Why goal translation is key to developing a B2B marketing strategy and campaign plan

Using goal translation to inform your B2B marketing strategy. 

A B2B marketing strategy should be all about goal translation. But what is ‘goal translation’ we hear you ask? Goal translation means taking your company’s vision, mission, strategy and objectives and working out the marketing function’s role in implementing and achieving them. 

For the average B2B brand, this may mean a brand-related strategy and objective to fulfil the usual ‘we will be the leading global provider of X solution in X number of years’. Then there is usually a sales revenue-related target. Some companies also like to include a responsibility or sustainability strategy with their objectives. 

If we sound a little cynical it’s because, of the thousands of B2B brands we’ve worked with over the last two decades, the vision, mission and strategy for virtually all of them has boiled down to three core areas: brand, sales and responsibility. 

Translating your strategic objectives into marketing action

Let’s say your organisation’s leadership team has decided that this year’s strategic objectives will be to achieve:

1.    Increased brand awareness in Europe and Asia 
2.    Sales revenues of £90 million
3.    A net carbon reduction of 5%

But your strategic objectives must be measurable. That’s easy with points two and three but measuring brand awareness can be more challenging. For this, you may choose to put out surveys and use a customer survey-based metric or monitor how much direct traffic you receive to the website over time. Sales revenues are measurable, as are hard responsibility targets such as emissions reductions, plastics use, or donating a percentage of income/profits to strategy. 

Translating your strategic goals into action means breaking them down into measurable chunks, understanding what activities you should do to influence what is being measured, planning and costing those activities, and actually doing them.

Measuring your objectives

Breaking down objectives into measurable chunks is the first challenge. If we take sales revenues of £90 million, you can segment this in several ways, but your final choice may be dependent on how your organisation is structured:

•    Geographically
•    By sector or industry
•    By solution, product, service line
•    By sales team
•    By all the above   

Now let’s say your B2B brand is selling an asset management technology solution to the UK and the UK sales team is targeted with £5 million of revenue – £1 million from each of the automotive and commercial vehicles, aerospace and space, oil, gas and petrochemicals, construction and civil engineering, and utilities and energy sectors, including the supply chains. Then suppose the average installation is worth £100k, meaning 10 sales are required from each of the target markets, with 50 sales overall. 

How do you turn these goals into activities? 

Turning your objectives into marketing activities

Well, let’s look back and work out how many leads turn into sales. Working backwards, we can see that for each sale we need five opportunities, and we define an opportunity as a potential customer with an established need and budget. For each opportunity, we look at data from previous years and calculate that we need 10 leads for each opportunity. So, working iteratively, we need 50 sales, which means 5 x 50 = 250 opportunities. To generate 250 opportunities, we need 250 x 10 = 2,500 leads.         

That’s a lot of leads. Is the UK market big enough? 

Here’s where we do some sanity checking. We need 2,500 leads over five sectors, 500 leads a sector, all of which have relatively large footprints in the UK, especially when you include the supply chain. Are there 500 potential buyers in the automotive sector, or in energy and utilities, and are there 50 of these that have a need and a budget for our solution? 

In our example, we will assume that we did our market research beforehand and, yes, there are enough companies prepared to pay £100k for an asset management technology solution. 

Now we have to engage with them.   

Segmenting your market by sector and persona

The next stage is to look at the sectors and specific personas within the organisations you are targeting. We should know from our market research that the decision-maker who decides to invest in the asset management technology solution is the c-suite executive on the leadership team responsible for estates/properties/facilities – although this is a technology solution, it’s paid for by the operational function, not the IT or technology function. 

A key influencer, and sometimes the decision-maker, will likely be the CTO or IT director. Other key personas will include the finance director or CFO, operators and users.   

Now you should establish what marketing activities will be needed to generate leads and achieve the revenue targets, and so fulfil the strategic objectives for the year. We’ve segmented by geography and market, so we’re getting closer to marketing activities we segment by persona. You could start with the following personas:

•    Facilities/estates director
•    IT/CTO director
•    Finance director/CFO
•    Operators/users 

We’ve now entered familiar marketing territory as we want to design lead generation campaigns that target specific personas in certain industries. And we want to design lead generation, engagement, sales and onboarding processes to turn leads into opportunities, and opportunities into customers. 

Designing a campaign plan

The lead generation campaigns will be designed according to our understanding of how to communicate your message to each target persona using the many marketing tools and tactics at our disposal. 

We would start by creating a campaign to engage with facilities estates directors in the automotive and commercial vehicles sectors. This would normally be an integrated campaign using content marketing for lead generation. Then we would design campaigns which target the other personas across the different sectors. This may require four persona campaigns across five sectors, so 20 campaigns – you can use a single campaign to target IT directors and CTOs.

But again, we’re OK with planning all this as we have turned the strategic objective for the year – £90 million revenue and our £5 million share of it – into manageable and actionable marketing campaigns that will deliver it. 

A similar process would be completed by each regional team if that’s how the organisation is structured. But the same iterative process can be applied to turn a global revenue goal into manageable marketing campaigns by sector globally.

So, to summarise:

1.    £90 million target
2.    £5 million for the UK market, an average of £100k per solution sale
3.    £1 million each for five industry sectors
4.    At £100k per solution sales, that’s 10 customers per sector or 50 customers
5.    2,500 leads needed for 250 opportunities and 50 sales
6.    Segmenting into personas and segmenting by sector, if required
7.    Up to 20 marketing campaigns designed to generate and nurture leads ready to pass on marketing qualified leads/opportunities to the sales team.   

Did you find this helpful?

If so, we’ve got more to share with you. In next week’s blog we will be applying goal translation to create an actual marketing strategy and campaign plan. 

In the meantime, get more B2B marketing insights for your brand. 
 

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