Even the most established vendors struggle to cut through from time to time. Taking new and existing products and solutions to market is tough. With so many things to consider, it's unsurprising that many businesses feel overwhelmed: which channels do you focus on? How can you guarantee an ROI on your investment?
In this post, we're aiming to give you as much insight into the efforts required to make an impact with your next B2B marketing campaign. Before you get overwhelmed by the volume of actions required, think about the potential returns that a successful campaign could bring. B2B leads are generally high-value. What would a good cost per lead (CPL) or acquisition (CPA) be? When you approach the effort vs return argument in this way, it often makes sense to make the time, resource and budget investment. Obviously, if you have few or no internal resources, or they're already stretched across other marketing activities, you might want to work with an experienced channel marketing agency partner.
The below information is fairly broad, check back later for more focused insights on taking vendor-owned solutions or your homegrown solutions as an ISV. It goes without saying, the tactics for each of these two contrasting approaches can differ significantly. If you're unsure about how to take a solution to market or want help doing so, get in touch.
Objectives & KPIs
Before we commit to executing any marketing activities, it's important to take a step back and think about what we are trying to achieve. Ultimately, it is these objectives that will inform everything we begin to plan out. Ignoring our underlying objectives could result in the execution of the wrong marketing tactics, and some difficult conversations about the return on marketing investment.
When creating marketing objectives, it's important to think about how much awareness there already is for a specific solution (assuming you're going to market as a technology reseller. If you are, you can afford to focus less on solution awareness and more on brand credibility as you're likely to be competing against existing noise in the market. If you're launching a brand new product as an ISV (independent software vendor), then you're going to need to create brand and product awareness, even if your brand has good referenceability in the channel. Why? Because you're known for other things, and you need to change perceptions.
As we referenced above in our opening paragraphs, thinking about the potential return a lead could bring is paramount in the objectives phase. Unlike the B2C world, a B2B lead is generally of a greater deal value, and thus your CLTV (customer lifetime value) is likely to be marginally higher. What would a reasonable cost per lead be in this instance? For example, if your average deal value is £25,000, and your target ROI is 20:1, suddenly spending £1,250 to generate a new customer doesn't sound so bad. If, on the same basis, we close 1 in 4 leads, then your target cost per lead comes in at around £300.
By understanding these data points, you can begin to map out a pathway to scaleable marketing campaigns, whereby you use data and insights to drive down cost per lead and customer acquisition and drive up lead volumes.
Once you've nailed the overarching objectives, it's time to think about the key performance indicators (KPIs) you'll measure to ensure that you're on track to achieve your goals. Naturally, these will depend on the channels and tactics that you use, but it's important to have an understanding of what to measure, such as total reach, average frequency, engagement rates (i.e., clickthrough rate, open rate) and conversion rate, as well as cost per click (CPC), CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and cost per lead/customer.
Target Audiences
No marketing activity should ever be executed without careful consideration of the 'who' - who you are targeting. Forgetting your target audience is likely to result in hundreds - if not thousands - of wasted pounds of marketing spend, as well as your ads, content and messaging reaching the wrong people.
With B2B marketing becoming increasingly expensive, it's vital that your messaging gets to the right people. Every wasted impression is going to hit your bottom line, and according to Adobe, B2B buyers engage 36 times before deciding to make a purchase. With this in mind, ensuring your messaging is relevant to your target audience will help you to reduce wasted spend and deliver marketing campaigns to a hyper-focused, and hopefully segmented, audience.
In the IT channel space, there's a good chance you're talking to an IT audience; IT managers, IT directors, C-suite and similar job titles. Unless you're utilising a peer-to-peer (or partner-to-partner) play, at which point you might be talking to sales, marketing, owner or director job titles.
Once you've identified who you are talking to, it's important to look at the 'what' - what you're going to say. What is it about the products or services you are offering that is compelling to them? We need to bring to life the product or solution USPs; what makes this solution better than anything else that already exists in the marketplace? What do we know about our target audience's challenges, pain points, desires or ambitions - and which of our product's features or benefits can we lean into to position our solution as being perfect for our prospective buyer? At the target audience stage, we need to think about how we make our product or solution a must-have, not a nice-to-have.
