In B2B marketing, trying out innovations can be thrilling, but it’s easy for your plans to fall apart. The real challenge lies in turning those innovative ideas into concrete results. This is what sets successful marketing apart from average performance.
But first! You need to set a clear strategy execution framework for B2B marketing. This ensures you achieve your goals and meet your vision. In this blog, we share the details on a practical structure to transform your intentions into impactful deeds that drive your desired business outcomes!
In a recent survey by Statista, U.S. B2B marketing decision-makers shared their top growth challenges in the digital landscape. Here’s a snapshot:
- 27% lack knowledge about effective digital marketing techniques.
- 26% struggle with digitalizing their sales process.
- 25% feel they lack expertise in creating a strong online buyer’s journey.¹
These challenges might leave even the experts scratching their heads. The solution? A clear, value-driven strategy to chart the digital course.
Gain Great Results with a Steady Strategy Framework: Factors to Consider in Your Execution
B2B marketing is a realm of boundless creativity. To navigate the ever-changing landscape, a strategy execution framework is your guiding star. Here’s a framework you can follow, with ideas on why certain elements are important to your strategies.
Strategy: Define Your Core Initiatives
Kickstart your strategy by defining your core. Your mission, vision, and values are the cornerstones.
Core Values: These principles steer your strategy, setting ethical and cultural standards. They shape your decisions and guide interactions within your organization and with clients.
Mission and Vision: Clarify your company’s purpose and future goals. A well-crafted mission reveals why your company exists and the value it brings to clients. Vision paints a vivid picture of your desired future, rallying your team toward it.
Goals: Set Your Milestones
Next step? Envisioning your goals. Setting milestones for your B2B marketing strategy provides measurable checkpoints for your progress. They let you identify what’s working and what isn’t so you can course correct and make sure your strategy stays aligned with your goals.
Having milestones in place can enhance your team’s accountability, facilitate communication between people, and optimize resource allocation for your effective B2B marketing campaign execution. Here are three milestones you can set to help you check on your progress.
Related Reading: X-Ray Vision for B2B Marketers: See Through Your Ideal Audience!
1 Year Goals
One-year goals provide you with a focused timeframe that helps you balance short-term results and long-term vision. This period aligns with your annual business cycles, so setting goals for this time period enables consistent evaluation, adjustment, and efficient resource allocation.
Imagine you’re a staffing agency aiming to increase placements in the healthcare sector. Setting one-year goals allows you to focus on both immediate and long-term success. You can evaluate your progress regularly, ensuring your strategy aligns with your annual business cycles. For instance, your one-year goal might be to achieve a 20% increase in healthcare placements.
90-Day OKRs
Your 90-day Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) can help promote agility and quick adaptation. This lets you have shorter feedback loops with your team to assess progress, adjust tactics, and stay aligned with conditions in the market.
Think of this as a series of checkpoints in your journey. If your staffing agency faces seasonal fluctuations, your 90-day Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) could help you adapt quickly. Let’s say you’re experiencing high demand for retail staff during the holiday season. Your 90-day OKR might involve a 15% increase in retail placements during that period.
2-Week Sprints
2-week sprints cultivate a nimble approach. This encourages you to regularly assess and adjust based on your real-time results. This helps ensure timely responses to emerging opportunities and keeps your team members focused on achievable goals.
Suppose your agency spots an emerging opportunity in the tech industry. A 2-week sprint can help you swiftly adjust your strategy to focus on tech placements, ensuring your team stays aligned with achievable goals.
Projects: Create Sturdy Steps to Climb
Projects are your organized initiatives aimed at achieving specific objectives within a timeframe. Through these projects, you can execute various elements of the overall strategy and contribute to the larger business goals.
Projects could include marketing campaigns, launching new products and productized services, and events. Here’s a closer look:
Define the Why
Ask yourself why you want to execute a project and what you want to gain from it once it’s completed. What is the pain points you plan on addressing? Go back to your mission and vision. Understand how this project will move towards that vision you set.
For example, if you’re launching a campaign to promote specialized IT staffing, tie it back to your vision of becoming a leader in tech talent solutions.
Define a Plan to Execute
The content marketing plan you will execute for the project should cover specific steps for the completion of the project. Your plan and its steps should be concrete, realistic, and achievable with the resources at hand.
Your plan should include: a project timeline, potential location or channels, and the story you want to tell through it.
Manage Stakeholders
Stakeholders are people who will potentially be interested in your project and may benefit from it directly and indirectly. Consider what stakeholders will value in the project you will be working on. Understand what part of it will resonate with what matters to them and their needs.
Say you’re organizing a recruitment event, think about what job seekers and hiring companies expect and ensure your event addresses both.
Control Risk, Resources, and Scope
Not all project plans will come out perfectly, so your strategies should be flexible enough to succeed. There’s always the possibility of deviations from your intended plan or strategy. What’s important is that you have contingency plans, flexibility, and a responsive approach to adapt to changes.
