B2B Marketing Plans
Your Guide to Creating Marketing Plans for B2B Companies
If you’re a B2B company, you need to sell your products or services to other companies. But if your company isn’t making any money – you’ve unfortunately got an expensive hobby. That’s where a marketing plan comes in. It can help you identify your audience and craft a message that appeals to your target market’s needs and pain points.
For B2B companies, developing a successful marketing plan will look a bit different compared to their B2C counterparts. If you’re ready to create a killer B2B marketing plan, keep reading. Learn how to develop a well-thought-out plan that will maximize results.
What’s the Difference Between B2C and B2B Marketing?
Before we dive into creating a B2B marketing plan, let’s review how B2B businesses are different from B2C:
- Audience: B2B businesses sell to individuals or groups looking for a solution to improve or enhance their company. B2C companies target an audience of individual consumers interested in buying products or services for themselves.
- Decision-makers: When marketing to B2C companies, you sell to a single buyer. Conversely, when you market to B2B companies, you’ll have multiple decision-makers in the buying process.
- Sales cycle: B2B companies typically have a longer sales cycle. More time is invested in forming a relationship than selling a product or service. B2C companies often ignite a consumer’s emotional impulse to buy rather than making it a logical or practical necessity.
- Marketing strategies: Due to long sales cycles, B2B marketing strategies are usually more in-depth due to the time it takes for a customer to purchase a product. In most cases, there’s a need for more channels across the marketing funnel.
- ROI tracking: Tracking ROI for a B2B company is different; attribution becomes less clear. Compared to B2C companies, B2B marketing plans involve more channels and touchpoints throughout the purchasing process.
How to Create a B2B Marketing Plan (For 2024)
Follow these marketing strategies to improve your performance for your B2B organization:
- Research your audience
- Analyze competitors
- Set SMART goals
- Identify strategies to use
- Benchmark KPIs
- Calculate the budget you need
- Create a roadmap
- Refine and make updates
1. Research Your Audience
Audience research is critically important for B2B companies. To create a B2B marketing plan, start by knowing everything about your audience – including demographics, psychographics, and what’s possibly going on behind the scenes.
In addition to understanding the company’s pain points, behaviors, and motivations, you should also focus on your buyer’s job title, role, and responsibilities. Create buyer personas that revolve around the buyer’s role because you’ll likely be selling to more than one person within a company. Make sure you know who’s involved in the buying process so you can customize a sales and marketing strategy.
2. Focus on pain points
Knowing and understanding your customers’ pain points will help inform your B2B marketing plan. If you center the messaging of your campaign to focus on customer pain points, you’ll get stronger results. Create campaigns and content focusing solely on solving your customers’ pain points and tie them into your product or service features.
3. Analyze Competitors and The Market
Next, research your competitors and the market.
Where do you fall among your competitors? Gather and evaluate data and information about your competitors to better understand their strengths and weaknesses and how your company compares. A SWOT analysis is a helpful exercise that identifies opportunities and threats in the market.
In addition to your competitors, you’ll want to evaluate the market. What’s the direction of the market or industry you operate in? As part of the marketing plan, B2B businesses should factor in the expected growth or decline of demand over the next five or ten years.
4. Find Your Value Proposition
Your value proposition will help shape your market positioning. When determining where your competitors stand in the market, are they higher priced, budget, or mid-range to yours? What’s their unique selling proposition (USP)? How do they differentiate themselves from others?
5. Set Your Goals
Now it’s time to set your marketing goals and what you want to achieve from your marketing plan. The objectives of your B2B marketing plan should closely align with the goals of your business. Having goals provides direction. Shooting darts in the dark can only work so long.
Use SMART Goals
SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) are an acronym used to guide your goal setting. Defining these parameters according to your specific goals will help make sure that the objectives of your B2B marketing plan are attainable and that you’ll succeed.
