Strategic B2B Marketing: Great insights for beginners and experience Marketers!!

1. Moving from tactical
to strategic B2B marketing

2. 2
1.The Chartered Institute of Marketing
(CIM)
2. B2B Internet statistics Compendium
January 2012
Introduction
The definition of Marketing is
‘The Management process which
identifies, anticipates and satisfies
customer requirements efficiently
and profitably.’1.
But in a vast number
of businesses and marketing teams,
the meaning has gotten lost. As
more and more marketers are
measured on the number of leads
they provide to the business, and
are having to constantly justify
their existence to finance and other
departments, marketing has become
focused on lead generation rather
than identifying and anticipating
customer needs and subsequent lead
development.Tactical campaigns are
sent out ad-hoc to generate leads and
show the business that marketing is
contributing and therefore valuable.
For the most part this approach might
even deliver some of your KPIs – so
is the hype surrounding strategic
marketing justified? Is tactical
marketing really so bad?
What’s your biggest marketing
challenge? 39% of B2B marketers cite
a lack of ability to stop executing and
think strategically as their biggest
marketing challenge.2.
Mass marketing
overshadows small
opportunities with
bigger value

3. 3
With so much focus on the
marketing execution, marketing
teams are missing the biggest
and most important part of their
job – identifying the right market,
understanding their audience in
this market, and sending the right
message to the right person. Moving
to a strategic marketing approach
corrects this.
3. B2B Internet statistics Compendium
January 2012
Tactical marketing
in a nutshell
In the aim to get as many leads as
possible, marketing teams focus
on the size of their database rather
than the quality of the prospects in
it. Audiences are overloaded with
multiple campaigns; each with a
different message hoping one will
resonate with the audience and
generate a lead. Some marketers
will even manage to do this relatively
well using thought leadership and
multi channel marketing, since B2B
audiences respond well to these types
of campaigns and marketing tactics.
However, this hit and miss approach
is potentially damaging for your
brand, and even if a customer has
downloaded a whitepaper on ‘The
future of B2B Marketing’ for example,
it doesn’t mean they are ready to buy
your products and solutions. It simply
means that they are interested in
where your marketing is taking them.
Likewise, an audience may like the
informative series of whitepapers,
webinars, guides and videos that you
send, but have no idea what you do.
So even though you might be quite
good at generating leads, most new
leads are not ready to engage. When
a sales rep then tries to contact a
lead before he or she is ready, it
reinforces the general impression
that marketing-generated leads are
no good. Sales subsequently stop
following leads up as they are poorly
qualified, so choose only the ones they
think could deliver big. But size isn’t
everything and small opportunities
that could have bigger lifetime value
risk getting ignored and snatched up
by competitors.
Acquiring leads was the top strategic
priority in 2011 for more than half (55%) of
B2B organisations surveyed compared to
39% that wanted to better understand their
customers/audience.3.
While it is sometimes true that tactical marketing can
help you meet your monthly targets and maybe even
get some kudos from your team, it falls short in many
respects – from delivering the best returns for your
efforts and budget, to job satisfaction and progress.
There are many reasons for this.

4. 4
Strategic marketing –
what’s it all about?
By doing so, you can educate and
qualify prospects over time to build
a continuous stream of sales-ready
leads that will turn into long-term
profitable relationships and ultimately
drive improved return on investment.
Shifting your focus and effort away
from ‘mass marketing’ campaigns to
ones that nurture customers along a
marketing funnel, allows you to learn
more about your prospects.
By identifying who responds to what,
you can begin to create a picture of
what challenges they are facing.This
allows you to send more effective
campaigns based on their interests,
keeping them engaged, so when
they are ready to purchase they are
already warmed up and much more
receptive to your product messaging.
Understanding your customers and
giving them the opportunity to engage
more closely with you makes your role
as a marketer more satisfying. But
what exactly does this involve?
Strategic marketing is a more structured approach
where you define what you’re trying to accomplish,
understand the markets and audiences, and implement
an integrated marketing program.
Myth: “…you need a large system to
manage your customer data”
In reality, a smaller, defined targeted list
of quality prospects can often be managed
within Excel or MS Access.
A defined, targeted list
of quality prospects has
greater value

