For a B2B, outsourcing your marketing efforts can be nerve wracking. What if the company doesn’t understand our customers? How will they establish my company’s persona? At VA Partners, we have a proven plan that quells your outsourced B2B marketing concerns up front and generates tangible results.
Last week I had a great conversation with an inbound lead about our outsourced B2B marketing offering and how it could help their company. At the end of the conversation, our marketing plan and the steps we take in client engagement was brought up. To help any of our readers who may be interested in outsourcing their marketing efforts, I’ve outlined these steps below.
Understand the solution and their customer
The most important think when creating a marketing strategy and the associated tactics is understanding the buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey includes identifying the types of information a buyer needs and where they can get that information from as they make a decision. Interwoven into this is our client’s solution and how it matches the buyer’s problem and needs. This information is collected from a prospect, by doing research, and through our kick-off meeting.
Create a plan
Our methodology is called the Sales and Marketing Fast Start Plan. It takes our knowledge and learnings about the organization, solution, customers, competitors, our own experiences, and industry best practices. This is then translated into a holistic marketing strategy that includes marketing tactics, messaging, timing, and goals.
Look for the low hanging fruit
The Sales and Marketing Fast Start Plan will often outline many new tactics and next steps. Our outsourced B2B marketing offering works on providing the best ROI for our customer. This means starting with the best tactics first. As an example we had a training client that had a big email list that was being inconsistently used. Our first efforts with this client was to create a schedule, update the email format, scrub the list, and add recent customers to it. This resulted in 2 to 3 times the traffic the previous emails had, doubled the click through rate, and led to more training sign-ups.
Set-up infrastructure
One of the benefits of using an Outsourced B2B Marketing firm is that we are able to provide our expertise of affordable and effective B2B marketing tools. These tools need to be set-up, which takes some time. This short term effort leads to medium term results as well as a more efficient effort supporting the engagement. This also means adding features and functionality to a clients website to better drive traffic and conversions.
Keep the marketing machine moving
Once the infrastructure is set-up then we work on constantly executing with tactics. We use a marketing content calendar to keep us on track. This consistent effort is the best for driving inbound leads as well as helping to nurture and support the sales teams leads.
Review results and tweak tactics
VA Partners reviews the marketing results on a regular basis. For most of our clients this means a monthly review. We look at a number of the tactics and results to determine what is working best and what we should tweak in the short and medium term. These goals would typically include website traffic, email open and click throughs, social engagement, leads, and lead closes.
If you would like to talk about how the VA Partners B2B Marketing Outsourcing offering could work for you, reach out to me and we can set-up a time to discuss.
