B2B Marketing for Beginners: Simple Steps to Get Started

hey guys today we're going to do something kind of fun I wanted to go all the way back to the basics I know some of you are probably a beginner maybe you're a new founder product person maybe a developer all of a sudden you're realizing you need to do some of this B2B marketing stuff in order to get that thing that that new idea out into the marketplace and so I'm going to try to break this down in a really simple format I'm going to throw out all of the the B2B marketing jargon and just

talk very tactically and very specific about the steps you should be taking in order to get your B2B marketing engine working I did this little kind of outline or flowchart if you will just to kind of really stick in your mind exactly those steps and to make it feel less overwhelming because you're you're literally sort of stacking some pieces and building in my mind some of these pieces is one at a time as you go about uh building out your business so first and foremost and I think this is really important to think about um

because I think a lot of times we'll read or we'll watch videos about marketing and we kind of just jump right into the marketing tactics without understanding kind of what we're trying to accomplish um and even contextually like how this marketing works well fundamentally everything starts with an idea right you uh as a founder or an early stage startup have created a better way to do something right this could be your product this could be your service but ultimately you have a value proposition and most likely you're probably trying to tell the marketplace that there

is a better way to do something that they're already doing or there is a totally different way something that's going to offset what they're actually doing so this idea um just inherently exists kind of in your mind this is your vision and from here we need to start to work that Vision into some tight messaging and I think a lot of times we we do this we just try to do this kind of intellectually and we just try to do this in our head and we think through it you will have a more complex and

nuanced um understanding of this Vision right and when you try to explain it to people you'll probably try to give them every single little detail possible in order for them to understand but this is where writing comes into play you should be writing down kind of your approach to explaining this or after you do explain it to somebody go back down um and and write down some notes what are some of the things that I should have said that I forgot to say or didn't say or what are some of the things that would you

know ideally have made this clearer um how could I boil it down and make it a lot more simple for these folks to understand even as I'm just kind of sitting around and doing other things our brains as entrepreneurs are always on right we're always cooking up sort of different approaches and ideas and messages and those sorts of things that can consume you right and I think this is just a a good entrepreneurial tip as well your brain's kind of like I said always on always thinking through these things that can disconnect you from some

of the other things that you should be focusing on right time with your family or friends friends or just literally trying to to decompress a little bit um and leave that behind and and get some relaxation and those sorts of things so I think this process is also great for dumping all of those ideas there's a couple different ways to do this um obviously a notebook uh super handy uh one of my uh bigger preferences an a Notes app inside of your phone uh it's always with you um at some point you're probably going to

want to digitize most of these notes anyway and that's where your spark file comes in that becomes you should it into a place a spark file which means every time I'm going to to write something or build some content or write a sales letter or write an email um I should probably take a quick look at that spark file and there should be all kinds of different ideas there the reason that I sort of made a notation that the spark file should be a database is because um ultimately you want to do different queries against

that spark file because it's going to to get huge if you were to to to look at my spark file uh in fact I can kind of I can show you here real quick I'll pull it onto the screen so this is my spark file you can actually see um this was in the spark file right um but there's a whole just unlimited list of ideas that I'm working on um and can potentially pull out depending on the type of content that I need to do so so obviously you can see I do this in

notion uh ultimately you want to get all those notes into something that's probably digital and probably um to some degree provide you some database functionality so you can kind of dive in there and look for for topics and is as you're writing something on it um it's super helpful to to be able to just query it and you can see with notion this is really um fun too you can say you know have have I written anything about be be lead generation and then it's going to come through and it's going to pull out all

the different content so this is another layer on top of the database this is just kind of looking through my my whole um Archive of of things and this is kind of nice it's summarizing some things it's pulling in some references it's even going out to slack for some things and then of course there's all kinds of of content here and different references so anyway a little bit of a u you know a side um Jaun there but I think it's important to kind of understand how this comes into play so from here we've got

this database of ideas we have a a system or a process to to start dumping that in and writing through that um th those sets of ideas in order to to Really Harden it right it's like um kind of the I don't know I'll get the the metaphor wrong but it's like kind of making a d diamond right you just you're just compressing and pressing and put more more pressure on that until it becomes something beautiful I think writing is a good process to do that with it helps us think um writing is a little

bit more strained than just talking although I think that's a good you know doing videos doing um and we'll talk about this a little bit video content can be a healthy way to to sort of practice going through how you're explaining things over and over again but writing is even more constrained and so has a tendency um to allow you to get more and more refined and succinct um make that story shorter make that that description shorter uh turn everything into an email um is kind of really good um way to think about this and

and I often do when I'm um writing something the the context I usually do people always say hey write for a particular person or or have somebody in mind what I actually often do is I think about hey I'm going to send an email like how can I write this as succinctly as possible and get an action out of it so email normally I don't send an email unless I'm expecting some sort of reply or action right that's also a good context um to start to to write through um my ideas the next step is

