Best Practices for B2B Marketers to Save Time, Money and Resources
Are you finding it hard to accomplish all the goals you have set out for your marketing team? Does it feel like you don’t have the time to stop executing and think strategically? Do you know you need to develop content but just don’t have the time? The challenges for most Business-to-Business (B2B) companies and their marketing teams are on the rise and the barriers to success can seem frightening. Most organizations traditionally view Sales as the revenue engine and commit great resources to its growth and development, while most Marketing teams must work diligently to barter for investments in their departments. To receive these much-needed investments, it is critical for marketers to demonstrate their contribution to revenue and overall success. They must also find ways to do more with less. This article will reveal proven techniques for Business-to-Business companies like yours to save time, money, and resources on marketing.
As economic times force too few people to focus on too much work, the lack of resources has become a big issue for many B2B marketing teams. Combined with that is the fact that the way your customers and prospects buy has greatly changed. According to Sirius Decisions, 70% of the customers’ buying experiences is completed before the first contact with a salesperson is made. This puts great onus on B2B marketing teams to find, nurture and convert suspects into prospects. The following are five best practices B2B companies can use to save time, money, and resources on their marketing initiatives.
Develop an Integrated Marketing Calendar
With so many different mediums available to B2B marketers, it can seem like there is just too much to choose from and do. Often when there is so much going on, things are not being done as well as it could be. You need to take the time to step back and develop an integrated marketing calendar.
Developing an integrated marketing calendar will make you to step back and look at the different initiatives that are going on. Identify what target audiences you are marketing to and what message you are sending. You do not want to be sending two different messages to the same audiences at the same time. You also do not want to be leaving your audience unattended and provide your competition an opportunity to swoop in and steal your thunder. It’s best to use a project management tool, such as Basecamp, to make sure you have all the moving parts in sequence and that you are on top of all the tasks required to accomplish your goals.
Don’t forget to include all vendors you have in the project management as well. That way everyone knows when tasks are to be completed and what the overall schedule and strategy looks like. By including your vendors or strategic partners in this step, they may be able to show you best practices from other companies they have worked with that can help streamline your operations and increase productivity and results.
Repurpose Content
By now, (you should know) everyone knows that content is king in the world of B2B marketing. However, producing great content can be a daunting task for many B2B marketing teams. One solution to the prospect of a labor-intensive content creation plan is repurposing your current content. Repurposing involves planning and executing content that can be used in a wide variety of formats, consumable at multiple stages of the buying cycle across multiple personas.
If you have ever cooked a fancy dinner, you know that premium ingredients make for a great meal. The same is true for your demand generation programs. When your B2B marketing strategy begins with good ingredients, content creation becomes easier. A powerful piece of content can work exponentially. Just like Rachel Ray who “rolls over” the leftovers from one meal into another meal, white papers, webinars, and trade show presentations can be repurposed for bite-sized content pieces such as podcasts, blog posts, and newsletter content. Planning the content with the endgame in mind makes this process much easier and saves you time and money.
For example:
- Develop Webinar content in sections that are easily broken apart into individual pieces. This makes the on-demand version much easier to navigate and creates natural segments to be used as podcasts or YouTube videos later.
- Turn PowerPoint decks into articles/blog posts and vice versa. Companies that leverage public speaking involving PowerPoint presentations can leverage the research and content created for the presentation as a compliment or inspiration for supporting materials.
- Create white papers with a future Webinar in mind. Develop white paper content in sections that will fit naturally into a Webinar presentation. Along the same lines, plan to excerpt white paper content into short articles for a newsletter and even shorter pieces for a blog.
Implement Marketing Automation
Marketing automation offers marketers the opportunity to speak specifically to prospects based on their profiles and their behavior, enabling the custom communications that drive a scalable, repeatable, and measurable demand-generation campaign. However, those multiple tracks of communication all require something valuable and relevant to say, as well as content to drive the desired actions you wish your prospects to take. All this can seem quite daunting but it doesn’t have to be.
When done correctly, you can build your lead generation program on your marketing automation platform to operate perpetually and limit the amount of resources you must commit to running the program. While it make take more initially to develop your strategy, content and build your campaigns, once completed you can sit back and tweak the strategy and creative content.
This will take you much less time in the end and deliver much greater results. Often, by going through this process, you discover just what type of content you truly need and what content you can stop wasting your time on. It’s important to remember that developing content for the sake of content is pointless. You need to spend your time developing content that has a purpose in your lead generation strategy and is useful to your prospects as they go through their buying process. A blog article for the sake of developing a blog article is just a waste of time.
Focus Only On Tactics That Deliver Results
According to a recent MarketingSherpa B2B marketing benchmark report, 21% of B2B marketing budgets are allocated to trade shows, and yet 20% of B2B marketers feel that trade show marketing is effective. Even worse, 12% of budget allocations go to print advertising and yet only 6% of B2B marketing believe is effective. Why waste money on ineffective strategies?
Every marketing initiative must deliver measureable results. Spending money on social media marketing just because it’s the “latest trend” does not necessarily work for your company. Social media marketing can be extremely time consuming and without the ability to show how it affects your bottom line, it can be a major waste of time. You need to be able to measure your results, or don’t even bother to start. You need to focus on the initiatives that you can do to generate high quality leads.
A great way to measure your results is to use your marketing automation tool to track how the leads were generated and allocate revenue to each source. This will show you exactly where your time and resources are being well spent and where you should spend less time and money. As Drucker said, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. You need to measure everything that you do, learn from the results, and adjust rapidly. The B2B marketplace is too dynamic for you to think that yesterday’s promotional strategies will continue to guarantee tomorrow’s results. Proper measurement can provide an indicator of success as well as competitive problems.
Outsource
By outsourcing some of your B2B marketing projects, you can spend your time where it matters most. Things like your offsite search engine optimization or social media monitoring can be outsourced to experts who have the time and cost effective resources to do it. Contrary to popular belief this doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice quality, it just means that you need to look at the time you have available and determine what tasks are best done in-house and what ones would be better to have a strategic partner help you with.
When you consider that 7 out of 10 businesses report high quality leads as their top challenge (Marketing Sherpa) and that outsourced lead generation gives 43% better results than in-house, there is a great case to implement an outsourced lead generation program in your business.
The Bottom Line
Business-to-Business companies are forced to do more with less. Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to marketing programs. Most B2B marketers lack the resources, staffing, budget, or time to accomplish all the goals they need to achieve. This means that you need to develop a strategy and a plan that delivers measureable results. This means measuring everything and focusing on the tactics that deliver the maximum results. Sometimes this means outsourcing to a strategic partner while other times it means scrapping certain projects all together. The key is to only do what delivers measurable results and cut the rest. When you do so, you will find that you have more time, money, and resources for those projects that help drive revenue for your company.
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