Market Smart

Get Smart About B2B Marketing

"Smart marketing, used effectively in B2B companies, leads to growth."- Market Smart, page 199

It all starts with a marketing strategy

Lisa shows you how to develop a B2B marketing strategy in three steps:

• Step 1 is an internal process to gather information available within the company. It includes a company workshop and interviews with staff and management. It also collects available reports on sales, profitability, and marketing.
• Step 2 is external – it includes research and interviews with customers, industry experts, and competitors to augment internal information and validate, or disprove, the hypotheses you’ve made in Step One.
• Step 3 brings together the data and insight you’ve gained to confirm the marketing strategy – target market, value proposition, and messaging.

Lisa then provides a detailed approach to help you put into action the three steps, and even includes an example of a marketing strategy, and other helpful templates, to guide you here.

How do you take action on your marketing strategy?

Tactical Planning

"There is no silver bullet in B2B marketing."- Market Smart, page 65

Once your marketing strategy is in place, tactical planning begins. Lisa details how to choose tactics, create a realistic timeline, determine appropriate resources, and also covers budget and performance measurement. As Lisa explains, “there is no silver bullet in B2B marketing.” It is more effective to employ multiple tactics together to get optimum results. And, avoid the desire to “jump on the bandwagon” and focus on one seemingly hot, new tactic. Lisa offers these factors to consider when determining tactics:

• The industry
• The target market
• The company’s position in the market
• How much marketing the company has done in the past and how successful it has been
• What kind of marketing the competition does
• The company’s goals
• The company’s marketing budget

Lisa then outlines four guidelines to help companies choose the right tactics:

• Guideline 1 – Get the basics in place
• Guideline 2 – What’s your stage of evolution?
• Guideline 3 – Prioritize tactics by ROI
• Guideline 4 – Focus your efforts and evolve

Lisa also encourages you to reassess, recalibrate, and adjust the timing of tactics as you go – actively monitoring and remaining flexible to changing market conditions.

Developing Content

"Marketing can transform a small player into an industry leader, and make the difference between struggling for sales and having leads come to you."- Market Smart, page 199

Before you implement, of course, you need to develop content. As Lisa explains, B2B companies need to be thought leaders in order to dominate their industries. They need to have deep expertise in a particular area and a demonstrated track record. Being recognized as a thought leader makes you the “go-to” for particular products or services and is a powerful way to increase brand equity, achieve price premiums, and avoid bid competition.

To decide what topics to cover, you can:

• Generate a list of twenty topics and ask your customer-facing staff (business development, customer service) to rate the topics.
• Repeat the process of gathering topics, but have a customer advisory panel rate the topics.
• Take your product developers (often engineers) to lunch, talk to them, and take notes.

From here, Lisa suggests you cross-reference your topic list against upcoming product launches, your firm’s core competencies, market trends, and changing customer needs – and create an editorial calendar.

Then, interviewing the thought leaders to create content is necessary – either through your marketing team or a third party – such as Lisa’s company The Mezzanine Group.