The path to turning a B2B marketing strategy into tactics

You’ve produced a solid B2B marketing strategy; congratulations!

• You have identified your ideal customer profile (ICP) and target markets
• You have set clear goals
• …. And now what?

What should you do next?

And where should you even start?

Sadly, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to strategy. I don’t know your plan and, therefore, can’t tell you exactly what to do. What I can do is share thoughts on how to draw your path and prioritize your actions based on your plan, as well as how to break down your marketing strategy into actionable B2B marketing tactics.

Here’s what this post covers:

• Adopt the Agile way of work
• Build your content plan
• Build your advertising plan
• Explore marketing automation
• Segment your audience and personalize their experience
• Sit down and assess

To turn a B2B marketing strategy into tactics, you’ll need to adopt a structured and rigorous working method.

Work agile; keep track of everything, optimize and iterate

Wait, what does it mean to work agile?

Solid plans are made to be broken reviewed.

Working agile in a B2B marketing organization means using flexible and iterative processes to quickly adapt as you learn and as you go.

It involves:

• Breaking your work into sprints (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc., depending on what works best for you - we at Advance B2B usually work in monthly sprints with our customers)
• Breaking heavy projects into smaller tasks
• Having frequent check-ins and reviews
• Measuring your performance against greater goals
• Reviewing your marketing strategy based on real-time data and team collaboration

This approach ensures marketing efforts are more responsive, efficient, and aligned with client needs.

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Do you know what rhymes with Marketing? P-L-A-N-N-I-N-G.

Listen to Sophie Hedestad (CMO at Netigate) discuss how marketers can move growth needles by working agile and being more strict about planning ahead.

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Now, the folks over at AgileSherpas reveal that 86% of marketing teams plan to transition to an Agile way of working, to some degree, in 2024 (with 52% of this crowd being from B2B organizations).

Of course, you know how it works. Numbers can mean everything and nothing, and, more often than not, studies like this one are biased (the world isn’t all unicorns and hugs and all that).

Having said that, 86% still shows a clear market trend; you need to consider implementing an agile working style in your marketing organization.

If you’re not planning on doing this, you can forget about this whole thing. I just want to stress the importance of keeping a tidy kitchen if you want to get anything done promptly.

I can only recommend working in sprints and using a task or project management tool (Trello is a great place to start, as it requires no investment). Here’s an easy breakdown to start with.

To clarify things, you can add extra steps, such as ‘Pending’ or ‘In review,’ between your Ongoing sprint and Completed tasks lists.

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Now that this is established, let’s move on to the actual work you need to produce.

Develop your content marketing plan

As a content person myself, I had to start with … content-related stuff.

It goes without saying that your content should support your company goal.

This means you can’t just go with the flow, publish content when you feel like it, or publish something because someone from accounting heard something on the radio last Tuesday.

You need a structured content plan.

A content mix you can actually deliver

There are probably thousands of content projects you could start to support your overall company goal. But you need to make choices based on what you and your team can actually deliver on a regular basis.

This means making a shortlist of content you can create, that your audience actually consumes and that you can measure to ensure it supports your business growth.

Build a content calendar

Trello and similar task managers are great for tracking ongoing tasks, but you need a document to track your overall plan.

For that, you need a content calendar.

Rest assured, it doesn’t need to be complicated.

Just something that tells you and your team:

• When to work on things to ensure you publish them on time and maintain consistency
• Who is involved
• What’s the task at hand
• What should be prioritized, when
• What type of content (blogs, whitepapers, webinars, etc.) to create
• When to go back to your existing content to optimize it.

We actually have a free content planning template to do just that.

Make room to repurpose your content…

…as much as you can.

If statistics speak the truth, there’s a strong chance you’re part of a small team (or even a one (wo)man army). But even if you’re not, there’s only so much time during the day for you and your team to deliver content that has a chance to support your business goals.

Now, there are ways to do more without spreading yourself too thin.

Repurposing the content you create is a perfect place to start.

What do I mean exactly?

Well, if you are a content creator and somewhat function like me, your brain does more when you’re not jumping from one topic to another.

