B2B Marketers Need Strategy Too

In the marketing world, you see a lot of time in the digital world spent on consumer marketing.  But so much of marketing also focuses on business to busienss, channel, partner, or other non-consumer marketing.  In this regard, marketers here can use marketing and social cloud capabilities.

Where do you start?

• Map your typical buyers journey to your unique brand or product story at each stage
  • This is one layer above personas.  it’s doesn’t have to be a full journey map. Focus on the simple
  • Don’t get stuck in the metrics snafu. Customers could care less if this ticks a box for marketing qualified lead.
  • Think about the questions that a customer asks at each stage.
    • what challenges do they face
    • How are they similar to others
    • How are others dealing with the problem
    • etc.
  • The presenter had us look at an empty marketing worksheet and then fill out a part of it.

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You see that there are key stages:

1. Buyer questions
2. Brand or Product story
   1. Start mapping the story to the buyer questions
3. Best Content Types to tell the story
   1. What stories map to questions and now in what content type
   2. Map these types to your stages
      1. blog goes here in interest
      2. newsletter becomes part of learn
      3. Pricing sheets for later stage
      4. customer testimonials for some mid-stage
      5. etc.

There are other things to consider

• Consider the age of assets.  The asset may be valuable but it’s just in need of a refresh
• Choose the right content to tell the story at each stage.
• If you have a rough time thinking about the story, interview a new customer. They just went through the process.

What’s Next?

Complete the worksheet to round out the high level journey.  Then validate them with key stakeholders.  Once that’s done, finish mapping the buyers questions and map the questions to the story you are telling.  Finally, do a content audit.  Create a spreadsheet of the main pieces of content, when it was created, line-up of personas etc.  Finally, execute on your strategy.  Don’t forget your metrics.  Here’s an example of what you might do to execute.

Execution aids or tracking