Lastly, we need to be thinking about the total audience pool, not just those in the market to buy a solution. Buyers exist (many without knowing) at different stages of the marketing funnel. Some - a very small number - around 5% - are actively looking to buy. These are individuals who are problem-aware, and more than likely have several solutions or suppliers in mind. This pool exists at what we call the 'Decision' stage, which means they're pretty much ready to buy, and are likely to be considering contract terms, pricing, etc.
The level before 'Decision' is called the 'Consideration' stage. This is where the greatest opportunity to get your product in front of prospects is. This stage is home to those prospects who are problem-aware, and open to engaging with potential solutions and suppliers. They're likely to be shopping around, looking at a variety of options, taking part in product demos, reviewing case studies and testimonials and are open to learning more about a broader range of solutions. At this stage, they're the most open to learning and have not yet made any firm decisions.
Going one step further up the funnel, where the greatest volume of people exist, is the 'Awareness' stage. Here, people are furthest away from buying. They exist at a very surface level, and are likely to be open to engaging with you, but not as a buyer, but more as a learner; somebody who is interested in a topic but has not yet identified that they have a need - or they simply may not have a need. As the name 'Awareness' suggests, content at this stage should be geared around creating awareness of challenges facing this audience, aiming to help them identify that they have a specific challenge or pain point. Awareness-level prospects are generally happy to engage with blog content, eBooks, and so on, but are very unlikely to book a product demo, consultation or discovery.
Given the above, it's hopefully easy to understand the importance of talking to people at the funnel stage that they're at, and not hitting everybody within our target audience with a one-size-fits-all message.
Leveraging Data & Insights
You've identified your marketing objectives and locked down your target personas. Now what? Quite often, even the biggest MSPs and distributors miss this crucial piece of the puzzle: reviewing and leveraging existing data and insights. When you're busy, it's so easy to overlook what came before, but the consequences can be catastrophic.
Think about it: have you carried out marketing campaigns before? What worked well? What fell flat on its face? These experiences provide us with a lot of valuable insights and can help us to start from an elevated position. If we know something does not work with this audience, we can simply not do it and save ourselves time, effort, money and frustration.
In a similar vein, if we know a specific tactic - for example - email marketing - drives a good, low-cost return, then definitely include that as one of your campaign tactics.
Additionally, previous experiences provide us with plenty of benchmark data that we can leverage for two purposes: to help us understand what to expect, as well as help us understand mid-campaign if our efforts are working or not. For example, if we have previously executed PPC ads, focused on the same solution that we're pushing now, and the budget we've set aside is the same, it is not unreasonable to expect the same return now. It is, however, important to recognise that eternal factors can affect performance; how long has passed between campaigns? Is the market more saturated now? Was the demand based on a trend?
On the flip side, thinking from purely an engagement standpoint, this level of insight can help us to understand if what we're executing is working. What engagement levels are you used to receiving in campaigns of this type? How does your campaign clickthrough rate compare to last time? Are you receiving the same level of email opens and clicks? How people engage with your content is a good top-level indicator of how your campaign might perform. Our advice is to get into the details of as many campaign metrics as you can, quickly identifying where things are not working as you would expect, and doubling down on improving the micro details. Nine times out of ten, when you do this, you drive campaign performance tenfold.
Content and Channels
Content Planning
Too many channel businesses focus on creating new content, investing hours of writing and design time, and ignoring the repository of content they already have. Of course, content that exists within the business might not be in the right format, but you can quite easily slice and dice chunkier content pieces, such as presentations, whitepapers and sales decks, into digestible public-facing content.
A simple audit of your website, any recent presentation decks and a quick conversation with colleagues will almost always solve the existing content conundrum. From here, we can start to identify content gaps. Ask yourself: what content do we have about the product or solution we are promoting? Do we have a compelling offer? Are we clear on the USPs? If the answer is yes in most parts, you're doing well. If the answer to any of these is no, then you know where you need to focus efforts.