So, if you’re working on a new downloadable file, think about what other formats you could produce without having to rewrite too much of the content. In the case of a downloadable, you could easily create:

• A few blog posts
• A webinar?
• A course?
• A series of social media posts?
• A couple of short videos?

It is more work, yes. But you already did the heavy lifting—you have the content and narrative. Now, you just need to fit it into different molds to expand your reach and target those among your ICP audience who don’t download/read long-written guides.

In short, always look for opportunities to repurpose content for different platforms and formats to maximize reach and efficiency.

Prep an organic content distribution plan

I hate to break it to you, but if you don’t distribute your own content, don’t expect anyone to do it for you.

Whatever content you create, you need to let your audience know by leveraging your owned distribution channels (newsletters and social media channels).

Of course, creating engaged email lists and audiences on social media is a long-term game, but the reward is really worth it.

Revisit your existing blog content

This is extremely important.

Whether you’re sitting on hundreds of blog posts or barely starting with content production, you should save a few hours each month to update previously published blog content.

Why?

First of all, everything evolves fast(er), and there’s a strong chance that your product/service or messaging is also evolving with time. Revisiting old content will simply help create more consistency between your old content and your current goals and messaging.

The other obvious element to consider is Google (yes, there are other search engines, but let’s not fool ourselves here). Content refreshes ultimately send positive signals to Google Algorithms, as they basically mean that what you have to offer is up to date.

It’s all about common sense.

1. Refresh your content
2. Provide a better/relevant experience to visitors
3. Better experience leads to higher engagement (higher time on page, lower bounce rate, etc.).
4. Higher engagement sends positive signals to Google.
5. Search engine boost

More on this topic: Build a B2B SaaS content marketing strategy for YOUR brand

Develop your strategic advertising plan

Advertising is a necessity for any serious B2B company out there.

Strategic advertising, that is.

What’s upsetting is that advertising is often perceived as a sole lead-generation tool or, worse, as a nice-to-have.

It’s (much) more than that.

Advertising is necessary to get your rocket ship off the ground and support its long-term growth.

To name but a few, strategic advertising is key to:

• Building brand awareness and credibility: simply put, high-quality and well-targeted ads will keep your company top-of-mind for your target audience.
• Supporting lead demand generation and nurturing: if your messaging, landing pages, and assets are spot on, advertising will greatly contribute to attracting quality leads or users and, therefore, give you a chance to nurture them and move them down your sales funnel.
• Understanding the impact of your actions quicker: with paid media, you pay to place your messages in front of your ICP. This gives you a chance to instantly measure whether your overall messaging resonates (or not) with your audience).

Experiment until you find your most relevant channels

Your media budget is limited. This means you need to make choices and target specific channels. Now, if you can assume that LinkedIn will outperform channels Meta and Reddit, you can’t know for sure until you try.

Use your ICP research, formulate hypotheses, make a shortlist of channels to test in priority, and split your budget reasonably to give each channel a chance to aggregate enough data to help you draw conclusions.

If you set out to benchmark 3 different channels, here’s what reasonable could look like.

Reasonable budget split (when testing new channels)

Alternatively, here’s what I’d consider unreasonable when starting with new paid channels.

Unreasonable budget split (when testing new channels)

Of course, this unreasonable model is what your budget split could look like down the road if you realize that investing 20% of your media budget on channels like Meta or Reddit is enough to find the right balance between generating awareness and generating demand.

What I need you to take home from this is:

• Don't put all your eggs into the demand capture basket (usually Google ads), leave some room for brand awareness because you will eventually run out of available demand to capture.
• Leave room for experiment budget

At the end of the day, it really is about common sense and what makes sense for your business.

About that, where should YOU start? Mónika, Paid Acquisition Strategist & Advertising Competence Lead at Advance B2B, has a good piece of advice for you.

“Begin with channels that you think would work best, but leave wiggle room to experiment with new channels later.

Linkedin works? Sweet. How about trying Meta or Reddit with, on average, a lower CPA? You can later review lead quality and assess whether or not those new channels are worth it. Then, try again with new channels, and new formats. Never settle”.

— Mónika Bene-Merta

More on strategic advertising here: No Paid Advertising, no Growth Marketing. Here's why.

