B2B Startup Marketing: How to Get it All Done
Today we have new channels and technologies to do things better, faster and in quick reaction to customer behaviours. No more months of planning and execution for campaigns to be launched. No waiting weeks or months for data to be gathered and reports to be circulated so we could know how they performed and how that would influence next year’s campaign. Now we can make decisions in real time and know instantly if our emails have been read, links clicked, actions taken.
B2B Startups Master Digital Marketing Tools
Modern startup marketing teams are mastering the digital tools at their disposal. Landing pages created, webinars executed, blogs and posts created, and emails blasted in no time. It’s fantastic to see so much productivity.
Yet in some ways marketing hasn’t changed at all. The strategic discipline, craft and measured approach of ‘traditional’ B2B marketing are more important than ever when execution is so fast and furious.
Marketing Performance and ROI
Time and again clients want to know why their activities aren’t performing better. Low click throughs, too few downloads and demo requests, not enough leads. Their teams are flat out trying to get everything done, but the results aren’t there. Frustrating and deflating.
I usually take them back to the start to discover that there was lots of stuff created but not necessarily the right stuff and not always for the right people.
Digital tools have revolutionised marketing access for small companies enabling them to create and distribute content in a way that was impossible before. But lots of activity doesn’t always translate into record sales. Plus, all this access means that all businesses are now competing in a much more crowded environment. That’s why it is more important than ever for growing businesses to create strategic marketing plans to deliver marketing ROI.
This is serious work that takes expertise.
Crafting your story, editing it down and turning it into a clear, crisp and compelling customer proposition is painstaking.
Ensuring that your plan is for the audience and not for the senior execs is intimidating (and potentially career limiting).
Instilling the company-wide discipline to focus on the key activities that are aligned with the strategy and ruthlessly cut out any non-core activities is patience-testing.
All are necessary to reach your goals.
So, if everyone is in overdrive to get it all done, producing tons of initiatives but not seeing the returns. It’s time to hit pause and take a moment to reflect.
Strategic Marketing Planning
Ask yourself questions like:
Why are we doing this?
How does this initiative fit into our overall plans? Does it contribute to our objectives? If not, then don’t do it.
You may identify a cool product use case with a niche audience that you want to promote tactically to see if you get some interest. Great, but the time and effort to create that initiative takes your team’s focus away from achieving their objectives. Before you send them off to execute, do a bit of strategic work to validate the opportunity and align it with your objectives.
What do we expect to achieve?
Are we trying to create awareness? Generate demand? Capture a lead? Support the sales effort further down the funnel? If we don’t know what we expect to achieve, how will we know if we’ve achieved it?
As a business leader you may come up with a great campaign or tactical initiative. It might be extremely cool - but before you give your team the orders to execute, be clear on what you want to get from it. A great idea with no clear objective or a mis-matched objective doesn’t have a place in your marketing calendar.
How does this support our story to the target market?
Are we reinforcing and supporting our message or is it tangential? Even if it is interesting if it’s not core to our efforts, let’s give it a miss.
A member of your board may recommend a campaign on a particular topic because another company she works with got great results. Take that onboard, but resist the temptation to run off and execute. First, sense check that it fits into your overall messaging strategy and supports a clear, unified story that helps you meet your objectives.
Will they care?
Is this activity something that our prospects and customers will find valuable and worth their time to consume and potentially act upon? If not, let’s not waste our time because our audience won’t waste theirs.
You may feel you have a compelling proposition but ask yourself honestly: With all that my target audience has going on, will they care? If you pass this test then ask yourself: Am I delivering the message in a way that works for the audience, in a medium that they use and in time chunks they can manage (i.e., a 10 minute podcast? a 30 minute webinar? A short blog series? An event? A combination?) Then trial and test to identify the best combination of message and media that resonates.
Take the time and do your best to understand your audience. If they aren’t responding you’ve missed the mark and you need to discover why.
So, how to get it all done?
Think first about what you want to achieve. Create a strategic marketing plan, stress test the strategy and then think about the tactics that will support it. A long list of tactics with no strategic underpinning will ensure that your efforts are a waste of time. There’s no point doing a lot of activities really fast if they aren’t all pushing in the right direction.
In the early growth years you can’t say everything to everyone, you don’t have the budget or the staff, so use your strategy as a guide to be selective about what you say, who you say it to and where you say it. That’s a clear way to ‘get it all done’ and get the results you need to succeed.
Want to know more, get in touch: katherine@torrencemarketing.com