to pick a platform so chances are you don't have an audience you don't have a website that has SEO you don't have probably a ton of capital to start blowing on PPC so my suggestion is to pick a platform um that has kind of two key characteristics one it inherently has your ICP on that platform and then two it's a platform that you probably use and are comfortable with you understand the culture of it and that sort of thing that's going to be your initial platform for audience development to do that it's just as simple

as creating something content and Publishing daily again in order to do that daily you're going to have to get it pretty tight right so it should be something short it should be easy for you to produce it could be you know uh constraining yourself to 500 words or less and Publishing to medium it could be creating um a a Twitter thread or X thread or short post on X again nice that it constrains you not as much as it used to but constrains you to get that that idea concise it also isn't very long right

so you can actually create something like that and publish it every day it doesn't have to be perfect again you're writing to think you're putting out some raw material you're trying to get some reaction to it which again puts more pressure and and starts to hone that right iron sharpens iron LinkedIn is another great one for B2B marketing LinkedIn marketing can be another and that's just literally publishing to your feed they also have an articles feature videos becoming more important to that channel so I encourage you always to kind of think about video YouTube can

also be a great platform people um go to YouTube to figure things out to find out how to do things and so that can be a platform um that has your ICP in there trying to solve problems which is you know ultimately when we're you know we're providing a Solutions so any of those platforms where people are looking to solve problems or to to educate themselves that's a perfect platform to kind of put those people in front of you and start to build this audience that is your ICP that is potentially interested in the product

or service that that you're developing so um so begin that that process of of publishing daily and the audience will just come to you that's the neat thing about these platforms right as you publish it will distribute um the algorithms are getting smarter and smarter so they're looking at your content um they're looking at how people react to it um and they're giving it distribution based on sort of the the the most optal um audience for that type of content because they want to please you know all these people in their platform is ultimately the

customers so they're doing their best to to please them the second component of this um while you're doing this or is your next step is very specific LinkedIn marketing and so in this category essentially you're going into LinkedIn somewhat behind the scenes I suggest that you um have a subscription to sales Navigator and a premium account and what this allows you to do inside a sales Navigator and I'll link um a video that I have for LinkedIn marketing and specifically for sales Navigator and that'll tell you a little bit deeper how to use sales Navigator

but basically what you're doing in sales Navigator is you're taking probably hopefully what you've written over here is your ICP you're taking that into sales Navigator and it gives you a really easy query tool where you can literally build out the characteristics that you've defined in the ICP you can talk about company size you can talk about role titles you can literally go through and select all those things and it will build essentially a database query that will go into LinkedIn and create a a very granular search for your icps from that you can look

at all of the people that return and you can continue to refine that until that list of people is as perfect as it can be right that you want to get to a place where the majority of those people are people that it looks like you would be interested in talking to that's how you're going to use sales Navigator you're going to save that search some of those folks you can go down through there and you can save them to your lead list again and that that um LinkedIn sales Navigator um marketing strategy I tell

you how to kind of create a lead list I I recommend creating one each quarter because there's so many that'll give you some Focus you can also look at some of the companies that come up and say hey are some of those companies strategic logos for me in which case I can save those as well as company into my account list what all that's going to do is is essentially going to give me in sales Navigator somewhat similar feed to H what I have in LinkedIn the only difference is I've 100% curated it to my

ICP and so I can go down through that I can work within that feed to engage with those folks in in a very organic way as a part of that you're going to do a follow campaign and a connection campaign the follow campaign requires nothing you just see people that you think are interesting I suggest that you look before you start following somebody to see are they active in LinkedIn there's a little activity section and and see if they're active if they're not active in LinkedIn there really no point in and following or even connecting

with them because they're not paying attention on LinkedIn so there is no LinkedIn marketing strategy to have there so that's kind of a neat feature you know a lot of these other marketing channels you can't really figure out whether or not they're they're active unless you kind of directly observe them but anyway go ahead follow the ones that are interesting that requires nothing from them and then you can create a CA connection campaign and again I talk in that LinkedIn marketing video about um you know how to do that connection campaign including the script that

I use um which is very productive so again this act activity is going to continue to grow this audience that's your main focus initially is try to get the audience that is aware and cares about what you're doing grow that as large as possible so that's our first step just audience development we're doing these things in order to get people to notice us get on their radar get them to sort of um agree with or by following you and by becoming part of your audience they're essentially s buying into your philosophy right so whatever that

philosophy is that's created this Vision this idea all of this when they become part of your audience and they start following and paying attention to they're buying into that Vision they're buying into that philosophy so when it comes to selling this is going to be a lot easier right because they've essentially already bought in to your perspective of the world right so that can be really powerful so next step once I've I've started to get some action I've started to get some audience I've started to get some awareness around my my product or my service

and of course hopefully the company as well then I start my email Outreach and you can notice I put this all the way over in the end so many B2B marketing strategies start with cold email Outreach and you see I don't even call it cold email Outreach because I want when I start my email Outreach campaigns I want the be this I want this to be a a warm Landing into the inbox I'm hoping at this point and I should because in here in sales Navigator I should have created my list my email list from

