How to create a B2B marketing strategy and campaign plan

Insights on how to create a B2B marketing strategy and campaign plan. 

Our reason for existence as marketers is to implement our organisational vision, mission, goals and strategy. We achieve this by creating a marketing strategy to deliver the marketing communications element of the organisational strategy. We then build specific campaigns to make the vision, mission, goals and strategy a reality. In our previous blog, why goal translation is key to developing a B2B marketing strategy and campaign plan, we said the strategy should be guided by goal translation. Goal translation is taking your vision, mission and goals and seeing how marketing can help you achieve them. 

Once you’ve used goal translation to measure your B2B marketing objectives, there are a few more stages to pass through before you can start building out your marketing strategy. 

But first, if you’re asking the question, what is a marketing strategy, here is our interpretation of the hundreds of definitions that exist. 

What is a marketing strategy?

Every business – or B2B brand – must have something along the lines of a vision, mission, goal and objective. These illuminate the purpose of the business and its brand(s) and are necessary for success and longevity. To deliver them, you have your business strategy. 

A marketing strategy grows out from your business strategy, and its primary purpose is to define how the marketing function supports the business to achieve its business goals. One strategy must be consistent with the other if both are to be successful. 

Creating a B2B marketing strategy: how to get started

Once your business strategy is in place, you can lay the foundations for the marketing strategy. To do this, you first need to understand what you’re selling and to who, and the market you’re operating in. 

What’s your proposition?

Define your product, service or solution. Before you can sell a product, service or solution to other people you first need to understand what it is, or does, internally within the business. 

Everyone working inside the business should be aware of the features and benefits of what you’re selling so you can speak clearly, with a unified voice and vision.

This may sound obvious, but this task is often not completed – for new and smaller businesses, it may not have been done yet, for established brands, the solution may have evolved or, as is often the case, the people who really understood the brand’s proposition have left.

Who’s your target market?

The next stage is to understand your target market, or audience. Who are you selling your product, service or solution to? Who can benefit from the features on offer?

Segment your target market and develop a greater understanding of the personas within it. In B2B, complex supply chains may require you to target multiple decision-makers with varying degrees of influence at any one time. You’ll therefore need to profile the people you’re selling to more specifically so you know what makes them tick – and ultimately, how to sell to them. 

Steal a listen to our podcast about how to create a B2B marketing strategy. Here, we use the example of a fire detector brand. Its target market includes different decision-makers and key influencers across many disciplines and organisations. Architects, building services engineers, tier 1 and 2 contractors, site managers, foremen and tradespeople all qualify as personas in this target market.

Each of these personas requires a dedicated communications plan to get the right message, or information, in front of them in their preferred format and channel. 

Who are your competitors and what is their value proposition?

Next, scope out the direct and indirect competition, or substitutes. Learn more about who they are, where they are, what they do, how they do it, their positioning in the market, and their strengths and weaknesses. 

Get a feel for each competitor’s value proposition to better understand your role in the market and how you can differentiate. Only when you set your offering against the wider context of the market competition can you know how to position your business in the market and set realistic sales targets and marketing objectives. This includes understanding what messaging to use and, crucially, your pricing strategy. 

In B2B, substitutes can be important. This refers to a proposition that is not competing with you in the traditional sense but offers the same benefits. 

Defining a B2B marketing strategy and objectives

Once you’ve established your target market and divided it into market segments with well-defined personas and sales targets, understood your competitors and the relative value of your offering, a marketing strategy will begin to emerge. The marketing strategy should be consistent with your business strategy and, as in most B2B organisations, developed in conjunction with the sales team. 

Now break your marketing strategy down into objectives. You’ll need to make sure each objective is measurable. If it is not measurable you won’t be able to analyse its effectiveness over time. As we highlighted in the blog on why goal translation is key to creating a B2B marketing strategy, most B2B strategies include objectives related to sales and leads, brand and responsibility (corporate social responsibility or CSR).

For the sales element, you should adopt a rigorous approach to your sales forecasting, such as the strategies and techniques outlined in our blog on sales forecasting methods.

Developing a marketing campaign plan 

Next, draw up a campaign plan that allows you to meet your marketing objectives. Each campaign objective should be specific and measurable. For example, you may decide you want to reach X number of sales for X product or service within X months. 

Your objectives should determine the tactics you use, but your budget – how much you have to spend on your marketing campaign – will also play a role. You’ll need to be prepared to monitor, test, tweak and optimise as you go along. Each tactic may require a different channel (for example, digital, events or media relations) and messaging that appeals to a specific type of decision-maker, or persona. This can make marketing for B2B brands more complicated, as you’ll need to set up metrics for each channel or persona you target. 

Planning a campaign is a critical stage – it must be thorough. Remember, your campaign is there to deliver the objectives. If the campaign is designed to deliver sales in EMEA, don’t include North and South American media in your PR and above the line advertising planning.  

It’s worth taking the time to develop the tactics and strategies you want to use and lay out plans for measuring them so you can see exactly what impact your marketing campaign is having on the business. 

Tailoring your marketing strategy according to its purpose

Although all the core components highlighted above are essential, exactly how you structure and create your marketing strategy depends on what you plan to use it for. A marketing strategy that forms part of a business plan which, in turn, is going to a private equity house to generate investment funding for a start-up tech business will be structured one way. A marketing strategy for an existing global brand with established solutions will be structured another way. 

Next steps

If you need a little more help to pull a campaign strategy and plan together, check out our podcast, how to create a B2B marketing strategy, for more useful insights. 

If you need support to write engaging, audience-driven content for your B2B brand or agency, contact Copestone today.