You might think your biggest B2B marketing challenge is the fact that in the early days of your company, you invited everyone you know to like your social media profile and now you can’t get your mom to stop commenting on your posts. Okay, so that’s a pretty big one, but a recent survey identified some other key issues that might ring true with your organization.
The study, from ON24 and NetLine, found that among B2B marketers working across a range of industries:
- 43% say that having an unclear strategy is their most pressing issue in B2B marketing.
- 37% say that there’s uncertainty in how to measure performance.
- 23% report that there isn’t enough prioritizing of brand building.
In addition, only 17% of respondents said that their brand was “very strong.” So … what can you do? If your brand isn’t strong and what’s standing in your way is an unclear strategy and a lack of metrics, here are some ideas to get you started:
Clear Strategy: Start by determining your brand identity and messaging, and then figure out who is most likely to buy your products or services. Once you have that target audience identified, think about how your product or service might fill their needs. Identify their pain points, and then create a strategy around how you’ll communicate your ability to remedy that pain.
Maybe you’ll launch a social media campaign with how-to videos or funny demonstrations of people in dire need of rescue by your brand. Maybe it’s a more technical product, and you need to create some white papers and blog posts full of expert advice for solving problems.
Performance Measurement: When you develop your strategy, be sure to enumerate the goals you’re trying to reach so that you can develop clear associated metrics. It’s important to have the right metrics. Take a look at the following examples:
- If you’re trying to increase brand awareness, you might decide to measure social media shares or how many times your “behind the scenes” video was viewed.
- If you want to focus on lead generation, look at measuring visitors to your website via social media or email newsletter subscriptions.
For any given campaign and its goals, there are wrong metrics to use, as well. For instance, you don’t want to measure the number of social media shares you get for a campaign aimed at generating leads, because shares don’t necessarily correlate with leads.
Prioritizing Brand-Building: When you don’t prioritize brand awareness, you are abandoning your brand values and identity and are forced to get the attention of your target audience through promotions and discounts. As a result, since they’re buying from you based solely on price, you won’t have much depth to that customer relationship. In order to build lasting customer loyalty, you need to tell what makes your brand different.
If any of this is sounding all too familiar, we can help you remedy these common B2B marketing challenges, and create strategies with clear performance measurements.