From there, you'll naturally be left with some gaps to fill at various stages of the funnel - but you'll be closer to launching your campaign than you were before undertaking the exercise. With these newly identified gaps, start to think about what additional content you could create quickly and easily. The last thing you want to do is invest considerable time and effort into creating new content. After all, until you launch a campaign and begin to see how your target personas engage with your content, you won't truly know if it is landing as you had hoped. So, by creating content that you can get out of the door quicker, you're making the best use of time. Once your campaign is live, you can start to use the data and insights that you are gathering to inform how content develops, doing more of what is working, and less of what is now.
Marketing Channels Considerations
When you're thinking about launching a marketing campaign, you need to be smart about your approach. For example, it's going to be a difficult uphill battle to drive leads using a brand-new social media account with no previous posts and a small number of followers. However, if you have amassed a good-sized audience ('good' being quite subjective and ultimately varies by sector, B2C vs. B2B, and so on.), then it makes absolute sense to utilise this to your advantage - if your target audience can be found there.
In addition to social media channels, you may want to think about other modes of communicating with your targets: your website, PPC, email marketing, and stakeholder or partner networks all come into play here and each has its use cases. Having leveraged these channels before for similar purposes will provide us with data and insights, as we discussed above under the 'leveraging data and insights' section.
As good as having established channels is, the focus needs to be on using channels where we know our audience is. If in doubt, leave it out - or do some desk-based research to understand if it's worthwhile. If you're still unsure, we always recommend leaving no stones unturned: some simple, short-burst marketing experiments will help you understand if your audience is there.
Our recommendation when executing marketing campaigns is generally to approach channels in two ways: primary channels, where you aim to engage people for the first time (during the campaign period) and secondary channels you might use as a re-engagement tool. For example, your primary channel might be LinkedIn Ads due to its effective targeting, and your secondary channel might be Google display ads as targeting is less specific. This approach is sensible as the display network offers an effective and low-cost way to re-engage prospects who have seen your ads or clicked through to your landing page(s) via them, whichever you choose.
Marketing Tactics
Arguably, the tactics you choose make or break your campaign. You can have the most thought-out plan with the ideal customer profiles selected, compelling content created, yet insufficient channels and the entire programme falls flat on its face.
With so many marketing tactics available to us, it can be incredibly overwhelming to decide which to use. Naturally, first-hand experience and marketing campaign exposure helps us to understand which tactics are likely to perform better than others. But what if you are not fortunate enough to have the same level of exposure? Well, we've got you covered. As we mentioned above in this post, the suggestions listed are fairly general and unassuming but should give more than enough insight into tactic use cases.
Organic Marketing Tactics
Organic marketing tactics are favourable for one obvious reason: other than the time and effort required, there are no monetary costs associated with executing them. The disadvantage of organic tactics is that they are a long-term play. You typically do not see any benefits to organic activity until you have built up their presence. For example, posting a social post to a small audience is unlikely to generate any results. Similarly, posting a blog on your website when your organic search presence is poor will be unlikely to generate any impressions or views.
Organic Social Media Posting
Organic social posting can feel like a thankless task at times - even with the best content on the market. If your audience isn't there, you need to find ways to get them there. But if they are, or you have a loyal network of advocates and stakeholders who can help you to propel your message, posting across your company or individual social accounts can be fruitful.
Even if you do not have a large following across your company pages, leveraging your internal experts' profile pages is a strategic move. Individual pages generally amass hundreds if not thousands of connections; people you've met at events, people you've worked with in previous roles, and so on. This is absolutely something worth thinking about.
Email Marketing
Email continues to be an effective communication channel and in an era where telemarketing is less effective with fewer people spending time in physical office spaces (and where landline end-of-life is coming!), businesses are increasingly reliant on utilising digital channels to engage their prospective audiences.
There are two main types of email campaigns to consider: one-off emails and automated email workflows. the former, beneficial where you have a timebound thing to say, for example, a time-sensitive opportunity, such as a product or subscription discount or event invitation. The latter, utilising automation tools, offers a more sophisticated way of engaging contacts. Now, automation can be as simple or complex as you like. An effective email workflow would consider engagement behaviours in its flow; if somebody engages in a specific way - for example, with a specific content piece or theme, you might want to send them a series of communications on this topic, aiming to take them from top of the funnel (awareness) through to the bottom of the funnel (decision) using a programme of emails.
