Too often, a B2B-marketing team will hit the ground running. At first, all goes well. Then they run into a wall and struggle to scale their marketing campaigns. We’ve all been there, being burnt out by not having a repeatable B2B demand generation strategy.Â
That burnout affects everyone in some way or another — CEOs, CMOs, business owners, and more.Â
As experts in demand generation, we know repeatability is the key to creating a dynamic, ongoing B2B marketing strategy that continually reaps the lead generation results you want.Â
So pull up your favorite chair. We’re going to dive into the most common pitfalls and tactical tips to ease burnout.Â
What makes a repeatable B2B marketing strategy?
As marketing managers and entrepreneurs, you are highly creative. And these ad-hoc deployments based on sound ideas are great! There’s just so many eureka moments we can have before we come to an eventual standstill.Â
Insead, a repeatable B2B marketing strategy is like a blueprint that runs on the same basic ingredients, for a longer time.
These ingredients consist of foundations like telling a great brand story, or a mechanism to turn your customers into advocates. For us at ViB, we’re making real investments in these following four ingredients, compiled into a 4-step framework you can easily follow.
We know it sounds challenging and time-consuming. But trust us, it’s far less so than not setting up a repeatable B2B marketing strategy.Â
What’s more, without repeatability in today’s complex world of B2B marketing, there’s no predictability. And without marketing predictability, you will struggle to generate predictable profits.
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Common challenges in B2B marketing
Before we jump into the solution, let’s quickly review the biggest challenges B2B marketers face when running their day-to-day operations.Â
Marketing burnout can happen for a wide variety of reasons, such as the following:Â
Over-focusing on one-off campaigns
This occurs when a team puts a lot of its resources into a campaign that runs only once. The effort it takes to create, run, and measure the campaign is likely to drain your energy and enthusiasm.Â
One-hit wonders
Often someone on the marketing team will have a brilliant idea. You run with it and it’s a success. However, it’s a one-hit wonder, like singers who are known for only one amazing song. Yes, they generate sales, but only for a short time. Then you’ve got to keep coming up with more short-term brilliant ideas to sustain the momentum.Â
Being overly reactive instead of proactive
Remember when everyone was writing content about COVID? While it seemed like a good idea at the time, all that content is basically useless now. This is a great example of being overly reactive to marketing pressures. To avoid wasting time and creating inefficiencies, the smarter approach is to be proactive. This means strategically determining your ideal long-term plan and marketing sticking to it.Â
Not building a long-term, self-sustaining strategy
If you want a solid plan that gives you purpose and guides your process, then you must create a solid, future focused, repeatable B2B demand generation marketing strategy.Â
How to build a scalable and repeatable B2B marketing strategy
Step 1 — Build a strong brand, then show It off
A brand is more than just a logo, tagline, and visual image. It’s the way a company, product, or individual is viewed by those who experience it.Â
For B2B companies, brand recognition is how well your target audience can recall your brand and identify your products. It’s the major indicator of how well your customers and potential customers differentiate your company from your competitors.Â
Everyone wants a strong brand but creating one can be difficult. But if you do miss this crucial step, you’ll struggle with driving a more repeatable marketing strategy.Â
Start with a strong brand strategy
Powerful brands have a full-bodied identity that includes a distinct style, trademarked visuals, core values, and unique tone and voice. If done right, you’ll find that it’s your branding that helps you sell in the cluttered tech market.
Here are seven essential tips for creating a long-term recognizable brand:
- Identify your target market. Clearly identify your core consumer and create buyer personas.
- Define your brand. This includes your purpose, vision, value proposition, mission, strategy, and definition of long-term success.Â
- Understand your brand position. Craft a brand positioning statement that defines how your brand fits into the world and is perceived by your target market.
- Craft your market position. Decide what makes you unique in the marketplace, what your target market needs, and what problems you can solve.Â
- Create your brand personality. Keep your target market front and center as you create your unique products, designs, and personality.Â
- Design your brand identity. Bring your brand to life through visuals, including colors, styles, and logos.Â
- Compose a tagline or slogan. In a few words, write the most compelling statement you can make about your company.Â
Download our free guide for more tips on how to start building your brand story.
Actively market your brand to your target audience
There are four leading ways to get your brand out in the world and in front of the people you want to reach:Â
- Branding building through target-rich networks. Find the networks that include your target audience, then ensure they are aware that you exist, what you do, and why they should care. Â
- Inbound lead generation. This helps you build a funnel of prospects through practices such as search engine marketing, organic and paid ads, and content marketing activities. Once you find them, nurture them through to sales.Â
- Outbound prospecting. To grow at a moderate or high rate, you’ll need to incorporate activities that generate a predictable flow of income leads, such as content syndication, webinar marketing, and cold calling for appointments.Â
- Create fans who refer you. Word of mouth references from satisfied customers are one of the most powerful ways to generate leads and make sales.Â
Pro Tip: Don’t lead with lead generation. While it’s tempting to want to jump into lead generation right away, the wise move is to first build a strong brand that helps lead you into the marketplace with top-of-mind awareness.
Step 2 — Invest in your inbound marketing engine
Here’s a quick crash course: inbound marketing is a way to attract prospects and customers using great content, SEO, social media and other digital marketing strategies.Â
It’s a more sustainable approach to marketing because it focuses on building relationships with potential customers, instead of interrupting them with sales-heavy approaches like ads, cold calling and cold emailing.Â
Although inbound marketing requires time and resources to execute, it can be more effective in the long run because you’re attracting customers with organic interest in you – i.e. leads can deliver a higher ROI than outbound.Â
Also, with inbound marketing now a norm, prospects have come to enjoy the act of exploring, researching, and buying what they need on demand. You can support this preference by ensuring that your website, social media, and campaigns are rich with quality content.