Suppose your product or service launch faces delays due to supply chain issues. In that case, your adaptability and alternative strategies can keep your project on track.
Deliver, Document, Celebrate, and Close
The end of your project should come with new learnings and celebrations. Measure what you were able to achieve, whether they met your expectations or not, and document what you can work on in the future.
If your IT staffing campaign surpassed expectations, celebrate the wins with your team and use these successes as motivation for your next ambitious project in the B2B marketing landscape.
Metrics: Measure Your Progress and Success
Your metrics remind you of what you have achieved and what you can still improve when it comes to your B2B marketing efforts.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs provide insights into the effectiveness and efficiency of your efforts. These could include website traffic, social media engagement, email open rates, lead generation rates, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, as well as revenue growth.
Calculating customer acquisition costs and measuring customer lifetime value can shed light on the return on investment (ROI), while monitoring revenue growth reveals the financial health of your B2B marketing strategies.
Key Results
These are specific, measurable outcomes that contribute to achieving your objectives. They are important markers that show how close you are to achieving your broader goals.
Whether it’s increasing lead generation by 20% or enhancing website traffic by 15%, key results provide tangible milestones that help you gauge how close you are to realizing your overarching goals.
Project Progress
Tracking project progress involves monitoring individual assignments within your strategy. It includes assessing whether tasks are on schedule, within budget, and meeting their defined objectives.
This real-time assessment allows you to make timely adjustments and course corrections, ultimately keeping your marketing initiatives on track.
Meeting Cadence
This refers to the regular schedule of your meetings to review and discuss the execution of your strategy. These meetings allow you to align with your team, provide updates, discuss challenges, make decisions, and ensure everyone is on the same page.
Whether it’s weekly check-ins, monthly strategy reviews, or quarterly assessments, a consistent meeting cadence fosters collaboration and keeps your marketing efforts synchronized.
Related Reading: Mid-Year Review: How to Know if Your Staffing Firm is Hitting all Your Marketing Goals
People: Strengthen Your Teams and Individuals
People make your strategies happen and should be part of your framework. Here are some factors you need to define.
Culture
Culture refers to the values, beliefs, behaviors, and norms that your team members will share to define the working environment within your organization. It shapes how people interact, collaborate, and approach their tasks.
For instance, in a staffing agency specializing in healthcare placements, a culture of empathy means that recruiters understand the unique challenges faced by healthcare professionals. They also strive to match them with roles that align with their values and career aspirations.
Organizational Design
Organizational design involves structuring your team to optimize collaboration, communication, and efficiency. It determines reporting relationships, roles, responsibilities, and how members are organized to achieve strategic goals.
In a staffing firm, this means structuring departments or teams based on specialization, such as healthcare, IT, or finance, to optimize expertise. Clear reporting relationships ensure efficient communication between recruiters and account managers, streamlining the process of matching candidates with client needs.
For example, a well-designed organizational structure in an IT staffing agency ensures that technical recruiters collaborate closely with IT professionals to understand their skills and career goals, resulting in better candidate-client matches.
Expectations
In the staffing industry, setting clear performance expectations is vital for accountability. Recruiters should be expected to meet specific key performance indicators (KPIs) like candidate placements per month or client satisfaction scores. For example, in temporary staffing for administrative roles, recruiters may be expected to place a certain number of candidates within a specified timeframe to meet the needs of clients.
Feedback & Support
Regular feedback and support are essential for continuous improvement. Recruiters and account managers should provide constructive feedback to candidates and clients. If you’re in the healthcare staffing sector for instance, this means offering nurses feedback on their performance during assignments, allowing them to grow and deliver better patient care.
Incentives and Recognition
Incentives and recognition shouldn’t be limited to material rewards. This can be redefined as what people involved in your strategy can gain for themselves. These may include new skills, opportunities to take charge, and growth.
Growth and better opportunities are most especially important to Gen Z employees you may be working with.
Follow your framework to success!
As the B2B landscape continues to evolve with new trends and technologies, being armed with a well-honed strategy execution framework can help you excel in your efforts without getting lost along the way. Follow the path you’ve set, and you can always make the best decisions for your business and your team.
ALLIED INSIGHT BRINGS YOU THE BEST B2B MARKETING STRATEGIES
Creating effective B2B marketing strategies can be demanding, but the investment is worth it. At Allied Insight, we’re here to streamline the process and help you make informed decisions.
Our team of full-stack marketing experts offers tailored solutions, including MarCom Strategy and Delivery, Sales and Recruitment Enablement Resources, and Orchestration of Brand-centric Competitive Advantages and Productized Services. Schedule a chat with us today to lay the foundation for your marketing plan success!
Reference
1 Faria, Julia. “Most Challenging Points in Driving Growth in Digital Environments for B2B Marketing Decision Makers in the United States As of May 2022.” Statista, 5 Jun. 2023, www.statista.com/statistics/1317524/us-b2b-marketing-challenges-digital-growth/.
