Now might be the best time ever to be in B2B marketing. We have so many digital channels to get in front of buyers. Buyers are actually using these same digital channels to learn and discover solutions to their problems. It’s a perfect scenario!
You’d better believe your competition will be thinking seriously about the best ways to leverage digital marketing too.
To win in 2022, don’t try to do everything and be everywhere. Follow this B2B digital marketing planning guide to develop a plan that gives you the best chance for success.
What should be in a B2B Digital marketing plan?
A good B2B digital marketing plan should define your strategy to generate attention and aid the buyer in their journey from unaware that your company exists to saying ‘yes!’ to your solution. Your plan should include:
- Defined Target Audience (who is your customer) - Always begin with defining your ideal customer, their pain/problems, and how your company specifically addresses their pain. In B2B, this would include geographic, firmographic, and psychographic elements.
- Measurable Goals (what does winning look like) - Define digital marketing goals that align with the macro goals of the business. (example: $1M in marketing-sourced pipeline)
- Strategy/Plan (how will you get there) - There are multiple ways to accomplish marketing goals. Document your strategy/plan on how to achieve the goal. Try to limit your plan to 1-3 key components. Any more and you’ll be spread too thin. (example: We will (a) run a Full-funnel digital advertising campaign; (b) execute a nurture email campaign to prospects in targeted accounts, and (c ) develop and distribute useful content to our audience)
- High-Level Tactics (what will you need to do) - These are the specific steps needed to execute the strategy. (Example: Promote weekly blogs to target audience via social media, retarget website visitors with a gated offer, invite opt-ins to quarterly webinars, etc.)
- Advertising/marketing Budget (how much will you spend) - There are many ways to determine your budget. The most common are: a percent of revenue, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) multiplied by total number of new customers, or an increase/decrease of the previous year’s budget.
Before we get to our 5 step planning framework, let’s review some important guardrails to keep you from getting off track. Be sure to keep these in mind:
Real quick, before we get to the planning process; be sure to consider how to work in some of the following digital marketing trends we are seeing starting to take off:
Now that the prerequisites are out of the way, let’s dig in and build a B2B digital marketing plan for identifying, attracting, and converting your best prospects.
Step 1: Leverage a Framework: Here’s the framework that we use to build go-to-market digital strategies for our clients. We believe that successful B2B campaigns need a well-documented plan that enables you to:
You don’t have to use ours, but it’s helpful to have a basic system that ties everything together. This will keep you focused and help troubleshoot and analyze performance once implemented.
Step 2: Identify the What and the Who: Start by documenting what company goals and desired outcome(s) you want to use to measure success. A good starting point is to get direction from your CEO about their vision for the next year. Ask yourself:
Then you can use our B2B Digital Marketing Budgeting Calculator to back into lead and traffic goals.
Every plan must also communicate who you are trying to reach. A great plan would focus on an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), that subset of customers that love you are most able to serve. This enables you to refine the rest of your marketing plan.
Step 3: Determine how you will activate your audience: This begins with understanding what digital channels your prospects go to for education and industry-related networking. Include in your plan ways to engage and distribute information to your audience within these channels. Pick 1-2 channels you want to dominate over the next year and also pick a new channel to explore. From there, you need to think through:
Step 4: Identify what you will do on your website to establish authority and empathy: Your website is your most important buyer enablement channel. Once you have prospects on your site, they need to understand how you are both qualified to solve their problem and that you care about solving their problem.
Take a look at your home page, services pages, blog, landing pages, and contact pages. Do you need to tune any of these up and improve messaging? For help with this, be sure to leverage our Website UX Checklist to identify areas of your website to improve.
Step 5: Determine your plan for staying top of mind during the sales process: We can’t control when a prospect will be ready to say ‘yes!’ but we can control that when they are ready, they think of you before the competition. The key here is to develop a plan that touches prospects often and in multiple channels and ways. According to Ziff Davis, when brands engage with buyers via email, sales, and social media, conversion rates increase by 30%.
Think through these prompts to identify areas to optimize and work into your B2B digital marketing plan:
Remember, it’s the best time ever to leverage digital marketing to attract and convert your best customers. You now have our framework, resources, and the steps you need to take to build a solid plan. The ball is in your court.
Finding the time to build and execute a strategy like this can be challenging. We'll be here if you need anything else. You can always schedule a complimentary discovery meeting with our team. We’ll take the time to learn about your business and give you an action plan on how to achieve your goals.