Create a content marketing plan
Leading B2B inbound marketing tactics include SEO, social sharing, followed by website conversion optimization and lead nurturing once your leads are safely in your sales pipeline.Â
You also need to, of course, create content that is strong and valuable. Basically, your content is a sales tool, so it needs to both inform and impress your prospects — and you need a lot of it.Â
The basics of a content marketing plan include:
- Define your mission
- Establish your KPIs
- Plan your content and channelsÂ
- Produce the content
- Distribute and promote the content
- Measure your results — and repeat!
Pro Tip: You can maximize your inbound marketing strategy in several ways. Two proven methods are through nurturing campaigns and content syndication.Â
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Step 3 — Don’t shy away from vendors and agencies
Now, we’re not saying to not engage in outbound marketing! It’s a tried and tested method of marketing that seeks to push messaging out to potential customers to generate new prospects. Outbound marketing includes activities such as cold calling, webinars, and trade shows.Â
The biggest drawback is the lack of repeatability in outbound marketing initiatives. That said, it can also be very effective — when you tap into the right services.Â
A specialized outbound lead generation agency can deliver several benefits, including lower costs and better results. Basically, their expertise, scale, and proprietary lead generation approach can help you gain a lower cost per lead and more ROI.Â
Tactical examples of outbound services you can hire a specialist to do for you include:Â
- Email marketing. Effective email marketing service can help you fill your funnel with qualified leads to keep your sales team busy.Â
- Appointment setting. A B2B appointment setting service helps schedule meetings with prospects for you.
Take this customer story from startup Abnormal Security for example, where they tapped into ViB’s outsourced appointment setting services to drive 67x ROI.
See how Jon drove 67x ROI with ViB Appointments
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Of course, when choosing the right B2B lead generation agency, make sure to do your research. Some bigger factors to consider are:
- How do they deliver leads – is the approach legitimate and proven?
- Quality of leads delivered – do they fit your ideal customer profile and have good chances of converting into opportunities?
- What their pricing model is — how do they offer leads as a service?
With ViB for example, we use a proprietary list of prospects that you can leverage. ViB has a community of millions of influential and powerful technology professionals who help make the most important buying decisions in industries, like IT, engineering, operations, sales, marketing, and more. This community is what keeps lead generation powerful yet inexpensive.
Pro Tip: To get the most from your marketing dollars, choose an agency that pays per result — like a pay per lead company. As opposed to lump sum or monthly fees, pay per lead means that you only pay for quality leads delivered. Â
Step 4 — Think of your customer journey as an infinite loop
As a B2B marketer, you’re probably familiar with the buyer’s journey. It’s a handy tool for understanding how prospects move through your sales funnel — from awareness to consideration to buying.
But what happens after they purchase? The buyer’s journey doesn’t end there. In fact, it’s just beginning.
The “after-purchase journey” is all about retention and advocacy — getting customers to come back to you again and again, or even encouraging others to join them.Â
Turn your existing customers into evangelists and loyalistsÂ
When you think about how much effort goes into building new accounts, it becomes clear that customer retention is just as important as acquisition.
By enlisting the help of your happy customers and keeping them around longer than just one purchase, you can perpetuate the customer journey to drive growth that’s repeatable.
Having your customers do your work is one of the most cost-effective and repeatable tactics any marketer can imagine – once you have a sound customer success and referral system in place.Â
Here are three examples of ways to leverage the power of customer evangelists and loyalists.Â
- Offer incentives for new contact referrals. When a brand delivers a great customer experience, organic word-of-mouth will naturally follow. But you can also incentivize your customers to make referrals. Incentives could be free gifts or discounts, for example. An example of an incentive referral strategy is the ViB Referral Program. It’s a dual incentive structure, which means it gives both the referrer and person being referred a reward, discount, or deal when a transaction is complete.
- Gather testimonials and case studies — and frame your customers as heroes. Most of them will be happy to give soundbites for public recognition, and share your asset within their network. You could re-engage them through written success stories or even virtual events, which all contribute to building stronger partnerships that could reap rewards in future. Great case studies also help you prove your expertise in a credible way. When your customers say your products are excellent, it packs a bigger punch with prospects than if you say it, increasing chances of new customers entering your loop.Â
- Upsell and cross-sell to extend the customer journey. Upselling is about raising the size of an order, or even an upgraded version of your product or service. With cross selling, you put forward complementary products or services like add-ons that enhance the main product offering in some way.
Pro Tip: Experience the same success that hundreds of other companies have when they tapped into the power of a ready-made, sales-ready community.Â
Build a strong and successful repeatable B2B lead generation strategy with ViB
When you’re aiming to achieve the highly coveted advantage of a repeatable B2B marketing strategy, you can fill any resource gaps in your organization with the right strategic partners and credible marketing agencies.Â
ViB has been the preferred marketing services partner for today’s leading technology companies for several years thanks to our ability to overcome lead generation challenges.Â
Our satisfied clients maintain strong partnerships with us because they gain significant results — including a steady flow of strong leads that lead to sales, a pay per lead payment structure which keeps their costs manageable, and the opportunity to add proven marketing tactics to support their lead generation, including:
- ViB Emails: Build connections with new customers that go beyond your mailing list.Â
- ViB Appointments: Build a sales pipeline fast.
- ViB Syndication: Expose high-value content to prospects who may never find your brand organically.
- ViB Webinars: Transform ordinary, static virtual events into interactive, lively round table conversations.
Contact ViB today to learn how we can help your company build a strong, repeatable B2B lead generation strategy that continually generates high-quality leads you need to be a success in your industry.
