity segment
Products purchased
Contact profile
Situation in the sales cycle
…etc.
It is not an easy tool to integrate, but once a CRM has been integrated and its use has spread throughout the organization, communication automation should be the next step.
4. The content strategy.
B2B content strategy
The Philosopher's Stone.
It is often said that only 5% of a company’s potential customers are in “buying mode.” Identifying these customers and providing them with the right information to help them make decisions is vital, not only to close an opportunity but to accelerate it as much as possible.
But it is also important to consider that 95% who may wake up in a month, a year or three years.
In B2B sales , and especially in more complex sales processes, the purchase decision is not emotional and depends on many aspects involving a large number of factors and people. This is why decisions tend to take time, especially when they have long-term consequences.
The purchasing process is changing:
Your customers get their information on the Internet or through industry colleagues, not necessarily from your sales team.
They don't care about your company unless you've shown them that you understand the problems they face and have solved them at other companies.
The content you publish and distribute on your website, social networks or through specific actions should be the gateway to future conversations with your sales team.
Your customers are looking for empathy. To do this, there is nothing like talking exclusively about yourself, your company or the superiority of your products and talking about the challenges your customer faces. It is not bad to talk about yourself, but the most effective “self-promotion” is to talk about how much you can contribute to your customers to meet their needs. The goal is to be perceived as someone “valuable.”
Therefore, the content that really adds value to the sleeping 95% is that which directly addresses the purchase triggers, the pain points of our clients, the problems that are common to our ideal client profile or the questions that companies ask themselves during the purchasing process.
There are dozens of formats in which to support the content: posts on a blog or on social networks, newsletters, success stories, Webinars, catalogues ...etc, all valid, why not?
What is truly important is that the content is capable of attracting the attention of our potential clients based on the moment of purchase they are in and generates authority.
If a prospect is close to making a decision, they will be more interested in learning about the company's experience through possible success stories . However, if they are in an initial phase, it will probably be more useful to know what value we can provide compared to our competition . And for this, there is nothing better than to stop saying that we are the best and move on to stating emphatically and with facts that we know what we are talking about.
Good content can help you:
Generate awareness and credibility in your company
Convert anonymous visitors into potential customers with names, surnames and position in the company
Help those who have entered the sales process make decisions
Increase the closing rate
Reduce sales cycles
Getting into the habit of writing quality content is not easy, it requires consistency and being aware that the return is not immediate. But it is certainly a sure bet to strengthen success in the sales process.
5. Demand generation.
B2B Demand Generation
So far we have talked about positioning (identifying the common characteristics of the ideal customer profile and the prescribers), the pillars necessary to be able to do quality marketing (web and technological stack) and the content strategy . The next scenario is the generation and capture of demand . Demand generation is understood as all those actions that we carry out to generate awareness in our target audience, regardless of whether they are in purchasing mode or not. On the other hand, demand capture includes all the actions that we carry out to convert, attract and convert those who have a specific need.
Both demand generation (which has to do with generating awareness about the company and its value proposition for when a potential client is ready) and demand capture can be addressed through three channels:
Organic channels.
Output channels.
Payment media channels.
Organic channels
Organic channels include all the tools you have available that do not cost you anything. Social networks, specific landing pages or your company's blog are a clear example. Their development is closely linked to the content management that we have already discussed and they are designed to generate credibility in your audience and reinforce organic positioning in search engines (mainly Google) or on social networks as you increase your audience.