Generating B2B Marketing Results Starts with Brand Storytelling
The #1 reason for ineffective marketing is that your marketing team lacks a structured process and experienced people for understanding your business – this prevents them from clearly articulating your value to your prospect so that it resonates in a powerful way.
If you Google “B2B marketing strategy, you’ll get thousands of results all claiming to deliver everything you seek. If the search results are to be believed, marketing your business is the easiest thing ever – you just need to use the latest marketing automation, pump out social media posts, and become a TikTok star you’re on the fast track to… something.
From “7 Tips…” to “leveraging AI” to “15 Ways…” it seems so easy to develop lead magnets and dominate your competitors – if you’re willing to pay, of course. These aren’t all bad ideas, but is that it and what do they have to do with your business?
A Strategic Approach vs. “Random Acts of Marketing”
Developing a B2B marketing strategy that increases your thought leadership, lead generation, and sales – including sustainable, double-digit revenues year-after-year – requires experienced professionals, a proven process, and the agility to change it over time instead of conducting “random acts of marketing.” After all, random marketing yields random results.
It’s not enough for your marketing team to be familiar with your solutions and how you think you’re differentiated from competitors. The key to effective B2B marketing is understanding what problems you solve for your target audience and why you’re the best equipped to do so. You need to understand:
- What problems drive your prospects crazy?
- What leads them to seek solutions?
- Do they want to buy from a vendor or partner and what is their decision process?
- How do they define success in terms of sales, marketing and overall business goals?
These are critical elements of the buyer’s journey and, for all of the above, it’s critical to go deeper than what lies on the surface. Without this understanding, marketing quickly starts to feel like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks – i.e. guessing and taking a trial-and-error approach.
Get Started by Understanding & Articulating Your Role as a Guide
If this sounds like a market research project, you’re not far off but it can be achieved faster and more cost-effectively than most market research projects.
It’s important to start by surfacing the key elements of your story, which starts by getting answers to the questions outlined above from your customer-facing team members, customers themselves, and even your partners and other stakeholders.
It’s also important to understand marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) to see what’s working and what isn’t, starting with keyword rankings, website traffic, lead generations, and sales converted from those leads.
Developing an effective marketing strategy then becomes much easier, whether you do so internally or partner with a B2B marketing agency that has proven brand storytelling and B2B content marketing expertise.