Is your marketing strategy looking a little lackluster or not driving the results you are looking for? While you may not need to scrap your entire marketing strategy, it’s likely time for a refresh. Here are three quick tips to refresh your existing B2B marketing strategy.
Look at the Numbers
Changing any aspect of your marketing strategy should be based on data, not anecdotal evidence. Time and again, we’ve had an anecdotal hypothesis that, when we’ve looked at the metrics, is proven to be wrong. For this very reason, it’s important to look at the analytics for your various marketing campaigns.
Check your Google Analytics to see how visitors are getting to your B2B website and what types of actions they are taking. Are most of your form completions coming from organic traffic? Then it’s likely you should keep blogging and content creation as essential elements of your strategy.
Also, be sure to check the analytics from different platforms, including your email automation platform (MailChimp, ActOn, Marketo, Hubspot, etc.) and social media channels. Take a long-term view (six months to a year) of the engagement on each platform.
- Are subscribers opening and clicking on your content?
- Are they watching videos on your YouTube channel?
- Are they liking or sharing your social media posts?
A long-term look enables you to disqualify singular events or any seasonality.
Ditch What Doesn’t Work
Once you have clear metrics on your various campaigns and platforms, it’s time to make tough decisions and cut what doesn’t provide any ROI. For example:
- Did you run lead-nurturing campaigns that resulted in sub-optimal conversion rates? It might be time to ditch those campaigns in favor of creating personalized content.
- Is a particular social media channel not garnering any traffic to your website or any engagement from followers? It might be time to re-focus on one or two social networks that are providing results.
The only caveat here is to make sure it’s the channel that isn’t working and not the execution before you ditch it. For example, email marketing might be providing some level of success but needs a retooling of the content to generate better results. This can be particularly true if your B2B marketing strategy for that channel hasn’t changed in the past two or more years. It might just be ready for an update.
Fill in the Holes
The last part of the B2B marketing strategy revamp involves adding new campaigns or channels to fill in the holes or get in front of a new audience. For example, if your B2B web design hasn’t been touched in 2 years and it’s acting merely as a virtual business card, you likely need to redesign the website. This is particularly true if you are seeing more and more organic traffic arriving on your site. It’s also a good opportunity to optimize the website for conversions and enable features to streamline your other marketing activities.
It’s a good idea to take a look at what your competition is doing and see where they are clearly beating your firm.
- Do they have a rock star, engaging presence on social media?
- Do they have well-crafted digital ads that are highly visible and compelling?
While we discourage brands from copying their competitors, it’s still crucial to ensure your B2B marketing efforts are getting your brand in front of your ideal audience. It could be that your competition has already figured that out.
