8 Steps to a Winning B2B Marketing Strategies

all right in this video I'm going to go over the eight steps that I use the checklist that I use to build winning B2B marketing strategies I use this same process uh every single time um and I think it will keep you on track uh and I think it will keep you out of some of the mistakes that we often make as marketers we kind of just jump in um and do before we sort of think through what ultimately that business objective is or what we're trying to accomplish with our B2B marketing strategy so let's

hop into the checklist first and foremost and this is where most of the kind of fidelity uh and the effectiveness of the campaigns are lost in planning is the lack of research so take some time and do some research really understand um the ICP um the competitors that are already in the space I I think too often um as the old adage you know goes if you've got a hammer everything looks like a nail uh as marketers especially those of us with some experience we probably have some go-to sort of tactics and strategies and campaigns

and approaches that have worked effectively for us over time and it doesn't mean not to use those um it just means to step back for a second and do some of that detailed re research some of my favorite ways to do this of course is to take a look at some of the tools that are available to you if you got some SEO expertise or PPC expertise um you can dive into those tools just simply kind of looking at your competitors and you probably know your competitor competitors if you're working with a sales team which

you should be you should be in alignment with your sales team um you can ask them who those competitors are who they run into and just literally take a look and and dive into them take a look at the people who are involved um on LinkedIn you can kind of see where they came from that can give you some really good Clues um as you start to sort of build that B2B marketing strategy and then also take a look at the icps again you should be able to get a good definition from your sales team

um as to who they're most effective with and again take a look at those people take a look specifically at people they've talked to or been effective with get into your CRM um and then go to LinkedIn with some of those folks that they've been affected with and then one of my favorite um really requires no one um but can be kind of your best interview and that is and I'll do a whole video on this uh because I don't see a lot of people doing this but go to chat GPT and take that ICP

or a couple of those icps that that that ideal customer profile customer Avatar that you've built up and feed that in as a prompt to chat GPT say hey you're a you know VP of marketing with this type of company give it Revenue you can give it all kinds of parameters and characteristics and say hey this is who you are and I want to interview you and ask you some questions and then after that prompt you will watch chat GPT will come back with you know a response that will basically tell them hey I'm in

this role um and it will sort of pair it back to you what you told hold it to be and then from there you can make sure that you've kind of narrowed that in and then simply interview that and in that that thread that dialogue just interview what are your pains what are your anxieties what what are some of the personal things that you're thinking about and again all kinds of deep interesting questions that you can ask and you can do that for a couple different icps and create sort of your own AI version of

a really effective Deep dive survey okay so that's your research I spent a lot of time there because I want to make sure sure that I have a clear understanding of what I'm trying to achieve and I have all of the raw materials to start building this campaign the second piece is to make sure that you're being nich driven so even if you're building a bigger campaign or you have some really big audacious objectives it's helpful to sort of Niche down uh as close as you can and then and again this is another place you

can use chat GPT try to become as much as you can as much as reasonable a domain expert and when I say domain expert I mean actually put yourself in the chair of that ICP and trying to work within that business so really learn how that business works you will be so much more effective um in your Outreach and the campaigns that you build if you truly understand um the business from their seat so Niche driven uh will make that so much easier to do and and really ratchet down um and and get you to

be a little bit more effective and and make that overall strategy that you're building uh a little bit more attainable it also give you a tiny test case so it's good to to do multiple test the more you Niche down the smaller those campaigns can be initially so you can get some some immediate feedback all right number three the landing page this is probably one of the most critical components to actually generating leads make sure that you've created a landing page um first for kind of all of those targets or all of those campaigns approaches

that you're going to to attempt so you've defined your ICP youve kind of defined your approach as to how you're going to go in with pain or solution and those sorts of things and then make sure you have a landing page for the product or service specifically that you're going to offer and it should be starting to line up with the message that you're going to use so ideally and we haven't even got to the messaging part but you're going to create some sort of Outreach message or advertising message or campaign message or um SEO

um content sort of approach and topic and then you want that to match your landing page cuz everything that you do out there whether it's social media LinkedIn Google ads SEO is going to ultimately push back to this landing page and you want that landing page to one capture the lead because most of the time when they hit that landing page they've already decided to inquire with you right 70% of those are ready to interact with you so make sure that that that uh positioning statement that value prop um and the lead capture form are

all there right at the top so that they can go ahead and convert into a lead without any distraction or friction and then the rest of that landing page is simply going to support um reinforcing trust and credibility and all those uh the benefits of engaging with you or taking that meeting or scheduling that meeting and then essentially sort of drive them up to the top of the page so make sure you sorted that out um eventually that that may be a larger website but depending on where you are um in your your growth as