Make use of marketing automation

By marketing automation, I mean using tools like HubSpot to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows, such as email marketing campaigns and social media posts, to improve your efficiency and drive more effective customer engagement.

Now, depending on the approach, marketing automation is a hit-or-miss.

There’s a vast range of marketing automation actions, from delivering ebooks to carefully crafted nurturing programs. I won’t focus on this bit as it would turn into a bullet point blog (and you probably don’t need me to schedule automated emails).  Instead, I will focus on something with more value-added: lead scoring and personalization.

Use lead scoring to bring your leads to maturity

I’m not going to share another study to prove my point, but simply say what we’ve learned from working with B2B organizations for over 10 years now: generating leads won’t yield results if they don’t move down the funnel.

In other words, success has never been about generating leads.

It’s always been about attracting quality contacts, setting up a series of relevant actions to move them down your marketing funnel, and closing the gap between MQLs (leads Marketing considers qualified) and SQLs (leads Sales considers qualified).

This is where - among other things - lead scoring comes into play. It allows you to score your contacts in real time based on criteria that you define.

With the right tool, possibilities are near endless.

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Listen to Joel Gaudeul (Ex-Ubisoft, Ulule, Mention, France Digitale, and Alma) share his playbook for improving sales & marketing alignment.

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Did you know? HubSpot is a fantastic platform for setting up a lead-scoring system.

You can use anything relevant you know about contacts to add or remove points. By default, once a contact reaches a score of 100, they become an MQL.

Here are a couple of evergreen criteria you could implement in your lead scoring:

Positive signals

• Contact visited [key page]
• Contact filled [Specific form]
• Contact attended [X] webinars
• Contact downloaded [specific resource]
• Contact visited our blog at least [X] times
• Contact clicked [specific nurturing email]
• Contact is from a key target market

Negative signals

• Contacts with competitor emails
• Contacts with free email providers
• Inactive contacts
• Visitors going through your career pages
• Contact is from a country you don’t target
• Contact unsubscribed from marketing emails

The challenge is to identify and implement the most valuable actions in your scoring. I advise experimenting with scoring and adjusting with time until you find your sweet spot.

Personalize the experience throughout multiple touchpoints

Personalization is essential in B2B marketing because it lets you tailor your messages and solutions to your target audience's needs and pain points.

Over the years, you’ve seen hundreds of ‘trends’ blog posts saying that personalization is the next big thing for year+1.

Ugh. Well as annoying as trends posts are, it’s true.

Personalization is no longer nice to have, as we’ve all gotten used to receiving personalized experiences in e-commerce, social media algorithms, or through advertising.

The objective of personalization is to create more relevant and compelling experiences, which should lead to higher engagement levels (if you got it right). In turn, higher engagement levels should affect your ability to.

1. Turn visitors into customers
2. Increase your customer retention.

In short, one-size-fits-all approaches don’t work anymore.

Fortunately, it’s gotten very easy for the common B2B marketer to create relevant and personalized experiences with tools … like HubSpot.

Here are a couple of simple examples:

Header personalized based on the industry of an already known contact visiting your page.

Ideally, you’d personalize other elements of the page based on what you know from your visitor. For instance, you could push industry-specific customer stories to be more relevant to the visitor.

Pushing specific messages or relevant content via Smart CTAs to your contacts based on their HubSpot lifecycle stage.

Always make time for a critical assessment of your marketing performance

Getting things done is good. But doing things that make sense is much more important.

Always be critical of your work and its impact on your business.

My advice is simple:

Keep a document somewhere close where you’ll make note of actions you should drop, actions you should optimize (or drop), and actions you should keep.

Simply put, if you give your everything to a marketing campaign and it simply doesn’t work, drop it.

Time is money. Resources are money. And marketing shouldn’t be a cost center. It should fuel your B2B organization’s growth.

• If an activity isn’t delivering results, but you still have a couple more things to experiment before calling it, do it.
• If something is working or showing promising results, invest more of your time and energy into it.

Time to get to work!

There you have it, friend!

If you need help figuring any of this out, please reach out! We at Advance B2B have helped countless B2B marketing teams turn marketing into a mean revenue machine.

And if you need help building your marketing strategy, we’re here for you.