What is your first step in planning your next B2B marketing campaign?
Too many business people today think that the first step in successful B2B marketing is deciding whether they should use email, social media, blogging, and even which marketing platform LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google.
This is a major contributor to why many most B2B marketing efforts are unsuccessful. All of the above are methods and means to distribute your marketing message which are tactics that you will decide after you have laid the foundation for your campaign.
So what are the first vital steps to a successful marketing campaign?
Identify Your Target Market:
The first step in planning your next B2B marketing campaign is to identify your target market in terms of these criteria.
- Industry
- Industry Segment (if required)
- Company Size by Number of Employees
- Geographic Location
- Key Decision Makers & Influencers by Titles
Why This Step Is Important: This is critical because it underpins the strategic foundation and direction for all the tactical decisions that you will need to make to ensure a successful marketing campaign.
As a result of this first step, you are now ready to focus on determining realistic market potential goals for your products or services.
Determine Target Market Sales Potential:
Calculate the potential sales for your products or services with your target market. You will need answers to questions like these.
- What is the total number of target market prospects in your industry?
- What is the industry product or service replacement cycle?
- What is the industry product or service purchase cycle?
- What is your current market share?
Why This Step Is Important: Answering these questions will help you to know the number of companies that are your market potential and the realistic sales potential you have at any given point in time. Without this information, you will not be able to measure your marketing success and progress over time.
Tip: Here is a link to a handy calculator to help determine your real market potential.
Since you have now identified your market and determined your sales potential, you can turn to setting specific marketing campaign goals.
Establish Your Marketing Campaign Goals?
Below is a list of possible marketing campaign goals for your consideration. This is not an all-encompassing list but should help you to formulate your own list of goals.
Potential Marketing Campaign Goals:
- Introduce our company to the market
- Introduce our products or services to the market
- Increase company or product brand awareness
- Introduce a new product or service to an existing market(s)
- Introduce a new product or service to new market?
- Increase our market share
- Stop market share erosion from competitors
- Reverse negative sales trend do to ___________________________
- Develop new market segments for our product or service
- Increase profit margins
- Improve our product service sales mix
- Implement new pricing strategies
You can have more than one goal, but you should designate a primary goal so you can then adjust your goals in a way one marketing campaign to fit your marketing spend.
Why This Step Is Important: While this step may seem obvious, this is what you are trying to achieve. Many people overlook or often forget why they are conducting a specific campaign as they get caught up in the tactics and implementation. Memorializing, your goal with a written document, keeps it top of mind.
The last first step in preparing your campaign for success is to complete a comprehensive marketing campaign analysis of how your campaign might perform based on your tactical assumptions and before you spend any money.
Conduct a Marketing Campaign Analysis:
In order to establish realistic performance criteria for your marketing program, you need you to think through all your selling goals and assumptions. With this information, you can realistically project the amount and cost of the marketing effort required to meet your sales & profit goals.
The information generated by a comprehensive marketing campaign analysis will give you answers to questions like these and much more.
- Do you know if your next marketing program even stands a chance to break even, let alone return you a profit?
- Do you know, which marketing program is the one the gives you the best opportunity to be profitable?
- Do you know how much your next marketing program could generate for your firm in terms of return-on-investment?
- What is our new customer acquisition cost in this program?
Why This Step Is Important: A B2B marketing campaign analysis enables you to:
- Establish marketing benchmarks to track and compare the actual results of your marketing campaign.
- Increase the quality and effectiveness of your B2B marketing campaigns through better decision making when you have empirical information.
- Build various marketing campaign plans and evaluate the market spend associated with each as to their to their reasonableness.
- Know If You Are Going To Make Money Before You Spend Any Of Yours!
Tip: Here is a B2B Marketing Campaign Calculator that will help you conduct a marketing campaign analysis. It allows you to run unlimited “what if” scenarios by varying its 8 assumptions about your marketing campaign. You are able to evaluate 14 different key marketing metrics.
In Summary
The first steps in planning your next marketing campaign are strategic planning steps that should lay the foundation to ensure a successful marketing campaign. These are planning and analyzing steps from which better decision making will emanate influencing marketing spend and tactical decisions. By following these crucial first steps in your next marketing campaign, you will increase your odds for marketing success.