a startup um you may just have a landing page and then ultimately build a website around that so um landing page is the most important then now that we have kind of our infrastructure we have our research in hand now we're going to go to audience development now we have to actually build out uh an audience a following and get a channel developed so that we can actually Market into again another place where people often make a mistake of getting all their marketing material their sales collateral they advertising but they don't actually have a channel

developed right they don't have any reputation on the ad platform or as an Advertiser um they don't have any SEO traffic yet because they haven't built enough content and taking enough time they're not they don't have anybody listening or following them on LinkedIn on uh Instagram on YouTube where on Twitter X I guess um wherever that wherever you're kind of going from a channel perspective um make sure that you have a channel of distribution make sure you have an audience inside of those channels so you may need to drop back a little bit and do

some audience development and usually that's as simple uh as going into that channel and producing some content or reaching out into the channel or running some advertising and and getting a little bit of credibility uh as an Advertiser on that that platform so whatever that channel is make sure that you give yourself enough time or set expectations that you're going to need to develop the channel a little bit and you won't get your sort of immediate lead results until you've got you know a sizable audience around you so audience development is critical and it should

be a step in your plan so that when you're setting that in front of Executives or stakeholders that they have expectations that hey there's going to take a little bit of time for us to develop that channel and create an audience within it then the rest of these are are more of the Tactical things right so I won't go into too much depth these are the things that everybody always talks about but start to think about the tactics that you're going to use so um often for me especially with B2B I like to leave with

SEO and content uh whether that's in inside of a platform like LinkedIn or YouTube uh or X where there's already my icps in there and I just have to sort of attract them with content um or on my website um ideally if I've got a website that's already got some credibility um I can hang content off of that in the categories that I'm looking and that will um in essence attract searches and bring people in as well so that's where I like to start is with content and with either a platform that already has my

icps um and some audience or easier way to develop the audience um or I'm going out to my website I'm probably going to do both even if I don't have my SEO sort of going and the website doesn't have credibility or domain Authority or anything like that yet I at least need to get some some content hanging off of that so that Google can kind of do its way do its thing and we can kind of get there um over time as we're working on these or these more sort of immediate um response type of

channels uh the next one is just advertising right PPC Google ads Facebook ads again depending on who your target is and and how you're doing it it might dictate the the ad platforms that you use but um almost always um I'm at least starting with Google ads and then probably LinkedIn ads as well um but definitely Google ads 90% of the traffic um comes from Google um and that's the search engine so that's going to be your top one uh the other thing is YouTube but a lot of the YouTube stuff you can actually get

organically you don't have to go down the app platform and then number seven and this is where a lot of people end up starting but I don't know that it's the best place to start and that is Outreach so email cold email Outreach I like to start these other things these content and working my social media platforms so that when I start my email Outreach one I should have done all of my work to make sure that I have good icps and I have a good list developed but ideally I've already targeted that same list

in LinkedIn with my content and when I send out that email or those email sequences again ideally they've already heard of me they've already seen some of my content maybe they've even um sort of binged it and gone down that Rabbit Trail with me and so they maybe bought into that philosophy a little bit I'm going to get a lot better response rate if I've already started to surround them so even if I'm just doing straight Outreach maybe I don't have the the funds to you know the budgets to do all of these things even

if I'm going to say hey I'm going to put all my eggs in the Outreach basket I'm going to do LinkedIn uh connection strategy and campaign ahead of doing my email Outreach so at least in LinkedIn they will have already seen me and been become sort of aware of my brand and my offering um and then when that email comes in it will not come in cold so I would never lead with email and none of these other things so ideally you're doing all of it to build up again that audience that's the most important

thing the biggest asset you that you're building is that audience that is aware of your product and your company brand and then from there that email Outreach will be so much more effective and then the last step in the eight step process is my analytics I make sure that when I build out that landing page um I have conversion uh tracking uh already built into to my ga4 my my Google analytics so that I'm very clear as to what activities are producing the lead and then um ideally again if you have the resources you're going

to set up a Google dashboard or looker Studio or something like that but at the very least you should get um well acquainted with ga4 or Google analytics have conversion tracking setup in there so that you can watch the channels at work you can watch the traffic at work and see what's producing your leads and you can double down ultimately on what's working so I hope you enjoyed um kind of going through my checklist and it's been helpful you can kind of double check it against what you're doing um I would love for you to

join me as a subscriber so hit that subscribe that notification Bell and of course if you've been here all this time I would really appreciate uh a like on this video any questions drop them in the comments I'm active in there and I will be happy to to answer any followup that you have and until then uh I will see you on the next video