5. B2B Marketing Strategy: Finding the Needle in the Haystack

The age of inaction in B2B marketing is coming to an end. With the explosion of Marketing Technology (MarTech), the democratisation of publishing/distribution and the evolution of more sophisticated competitor approaches there has never been a more important time to recognise and address the strategic challenge of industrial, technological and wider services based B2B marketing as a core specialism.

Good B2B marketing in practice is often as much about a scientific and strategic approach as it is about creativity. Marketing to highly specific customers in niche segments means navigating a haystack in itself but that term can also be applied to selecting channels or MarTech tools, sifting through content or making sense of an avalanche of data—it actually ends up relating to many different facets of modern B2B marketing. Strategy helps quantify the value of marketing to an organisation.

Anyone who manages a B2B marketing team, budget or campaign inevitably faces this planning headache on a regular basis. Great ideas are still the main output, but those ideas ultimately cannot flourish without the foundation of a strategic platform. Over the course of 20 years, from in-house blue-chip strategies to award-winning campaigns for my agency’s clients I have developed an eight-step model to ensure success in your B2B marketing planning and strategy execution. The methodologies used in putting this strategy model together have been rigorously tested, applied, adapted and enhanced over the course of more than 200 marketing audit and planning processes for SME manufacturers, industrial, B2B service/technology and science-based companies, typically with an annual turnover of £10–£30 million.