5. 5
4 steps to setting up a
strategic marketing campaign
Once you have defined your business
objectives, you’ll need to identify
your market. Firstly, establish the
opportunity to increase share of
wallet within your existing customer
base. Using a single customer view,
you can understand how many
unique customers you have across
your business/es, how many have
relationships with all your products,
and how many have just one product?
You can then use product opportunity
and potential models to establish
what opportunity there is to increase
your share of wallet.
Step 1: Identify your market
Secondly, you need to understand
your prospect pool by matching
prospects to existing customer traits.
By understanding the difference in
customer profiles from those who
purchase just one product to those
with multiple relationships and
different spend patterns, you can
determine their propensity for your
products and calculate likely spend
and purchase frequency to see who
are the most valuable prospects.
Just under two-thirds of B2B
companies say they know or
understand the prospects they are
selling to well (41%) or extremely well
(20%).4.
This leads to targeting just one
person in a complex decision-making
unit, or targeting several people within
the same company with the same
message rather than identifying,
anticipating and satisfying each
individual’s requirements - from the
main user to the gatekeeper and IT
to procurement.
This is compounded further by the
complexity of B2B data, which is
inherently different from B2C. Job
titles are inconsistent, people move
jobs or change position, and you
might need to target different people
within the same organisation using
different messaging – to do this you
need to understand the ins and outs
of a business, including their decision-
making unit. But where do you start?
Structural characteristics:
understanding a company’s sector,
the size of the company in terms
of employees, turnover, or even
balance sheet, and their locations
will help you understand their
challenges and which products
could be most relevant.
Complexity measures:
finding out whether a company is
registered or a sole trader, whether
it is part of a corporate group or is
independent, and establishing the
number of sites and their geographic
dispersion, will help you get a better
understanding of their decision-
making unit.
Step 2: Understand your audience
4. Demandbase, 2011 NationalWebsite
Demand Generation Study,
September 2011
Behavioural characteristics:
identifying international activity,
the age of a company, its generosity,
and in the case of small companies,
certain owner characteristics such
as age and wealth, can all help you
predict how a company conducts
their business and makes
purchasing decisions.
Performance measures:
seeing a company’s financial strength,
peer group performance and growth,
will help you understand the potential
a company has to invest.
Understand the person
speaking to your customers to ask
them how your products fit into their
wider role and using this insight to
create persona groups for them,
allows you to create content that fits
those needs. It also means that you
can use marketing channels that your
target is most engaged with.

6. 6
Lead nurturing is not sending out an
e-newsletter on a semi-regular basis,
randomly calling leads every six
weeks to see if they are ready to buy,
or blasting your entire database with
a new case study.
Unlike the consumer world where we
buy emotionally and post-rationalise
afterwards, in business we purchase
products and services when we
recognise a need or problem. Once
we’ve identified this we normally
need to get buy in from various
stakeholders and put together a
business case, particularly for high
value products or solutions.
By developing a long-term lead
nurturing strategy, you can start
building a relationship with a series
of useful, relevant communications
nurturing these customers. So when
they become aware they have a need,
your communications are ready to
give them the answers and drive them
down your marketing funnel to deliver
sales ready leads.
So what are the different stages of a
lead nurturing campaign?
Stage 1: Awareness
The aim of this communication is
to educate prospects using thought
leadership content. If it’s relevant,
they could recognise an issue in
their business to trigger a need they
weren’t necessarily aware of. Guides
and whitepapers, for example, work
particularly well here.
Stage 2: Consider
If they respond to stage 1 you can
start gently moving them down the
marketing funnel by showing them the
steps they need to go through to fix
the issue.
This isn’t your product sell as that’s
only part of the answer and content
should be closely related to your
earlier communications and include
a clear call to action! For example,
a ‘How to’ webinar or step-by-step
guide work well.
Ask yourself the
question, would
this be of interest to
someone that never
bought a single
product from you?
According to MarketingSherpa, B2B
organisations on average allocate just 6%
of their marketing budgets to lead nurturing,
while 12% is allocated to email marketing.5.
Sending a series of emails promoting your latest
case study or products is more likely to result in
an unsubscribe than a sale!
5. 2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey, MarketingSherpa,August 2011
Step 3: Develop a long-term
lead nurturing strategy
Stage 3: Buy
If they respond now you can
demonstrate how your product and
services could help them apply the
fixes. Product overviews, demos and
case studies are ideally suited for this
stage of the campaign and are the
final jigsaw piece prior to a sales call.
If they respond, they’re sales ready!
Don’t be put off if they don’t respond
straight away, just keep nurturing
until they are ready.
A successful lead nurturing campaign
is consistent and integrated across
your selected mediums. It is therefore
important to keep your branding
and messaging consistent.You only
want one message to stick with your
consumers - prospects should be
able to scan your email and see the
value within seconds. If you can’t
keep it consistent, short and relevant
you’ll quickly become irrelevant in the
minds of your audience.

