5 Critical Elements Of An Effective B2B Marketing Strategy Framework

It’s not common for digital marketing agencies to share their secret sauce, let alone the frameworks and tools they use with clients. But that’s exactly what we’re doing now.

One of the secrets to a solid strategy that generates leads, new customers and scalable revenue growth is using a framework that’s proven to produce results.

We’re going to share the basics of the framework in this article, and then if you want to get access to the full framework documentation, there will be links in the article. Enjoy!

Here’s some harsh reality – the marketing tactics that worked for you two years ago aren’t working today. If you’re frustrated and struggling to get marketing results for your company, you’re not alone.

But you can stand out in a crowded marketplace if you engage and educate prospects throughout their buyer journey. It’s hard work, but with the right strategy, tactics, campaign framework and technology, it’s possible.

The key is consistently targeting the right prospects with the right message, defining the best campaign approach to get that message in front of them, choosing the right channels as part of that campaign and then making sure you’re investing enough to move the needle and generate results.

This workbook is intended for CEOs, CROs and CMOs only. If you’re not in one of these roles at a midsize or larger company, this isn’t for you. Seriously, we’re not kidding – don’t use this resource.

Target the Right Prospects

The days of reach and frequency are long gone. You can no longer be everything to everyone. If you want your marketing to perform and shower your sales team with high-quality sales leads, you have to be laser focused.

To start, create a profile of your best prospect, or think about your favorite customer and create a profile based on that person. Personas are for people, not companies. Use the framework in this workbook to work through creating your personas.

Then you’ll pick a single persona for your initial campaign. To learn more about personas, selection, targeting and priorities, check out this article on creating buyer personas.

Create a Big Story for Your Company and Your Campaigns

You’ve probably heard the saying, “If you don’t have anything interesting to say, don’t say anything at all.”

This applies to marketing in today’s cluttered, oversaturated digital marketplace. If your company’s story isn’t remarkable, it’s going to be very difficult to cut through the noise, and your campaign messaging won’t be strong enough to drive the results you expect.

To help you think differently about your company’s story, you’ll need some tools.

Here are some questions to ask of your leadership team during an exercise to help create your Big Story:

1. What do we do that no other business in our industry, market or space can claim they do?
2. What pain, problem or challenge does this capability solve for our prospects and customers?
3. How do we prove that this remarkable capability solves the stated problem or challenge?
4. Who else (such as current customers or industry experts) will state that we have helped them in this way?

Carve out 90 minutes and, as a team, write the answers to these questions on a whiteboard.

The Connected Customer Framework goes into more detail about how to marry your Big Story and remarkable elements of your business into a disruptive, emotional and compelling message that will drive leads and more new customers. You can get the full Connected Customer Framework here.

Pick Your Campaign Approach

You could run a variety of campaigns, but you should discuss them and then plan accordingly.

Inbound Campaigns: Designed to earn attention from your target prospects with content that drives them to your website and then converts them into new contacts that you’ll then nurture with emails, moving them proactively through their buyer journey.

Demand Generation Campaigns: Designed to take your message out to your prospects proactively using targeting tools to get your content in front of them so that they are aware of your company and your product/service.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Campaigns: Designed to target specific people at specific companies with highly personalized messages that drive a new connection, get them to engage with your content and leverage the sales team to start a conversation.

Customer Campaigns: Designed to get customers to increase your share of wallet – cross-sell and upsell opportunities are usually the key to this campaign type.

Advocacy Campaigns: Designed to get customers to publicly advocate for your company, including online reviews, references, referrals and success stories.

For more on campaign selection, check out this resource.

Select the Right Channels

Today, marketers need to run orchestrated and omnichannel campaigns. Here’s what that means:

Marketing Orchestration: Marketing orchestration is an approach that focuses not on delivering standalone campaigns but on optimizing a set of related cross-channel interactions that, when added together, make up a personalized customer experience.

Just like a musical orchestra, every one of your touches is firing perfectly at the perfect time, telling the perfect story, evoking the perfect emotion and creating an experience that moves people to buy – just like the music moves people at the symphony.

Omnichannel: This refers to the ability to use ALL the necessary vehicles or channels to deliver the same message, story and offer so that your prospect sees and hears the same story from your brand regardless of platform or location.

Whether they visit your website, see an ad, receive an email, do a search, notice you on social media, see you at an event, get a text or read a review, every channel is telling the same story, positioning you the same way and offering them the right content at the right time.

First, let’s look at your channels. Think about your channels like tools in the toolkit – you almost always need multiple tools to get the job done, and having the right tools at the right time is critical.

You could also think about your channels like lanes on the highway. The more lanes you have, the faster your trucks can make their deliveries, the more trucks you can use and the more products you can deliver.

Here are just some of the channels available to marketers:

• Social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Medium, Reddit, Pinterest, etc.)
• Paid ads on the social platforms
• Email
• Events and conferences
• Influencers
• Partners
• Content publication (including speaking, webinars, video, written content and audio content)
• Your website
• Organic search (Google and Bing)
• Paid search (Google and Bing)
• Word of mouth/referrals
• Public relations
• SMS text
• Direct mail
• Traditional advertising (TV, print, radio, satellite, streaming)
• Digital advertising (banner, retargeting, syndication)
• Online reviews
• Networking
• Chat

Sometimes these get grouped together, too. For example, inbound marketing, demand generation and account-based marketing (ABM) represent a collection of some but not all of these channels.

In addition, most companies can’t afford to use every single channel available. That means you should prioritize channels and select the right set of key channels to focus on.

Marketers have so many options these days. It’s likely that this list doesn’t capture everything you might be considering. The key is to select and execute the right set of tactics inside the right channel to engage prospects and turn them into leads, sales opportunities and new customers.

For more on designing your campaigns and selecting your channels and tactics, click here to get the Connected Customer Framework, where you’ll find tools and templates to help with this.

Set the Right Investment Levels for Your Campaigns

You’ve probably heard this before: “Sounds great, but how much is it going to cost?” While that’s not exactly the right question for management to be asking, you’ll need to be prepared to answer it.

Knowing how you expect the campaign to perform is the first step. Instead of saying what it’s going to cost, you’ll be able to respond with: “An investment like this will produce these results.”

By using a scorecard and performance projections, you’ll be armed with the expected results answer.

Regardless, you’ll still need to be prepared with an estimate of the investment required. Here’s how to calculate that number.

First, you need to know where you want to be to know how to get there. For example, let’s say you need to generate 100 new leads that will produce 20 new sales opportunities, 14 proposals and seven new customers spending $100,000 to $700,000 in annualized revenue.

You’ll need to back into which campaign tactics are required to generate 100 new leads. That means looking at each of the tactics in your campaign plan and attributing a certain amount of performance or lead generation to each of those tactics over the campaign.

Then attribute the projected cost or investment in each of the campaign tactics required to hit your goals. Now you have a budget with a reasonable, attainable and projectable set of goals.

Once this is approved, it’s full speed ahead on the campaign. You can take this approach across your entire marketing effort over the course of the year to create both the financial investment requirements and the expected results. Now you’re ready to launch.

This article only covers some of the main elements required to plan, design, run and optimize a revenue generation campaign in today’s environment with today’s tools. To get everything we look at and the tools we use to get these campaigns ready for clients, get the Connected Customer Framework on this page.