5.Identify Marketing Strategies
Marketing strategies are your comprehensive plans and approaches your business will use to achieve your marketing objectives and connect with your target audience. There are a number of marketing strategies (no-cost, low-cost, and paid), and selecting the right strategies depend on your business goals, target audience, and market conditions.
6. Benchmark KPIs
What are the KPIs needed to reach your business goals?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in marketing plans are essential metrics used to assess the success and effectiveness of your marketing strategies and campaigns.
KPIs help B2B marketers measure performance, track progress, and make data-driven decisions to better optimize their efforts.
The specific KPIs you should focus on can vary depending on your business goals and marketing strategies. They may include tracking website traffic, conversion rates, number of leads from specific online campaigns, etc.
7. Calculate Budget Needed
Even though you’ll use a number of organic marketing strategies, at some point you’ll decide to go beyond that and create a marketing budget. What are the marketing dollars needed to reach your goals? Calculating a marketing budget will depend on the unique characteristics of your business and industry, what you want to accomplish, and how soon.
8. Create a Roadmap
Creating a roadmap for your marketing plan helps outline the strategic steps and timeline for implementing your marketing strategies. Roadmaps are used by all team members to stay on target, on time, and on track. Marketing plans often have action plans with outlined tasks and assign a designated team member or outsourced freelancer who’ll be responsible for that item.
9. Refine and Make Updates
As you roll out your B2B marketing plan, you’ll also look to refine it – especially if it’s trending in a negative direction and not meeting your goals.
Examine the performance of your marketing efforts. Review key performance indicators (KPIs) as noted above, like sales, ROI, engagement on social media, and contact page inquiries. You’ll also want to identify areas where you’re exceeding or falling short of your targets. This data will help you tweak your marketing plan so it’s more efficient.
Lastly, stay on top of drastic market changes like industry trends, market dynamics, and changes in customer behavior – and monitor how that will affect future performance. If needed, adjust your marketing strategies to align with any shifts in the market and better position your business for success.
Proven B2B Marketing Strategies
What are the best marketing strategies for B2B companies? Consider investing in these proven strategies to generate leads.
Adopt a multi-channel marketing approach
Your B2B strategy should include several channels, all chosen based on your demographic and target market research. With a multi-channel approach, you can continue to reach your audience throughout the sales process to keep them engaged and wanting to learn more.
Create relevant content for your audience
When creating content, study what motivates your audience and build content around their needs (pain points) and interests. Once you understand what problems your target market is experiencing, and how your solution fits their challenge, you’re better equipped to create content that converts. You can find ideas on content that drives website traffic here.
Choose long-tail keywords
Getting specific with your target keywords can help your company become more visible and discoverable by search engines. Keywords for B2B companies will likely have less search volume but can bring in sales through online form fills, phone calls, and messages to improve your bottom line and marketing ROI.
For more tips, check out this article published on “5 SEO Marketing Tips to Rank Higher”.
Create Ebooks and Whitepapers
If your B2B audience isn’t quite ready to convert online, consider writing a gated ebook or whitepaper. These resources can be a great way to build expert authority, inform your customers, and get contact information from potential clients.
These publications give prospects the opportunity and time to get to know you and properly understand your business while working through the buyer’s journey.
Promote Updates to Your Product or Service
In B2B businesses, it’s common for companies to make updates or add new features to their products or services. When this happens, be sure to promote updates on your website and social channels. You’ll also want to share this information with clients, prospects, vendors, and the media, if appropriate. Many media releases (and accompanying short-form videos) are written and published to share these updates, outshine the competition, and gain all-important SEO and backlinks.
Final Tips on B2B Marketing Plans
Creating a B2B marketing plan can’t be done in an hour, nor should it be written in a silo. It’s important to invest the time in all of the steps outlined so that your marketing and PR team is on the same page – and so that company stakeholders and the C-suite can understand the strategies and details involved.
Robin Samora is an experienced marketing consultant, having worked with B2B clients to provide marketing planning services. Interested in taking your company to the next level?
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