7. 7
Although monitoring is the final step
in implementing a strategic marketing
approach, the process is in fact on-
going. Different mediums and content
will work for different audiences and
campaigns, and through trial and
error, you will be able to make the
necessary adjustments along the way
to optimise your results.
Tracking your progress will allow
you to see what is working and
what isn’t so that you can update
your communications as things
change. Monitor clicks and see
what content pieces resonate better
with your recipients.This will allow
you to improve your understanding
and improve your lead nurturing
campaigns further down the road.
Your industry isn’t static and neither
are your offers – by testing, evaluating
and fine-tuning your lead nurturing
campaigns on a regular basis, you can
keep them relevant and interesting.
The return on investment
Marketers who use a strategic
approach to understand their
audience’s needs bring in significant
long-term value – to their business
and their job role. Revenue forecasts
are likely to be more accurate and
having a smaller list of high quality
prospects allows you to send fewer,
high value campaigns that generate
more revenue over a 12-month period.
You can also set up warmer sales
conversations, strengthening your
relationship with sales and ensuring
that you work together to maximise
revenue share from every lead –
revenue that feeds back into your
annual sales figures. Research shows
that companies successfully using
lead nurturing generate 50% more
sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost
per lead.The percentage of marketing
generated leads that are ignored by
sales is also reduced from as high as
80% to as low as 25%.6.
Strategically planned emails also
have a slightly higher unsubscribe
rate than tactical email sends. While
this can be viewed as negative
performance, it actually indicates that
a strategic approach is doing its job
of qualifying leads and eliminating
people who are not interested in
your business or your solutions.
Only the most engaged leads will
move down the marketing funnel
and can potentially turn into great
new customers – ensuring your time,
resource and budget is well spent.
Companies that excel at lead nurturing
generate 50% more sales-ready leads at
33% lower cost per lead.These companies
also reduce the percentage of marketing
generated leads that are ignored by sales
from as high as 80% to as low as 25%.
6. Marketo, Forrester, CSO Insights,
and others
Step 4: Monitor your results
Handle your prospects
with care to drive
profitability

8. 8
To get help identifying your markets and
understanding your audience, contact us at
ph@uk.experian.com
Getting started
One of the best places to start is
to focus on your existing database,
understanding where the value
opportunity is and introducing more
regular engaging content into your
plans to start building trust and
credibility. By understanding who
your target audience really is and
what is important to them, you can
put together a strategy that gets
more qualified prospects to call,
reduces your sales cycle, and
increases your ROI, making the
benefits of a strategic marketing
approach far-reaching.
Although moving from tactical to strategic marketing
may sound like a challenge, it doesn’t involve making lots
of big changes. It’s really just enhancing and optimising
what you’re already doing to be more effective.

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