Tips to Building a B2B Marketing Campaign

When it comes to B2B marketing, it’s no surprise that businesses struggle. Most B2B companies sell “boring” products and compete in the market with few resources, outdated messaging and barely any influencers to help out.

A common mistake that many brands do is try to incessantly promote their products without any actual data-driven groundwork or efforts. A marketing campaign is a series of dedicated and planned marketing efforts set to achieve a specific goal. So before diving into building an effective campaign, it’s important to establish your marketing goals and what you hope to achieve from it.
Marketing Campaign Goals: The most common goals of a marketing campaign are lead generation for a product or service, creating awareness around a new product, creating a conversation on industry news and anything else you want it to be. The following are the most common types of B2B marketing campaign objectives:

• Building customer relationships and encouraging customer retention
• Customer acquisition
• Brand recognition and engagement
• Market Development

What’s important is that your B2B marketing goals are defined and can be refined along the course of the campaign. Your goals should also be SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and time-bound. This is the best way to add value to your marketing strategy. In case you’re confused as to what kind of goals your B2B brand should be, start at understanding your own business and what makes it stand above its competitors.
Business Unique Selling Points (USPs): What makes your business unique from your competitors? List points as to what makes your business superior to other brands in the market. This should form the core of your marketing messaging and attract the right kind of prospects. Unless you’re really able to define these points, there’s no point in building a marketing campaign. Here are some lines you can think along:

• What does your business sell?
• How is this service/ product different?
• What are your business values?
• Why should someone work with your business?
• What else can your business offer?

Once you’ve understood what makes your brand unique, focus next on the audience that your campaign aims to target.
Campaign Audience: For a successful marketing campaign, your business needs to concentrate on a core audience that your product/service can benefit the most. While keeping that in mind, your campaign should address your audience at every stage of your buyer’s journey from awareness to action. This is where a B2C marketing campaign can differ from B2B- while a nice creative and good copy can work for a B2C audience, your B2B audience will take more thought than that. To get the most out of your marketing campaign, you’ll need to consider the following:

• Is your product/ service meant for small businesses or larger organizations?
• Is it used only by a specific field/ industry?
• What are their pain points?
• What questions do they have?
• Who are the key decision-makers in the organization? Who calls the shots?
• What are the media habits of that company or their decision-makers?
• How can you get their notice on the platform they use?
• Which prospects have converted? How can you reach out to such prospects on a larger scale?

Based on these answers you can build buyer personas. A buyer persona is nothing but the data of your ideal customer. In most businesses, the sales team will be able to answer these questions best and give you the information you’ll need to build great buyer persona data. Besides this, Google Trends and Google Search Console are solid tools that can tell you the queries people are asking in relation to your business.
Define Call to Actions: All call to actions should be in alignment with the primary goals you’ve defined for your business. The easiest way to do this is to collect the details of your prospects so you can reach out to them later. Most businesses do this by leading marketing campaigns to a landing page. Generally, these call to actions (CTAs) can be ranked from high commitment to low commitment.
An example of a high commitment CTA would be “Enter your email ID and phone number and we’ll have our sales executive reach out to you!”. A low commitment CTA would probably be “Enter your email ID to download our exclusive e-book”. While high commitment CTAs are a more direct shot to your audience, you probably won’t get as many conversions as you could with a low commitment CTA. Generate content of quality information like downloadables that can be promoted across your social media page. Many digital agencies help to create CTA-driven marketing campaigns and subsequently promote them across all platforms. In case you can’t afford an agency, you can take out an alternate business financing option to help you out with your marketing efforts.
Creating Brand Messages and Creatives: Finally, it all comes down to the ads and creatives your brand pushes out. Most brands are stepping out of speaking only about their product and service to actually addressing other topics their target audience would be interested in. In doing so, they actually increase the chances of catching the eye of their core target group. Your brand messaging should stick to the values of your business, yet engage with your audience. Address industry news, and keep the ball rolling on any conversation that could be relevant to your brand. People are tired of listening to the same jargon and pitch, so stay witty and active across platforms and maintain the tonality of your brand.
You can’t create a marketing campaign, auto-schedule it and forget about it. You’ll need to study the numbers your campaign has generated and the campaign reach. Change things around and work on optimizing your marketing efforts. Eventually, your business will build brand ambassadors that are loyal to your business and willing to promote it to other businesses. This is one of the best outcomes of a successful marketing campaign.