Create a B2B Marketing Campaign that Wows Your Audience

Marketing’s role is to increase awareness of your company’s offerings and persuade people to buy. This requires creating enticing content that attracts and delights customers. 

However, not every marketing campaign is successful in accomplishing this. Sometimes your emails sit unopened because you targeted the wrong audience, or your offer is never downloaded because it seemed too “sales-y.”

Creating and managing B2B marketing campaigns involves a lot more than just coming up with an angle and creating a few pieces of content to promote it. Let’s get back to basics to explore where you can optimize your strategy during each stage of a campaign rollout for maximum impact.

 

Tips for planning a B2B marketing campaign

1. Set goals

At Accelity, we rely on the SMART goals framework to set and achieve business objectives. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. It’s important that your campaign goals are realistic but that they also push you to do your best work to achieve them.

2. Understand your audience

It’s pretty obvious, but if your audience isn’t at the center of your campaign buildout, it’s a big miss that will affect results.

One of the most important steps in crafting a successful B2B marketing campaign is to identify which buyer persona you are targeting. Consider your audience’s goals, preferences and pain points as you craft your campaign so that it is perfectly tailored to them. 

Be sure to also figure out which channels your audience prefers so you can create a promotional strategy that works. If your target audience never uses Facebook, don’t waste time and money promoting your campaign there.

3. Research how the audience interacts with you

It’s rare for a prospect to buy on the first touch, so it’s important to understand how your target audience interacts with you, your website and your other marketing materials. How many touches does it take for them to buy?

Look at past data, or if you lack this data/don’t have a large enough customer base to pull from, go with the rule of 7.

4. Create your content

After finalizing your campaign strategy, gaining a thorough understanding of your target audience and conducting keyword research, it’s time to start creating your content! Use the knowledge that you gained from your planning and research to create modern content that will resonate with that specific persona.

First, decide what your CTA will be and build every piece of content around the end goal that you established. Then, create your content offer, which can be anything from an ebook to a video to an infographic!

After building the main content offer, create more promotional materials to go with it, such as a landing page, some social posts or a blog (we recommend all three).

5. Promote your resources

As part of the content planning stage, you’ll decide what channels you’re going to use in your campaign. If you know your audience is on LinkedIn, consider using LinkedIn ads, organic posts and direct messages to prospects.

There are countless channels and content types available for use in each of your campaigns. Choose them wisely based on the audience segment you’re targeting. A few other examples include:

• Social media platforms—this includes not only posts, but also ads and targeted messages
• Email—newsletters, marketing blasts and 1:1 sends
• Search engine ads

Just remember that because one channel and type of content works well for one segment of your audience doesn’t mean that it will work well for others.

6. Create a calendar with deadlines, and stick to it!

Picking what you want to make and then slapping it on paper (or a spreadsheet) will hardly make it happen. Decide who will own each part of your campaign. Who is writing each piece, who is designing it and how long will it take for them to do that? Do they have the capacity to do it?

Build out your B2B marketing campaign calendar that allocates time to your coworkers to create quality deliverables, and plan the days they go live around how your readers/potential customers will view them (not based on how long it takes you to make each piece).

Once the campaign calendar is in progress, be sure to stick to deadlines and keep the campaign on track. Keep in mind that before your current campaign ends, you should start planning your next one to keep that calendar full!

7. Track and analyze data

You should be continuously analyzing data using the goals you set at the beginning while the campaign is running so you can make timely, meaningful changes. Once your campaign is complete, you will need to look at the numbers from start to finish to make informed decisions about future campaigns.

Plan for a successful B2B marketing campaign

If you don’t have a solid plan for your B2B marketing campaign, it will fail. A lot of time and effort goes into creating and executing marketing campaigns, so make sure that you have an effective strategy in place to meet your goals.