Food for thought: before you start asking people to visit a landing page and complete a data capture form, ask yourself if you need them to do that. What information do you already know about them? By completing the data capture, are you collecting anything new? Data capture forms, whilst effective in some ways, can be offputting in others. Think creatively: how else could we gather insights about our email data lists?
SEO
Search engine optimisation can be a mind-boggling task. If you don't have the knowledge and experience of the 'how' - how to optimise content and appear in search engine rankings (SERPs), then you will most likely find yourself frustrated that the content you have created isn't cutting through, and when you go onto Google, Bing, or any other search engine, and type in your search term of choice, your more established competitors come up.
If you are considering SEO as part of your go-to-market strategy, you need to accept that you're in this for the long game. SEO will not drive results overnight, but it will drive results longer-term. Given that we're focusing on taking a new product to market, we are going to assume that you are planning to offer this solution long-term, so SEO should definitely feature in your marketing plans.
To win at SEO, consider product-specific search terms (this is particularly important if you are reselling existing vendor solutions), as well as the challenges your customers are facing. Research potential search terms that could apply to both scenarios and then begin to map content out across both of these areas. Additionally, as we touched above in relation to existing content, think about what you already have that could be updated or repurposed as part of your SEO strategy. Examples of this could be 'Copilot for Microsoft 365' as a branded, vendor-specific search term, and 'email summary tool', as something more challenge-led. These are just two examples, but there are plenty more out there that apply to Copilot itself.
Paid Media Tactics
Paid media is a necessary evil when it comes to marketing campaign execution. Without it, chances are you will end up talking into the same voids. To grow, we need to be talking to new people, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to utilise paid media channels such as PPC, paid social and other third-party sites to propel our message.
PPC (Pay-per-click Advertising)
At this point, PPC advertising is a well-established marketing tactic used by most - if not all - businesses at some point. Most businesses have used search to promote their website pages when somebody searches for a specific keyword or phrase, but PPC has more benefits than this. When we think about primary and secondary methods of targeting, PPC is the perfect example. You might utilise search ads (as described earlier in this paragraph) as a primary engagement tactic. You might then decide to utilise display ads to retarget and re-engage those who clicked from the original search term ad but failed to convert.
PPC is all about bidding. If nobody else is bidding for specific search terms or phrases, your chances of winning the bidding war are very high and likely to be low-cost. However, in contrast, if you're bidding for a competitive keyword, expect your ads to struggle to appear in SERPs (search engine results pages) without increasing your bid, which comes at a cost.
We've long been advocates of Microsoft Ads as a PPC platform, which serves ads across the Bing search platform. Whilst the overwhelming majority of searches are conducted across Google search, Bing has far fewer ads, with advertisers opting for Google Ads instead. We think this is a very short-sighted viewpoint and we always recommend Microsoft Ads as part of your channel mix. When you think about it, PPC - pay-per-click - has a simple working mechanism. You pay per click, so if your target audience is not seeing or engaging with your ads, you are not charged. What have you got to lose?
Paid Social Media Advertising
Paid social is the term used to describe advertising across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and so on. Long used in the B2C world as a consumer-first tactic, paid social has its benefits as a B2B marketing tactic too.
Paid social, unlike PPC, is a proactive engagement tactic. That means you are promoting your products or solutions to a broad audience, some of which may be interested, and a lot of people who are very unlikely to be interested at all (think about the 5% of audiences reference we discussed earlier). That means that engagement is typically a lot lower. In the IT space, an average clickthrough rate from a PPC ad is somewhere around 2-2.5%. Across paid social - particularly LinkedIn ads, an average CTR sits somewhere between 0.4-0.7%.
Now, this might sound all doom and gloom, but there is a very big silver lining. Even with only 5% of target audiences being in a buying mindset, you can choose the targeting. Unlike PPC, where you can't pre-determine who sees your ad, paid social ads allow you to be micro-focused. If you only have a cyber security product and you only want to target CISOs, consider it done. Not to mention, the opportunity value across paid social campaigns is likely to be far higher than those on PPC.
As we've mentioned several times in this guide, focus on platforms where you know your audience is visiting. If you're unsure, conduct some market research or use an audience builder - most paid social platforms have them.