this activity in sales Navigator so that means I I should have followed them I probably made a connection request so there there should be no question when I go to start working my email Outreach that everybody on here has actually seen or heard me up until this point couple things about email Outreach just to give it a little more depth is one become a CRM expert right this is probably one of the larger mistakes that I see and it's so frequent sales folks or early Founders or early stage startups there's this tendency to kind of

go after the shiny object and a lot of the people at least we talk to in fintech probably software people anyway and so every time they see a new feature or hear kind of a a new value proposition around software they just assume it's going to you know there's I won't say soon but there's a tendency to think it's going to solve all of of your issues and it's going to make sales so much easier the fact of the matter most of these crms very quickly kind of come to the same feature set my advice

is pick a CRM that you're comfortable with that you can you can work in you're familiar with you have confidence in and then become an expert of that CRM system and start building your systems around that and then stick with it because ultimately I can guarantee you if it's a if it's a robust CRM any feature you see over here they're going to kind of quickly come to a similar result or that feature wasn't important right so so you're going to get whatever you need I would stay I would stay as stable as you can

with that CRM because that database every time you change it essentially sort of wrecks the database right some people get move some people don't the sequences have to start all over it creates this weird experience on the other in that customer was seeing something that made sense and then obviously it's changed so often times in B2B marketing and and the serum systems that potential ICP is going to notice that's like something's happened here that's different and that can be off-putting so settle into your CRM become an expert um out there in some videos I'll probably

make some recommendations that sort of thing I personally use clothes.com which I think is a great one and I've used it for for years like probably 10 or 15 years almost as long as they've been around I just settled into that now there's been a lot of other ones I've I've played around with some other ones but my core database has always lived and breathed inside of clothes and that's the way it should be because that's going to give you the most sort of fidelity and integrity on that database and it's going to give those

icps those those prospects those opportunities the most consistent experience um as they interact with you of course you're going to build that ICP list like we said a lot of that should be built off a sales Navigator and then you're going to bring in something like rocket reach or Apollo to actually get the email component of that going to drop that in there and then this is that relationship that I was talking about there should be various statuses in there and sequences and that's going to help you with some of the heavy lifting of automation

across those areas where people are maybe less responsive or lower priority or just haven't engaged with you yet and then sequences can also help with win backs follow backs ghosting and those sorts of things so again these are automated sales automation that allows you to spend all of your attention on actually Discovery sessions sales meetings and those sorts of things so live engaged leads the last component here um is the actual lead generation mechanism itself and in some regard I don't necessarily start here because I think getting the content created and working on the platforms

is far more important to have an audience before you even have a website and you can easily start with just a landing page to offer for I often suggest you notice I talk about a lead magnet here I often suggest that that's your MVP you create a lead magnet just to you know determine a couple things one is this interesting and then two can you create a transaction an exchange of value can I get somebody to give me an email list for me to give them my white paper or my ebook and so that can

be facilitated just with a landing page you don't even have to up a website yet and maybe you shouldn't until You' validated again this idea so everything that we're doing here in lead generation is in an effort to validate and then ultimately to propel that idea into just common understanding often times starting with a landing page and later a full-on website what am I trying to do with this I'm going to continue this sort of writing and Publishing I want to continue that on to my own platform over time I want to be be able

to build an asset here and so this content facilitates a set of of rabbit Trails right they're going to read this content they're going to check it out before they want to interact with me so it's going to create what I always talk about the rabbit trails and rabbit holes it's going to allow them to sort of binge and and totally understand what you're about what this idea is about and then ideally they're they're buying into that along the way and then if they do react to this call to action and there's a couple different

options here then that means that they've bought in and they're ready to talk to you and any sales interaction you have after that should be a lot easier it's going to be questions about that philosophy questions about that content and that's going to make all of that much easier and then of course there's two options here um sort of an A and A B the lead magnet is obviously the lower friction that's going to get them on the email list which is going to feed back into everything that I'm doing here in email Outreach but

there's going to be an exchange give me an email I'm going to give you some some content some deeper content again this can be white papers checklist ebooks could essentially be your kind of informational MVP of whatever that product and service is and then over time as you're targeting different categories or different audiences because you will start to segment probably different categories and different audiences within that larger audience that you can serve this can be really efficient too because you can have a landing page for a particular segment and then they can grab a lead

magnet that's that's addressed directly to them which can be really compelling and then ultimately your your your your preferential CTA your primary CTA should be that Discovery session right get them on a call and again that process of of getting engaged with them having a sales call a discovery call a demo that's your kind of ultimate lead generation so now lead generation for beginners we've done all of this process in order to achieve this ultimate lead and a lot of times we start with a lead we don't start with the audience development so we'll get

we get all wrapped up in websites and landing pages and all that sort of thing but we don't have anybody to visit we haven't built out any audiences we don't have any channels built out so you have to do this step first in order to expect to get some good leads hope you've enjoyed this video hopefull it's been helpful for you if you have any questions dive into the comments I'll personally answer any questions and and follow up there I so much appreciate you guys if you've enjoyed it so far encourage you to subscribe like

and follow and we'll see you on the next video