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One of the most important aspects of a successful marketing campaign is knowing your audience.
It seems easy, but after initial concept development, multiple iterations of creatives, and multiple levels of approval, it’s easy to lose track of who you’re talking to.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re promoting a local nonprofit, selling tires, or providing web development services. If you don’t know exactly who your target audience is and what they want, even the expertly crafted message will fail.
The importance of knowing your target audience is increased in B2B marketing, largely due to the often substantial amount of money that is spent on a particular initiative. An investment failure can be catastrophic – especially in the world of small and medium-sized businesses.
Potential B2B customers have common characteristics:
- They have specific – and often unique – problems that they want to solve.
- You already have a fixed budget and scope in mind.
- You are ready to do a thorough research of your company (and your competitors) before making a decision.
- They expect you to be clear about what sets your company apart and why your company is the right choice for them.
What does this mean for your marketing strategy?
We already know it’s important to understand your audience as precisely as possible, but that’s just the beginning. What you do with this knowledge will determine the success of your campaign.
Here are five tips to ensure your B2B marketing campaigns are targeting the right people, conveying the value of your business, and putting your sales team in a great position to get prospects over the conversion line.
1. Create a compelling story
It may be business-to-business, but people run businesses. Your campaigns need to be compelling to compete with all the news that is inundated with people. As a result, we often think about what story we want to tell about our company rather than the story our readers want to hear.
Your marketing has to be helpful in some way. Jay Baer’s “Youtility” concept explores the idea in depth.
Be able to relate. Make it easy for your target audience to both learn from your marketing and take the next step on the buyer journey.
2. Know what to measure before you start
If you don’t set your goals in advance, you won’t be able to measure your success.
Whether your KPIs are related to brand awareness, lead generation, reputation management, or increased conversions, determine them in advance. This not only helps you drive thoughtful, targeted strategies, but also helps you understand what worked and what needs to be considered the next time you launch a campaign.
Not sure where to start? The first step is to understand your metrics. A lot of energy is wasted on metrics that don’t mean much in the overall concept of your campaign. Find out which metric is most important and how it will help you achieve your goals.
3. Help your audience find you
Okay, so you understand who your audience is, you position yourself correctly, and tell a comprehensible, compelling story … but does anyone see it?
Again, a successful marketing campaign is the sum of its parts. In this case, you need to make sure that your target audience knows how and where to find you. Being able to easily find your business online is critical, and your ads and other marketing activities need to be where your prospects are looking too.
It can be a lot of work upfront, but it’s well worth doing a thorough SEO audit to strengthen your website’s domain authority and rank on or near search results. Also, identify communities and marketplaces that your buyers go to that rank high for the keywords relevant to your service area.
When you find sites that rank high on Google on a huge number of service area keywords, your key audiences can search for phrases that contain those keywords, such as:
4. Throw fuel on the fire with LinkedIn
Social media marketing is prepared for content distribution. LinkedIn allows you to target your buyers when they have a business mindset, and by building a suitable audience with intent data, you can use conversational ads on LinkedIn to target the inboxes of potential customers you know about yours directly Interested in your product or service.
Combine these ads with image or video ads to build a bigger exposure and use an account-based marketing approach to build deeper relationships with existing customers.
5. Iterate, iterate, iterate
Not every idea works the first time, and small changes can have a big impact. Successful marketing requires gradual improvement over time. Finding ways to get 1-2% more ROI in order to meet your goals and build a high performing campaign is critical.
Our team recently tested customer testimonial copy versus benefit-focused copy, and the difference in conversion rate was 43%. In addition, when capturing incoming leads, we tested a confirmation email versus a confirmation page with a calendar embed. The calendar availability tool page increased booked meetings for our sales team by 124%!
Be it copy, design or process, constantly challenge yourself to optimize your performance and adapt as quickly as necessary.
Build a successful B2B marketing campaign that gets real results
While many of the core concepts of B2C and B2B marketing are similar, there are nuances in B2B that you need to enter in order for your campaign to be truly successful and as good – or better – than you can expect.
You need to be precise in your targeting and present useful information that not only highlights your product or service, but also informs, inspires, or entertains your prospects, beyond the sale.
Don’t be afraid to try something new, but also understand why you are doing it. Set yourself clear goals, find out about the most important key figures and don’t be afraid to optimize and optimize the midstream.
The business landscape is more competitive than ever. You need to find a way to stand out from the crowd and come up with a compelling reason why your company is better than the other on the road. The five tips in this article can get you on the right track, and if you put it all together, you will have a successful B2B campaign that generates high quality leads and, ultimately, more conversions.
More resources on successful B2B marketing campaigns
How to manage a successful marketing campaign that meets your goals
Four successful ways to combine inbound and outbound marketing
10 “Gotchas” of the Demand Gen Campaign that must be overcome for error-free execution of marketing automation