Earned Media Tactics
Press Release Distribution
If you have launched something new and exciting, a press release might be a good marketing tactic to undertake. This is particularly a good way to promote a new homegrown solution if you're an ISV taking a new product to market. Your press release could be angled towards a particular group of publications, for example, sector-focused trade media if your product is geared that way. Alternatively, if you have a good presence locally and want to continue to drum up new business in that way, you might choose to engage with local news outlets.
Thought Leadership
In the B2B space, thought leadership stands out as a solid mechanism for solidifying your position as a thought leader. We strongly believe that in the coming years, with even more solutions entering the market, credibility and authority are going to be sought-after by buyers. What better way to build authority than to be featured in well-respected media titles?
Speaking Opportunities
If you have something credible and interesting to say, seeking out speaking opportunities is definitely something to strongly consider. Like thought leadership, speaking opportunities are good examples of ways to get in front of your target audience in an authoritative way. The one additional benefit of speaking at an event is that you have the opportunity to follow-up and network with attendees afterwards.
In addition to event speaking opportunities, consider pitching yourself or a colleague for a podcast that your audience is known to listen to. Positioning yourselves with an already established and recognised leader in your space is a strategic way to raise your individual or business profile.
Account-based Marketing
If you have a target list in mind, for example, a list of the top 25 businesses that you want to work with, an ABM approach is a good one to undertake. Having an ABM strategy, however, is going to be key. You need to create a blueprint that you can follow to understand if your efforts are working or not. If you take an inconsistent approach, then it will be difficult to scale your ABM efforts. Now, that is not saying that you can't be hyper-personalised. You can. However, your overarching approach to ABM efforts should be consistent across the board.
At the heart of any ABM campaign is insight. What do you know about your prospect list? This stems to everything from the key contacts in the business, such as key decision maker(s), influencers and those who might become blockers, to who they work with, what they do and their perceived challenges that you can begin to position yourself to support with.
Account-based marketing is not a one-time thing. A lot of channel businesses (particularly MSPs) treat ABM as a revolving door, contacting one person each day, or focusing on a small number of contacts per week, simply following up to see if they have any feedback on the previous communication. Not only do ABM contacts see through this, you're failing to position yourselves in the right way. Instead, monitor opportunities for meaningful conversations or opportunities to contact them without it feeling overtly salesy. ABM should be reserved for high-value opportunities, where you need to build try and credibility over time. hitting an ABM prospect in the face with a sales message is counter-productive, and likely to set your efforts back by a few steps.
Channel Marketplaces
When thinking about utilising the channel to distribute your solutions, you may want to consider joining a channel marketplace, listing your solution for the breadth of the channel to find. Perfect for all solutions, from data and analytics to cyber security, channel marketplaces enable businesses - including those new and already within the channel - to access a sophisticated, vendor-approved catalogue of solutions.
Marketplaces exist for the biggest vendors and the smallest of independent software vendors. Anybody with a solution and a desire to accelerate growth should consider joining a marketplace to maximise reach, drive brand awareness and deliver customer growth.
The Partner Network
The partner network is not an option for every MSP or VAR but could be a good strategic choice for those who have branched out and invested in creating their own technology solutions, or those who are born-and-bred ISVs in their own right.
The partner reseller network exists to expedite the distribution of technology solutions, which makes it a sensible and strategic move for those who have created solutions that would be advantageous for other MSPs and the like to resell. Despite partner hesitancy over the last few years, we think more and more will overcome their fears and see the opportunity that reselling presents. Opting to partner and reseller rather than build provides additional revenue streams without the development costs, making it a lucrative offer for open-minded partners.
If maximising the opportunity of the partner network is on your agenda, it's important to consider how you will support those that you onboard as reseller partners; how will you support their marketing efforts? Have you got content already created for them to use?
Ensuring Your Marketing Activities Are Informed by Data and Insights
There is nothing worse than seeing businesses run marketing campaigns and waiting until the very end to do any analysis. The minute your campaigns start building impressions, clicks and conversions, you're gathering rich data and insights. Data and insights that can be used to make poor campaigns average, average campaigns good, and good campaigns great. If your campaign isn't delivering leads, do not just sit there and wait until the end to understand why. Get into the details straight away. And just because your campaign seems to be working, do not just sit back with your feet up. There will be elements of your campaign - whether that is channels, tactics, audience, content or messaging - that are lagging behind the rest. What if you could repair those dents in the armour and accelerate results? It's entirely possible.
The best way to ensure your campaigns are data-driven from the offset is to approach them in that manner. We're big believers in marketing experiments, A/B testing, whatever you want to call it. We opt for the term experiment because we're being more process-driven than just testing two variables and seeing what happens. We're creating an objective-driven process whereby we're testing a hypothesis. A/B testing, on the other hand, is just about testing two things to see what works.
With marketing experiments (you might refer to them as growth experiments as they are flexible enough to help you to solve any business problem), you're making an assumption. If we do X, we will achieve Y. There is more motivation and intent behind the test, unlike A/B testing, which is, in essence, just seeing what happens and learning from it.
If you are doing any tests, be sure to compare like-for-like. Make notes, and capture insights in written form so that you create a bit of a campaign optimisation log. It'll help you to make objective decisions. Date ranges are a key thing to be mindful of when you do any campaign analysis. If you've paused some ads (for example) as they were not performing, and then published some new ones to see how they land, be sure that you're only measuring the date period from when they went live. We've seen too many examples where marketers are looking at full campaign windows and measuring campaign groups as a collective, when only the new ads are live. By failing to amend the data period, the metrics you're looking at take into account the previous campaign history, which you've already identified might not be that great, hence the optimisations taking place.
Nurturing Leads
Before hitting the button to launch any campaign, it's important to think about what happens next - particularly if you're executing a full-funnel campaign. When somebody engages with your hero content, you need to be ready to send an appropriate follow-up. As we've discussed, a prospect at the 'awareness' stage hasn't made any indication that they want to buy, so how do you keep them engaged? The answer: nurture them until they're ready. The same approach happens if someone joins a webinar; what are you going to follow up with? How do you make your interaction meaningful but not too full on?
Nurturing is the process of keeping someone engaged; keeping them 'warm'. You do this by serving them content that you think is relevant, which is where the accuracy of your marketing personas comes in. If your marketing persona profiles are accurate, and your content is relevant, you'll find the process of lead nurturing to be fairly easy. That is not to say it's quick though. You should be prepared to play the long game with a lot of leads. That's why the full-funnel approach is so important (and lucrative) - you serve content across all stages to your target audience and see what they engage with. Some will engage with your eBooks, others with your webinars, and a small number might even engage with your demo, discovery, or quote-related CTAs.
Marketing Technology
No campaign is complete without effective marketing tech. From email-sending tools to landing page builders, marketing automation, ad management and SEO, to name a few variants. Whilst a campaign is possible with basic tools such as your existing website and utilising Outlook or Gmail to send email communications, leveraging sophisticated technology solutions opens up additional insights and features, and allows you to accelerate campaign developments.
To help you with your planning, we're listing some cost-effective and easy-to-use solutions that should help you get up and running swiftly.
HubSpot
HubSpot has almost everything you could need to launch, analyse and report back on a marketing campaign. We love HubSpot particularly for its end-to-end reporting, which is second-to-none. Say goodbye to guesswork and see true acquisition and ROI costs. You will also be able to see which specific ads or emails drove each and every lead, as well as what £revenue those tactics drove. With other platforms, you would likely find yourself having to do some manual calculations (and plenty of guesswork) to get this level of detail. For marketing campaign execution, you can use HubSpot for building landing pages, sending and tracking email communications, integrating your campaign ads and reporting on leads and ROI. There are many other benefits to using HubSpot, such as building your website through it's CMS, pipeline tracking and more.
SERanking
If you're looking for a quick and easy way to identify the right keywords you should be targeting, or to identify where your target keywords or phrases rank, SERanking is an excellent and low-cost tool.
MailChimp
Just want somewhere to send your emails from? MailChimp is just that. One of the original email sender tools, MailChimp is incredibly easy to use and supports automation too should you need it.
Looker Studio
Formerly Google Data Studio, Looker Studio allows you to integrate data sources to create real-time dashboards. This is particularly useful if you're using different data sources, channels and platforms and want to see everything in one central place.
Timelines
What do we need to do and when?
How will we measure success?
What will we report on?
Is tracking in place?