How to Choose the Right Marketing Tactics for your B2B Business

How do you choose the best marketing tactics for your B2B company? You need to start with a clear perspective of what you're trying to accomplish. First understand these 5 dimensions of your business and it will be surprisingly clear what to do, how much to spend and whether or not it's working.

A common question I hear when I talk with business leaders is, "What should I be doing What are the marketing tactics and programs that are best, most effective, most powerful and help me achieve my business objectives?"

And I get it. It's a tough one to answer. There are so many options available today that that it can be paralyzing to look at all the things you could do and decide what's the right thing to do.

What I found is that the best thing you can do to help yourself with that decision is get as clear as possible an understanding of your business, your customer and your market landscape - how it all is going to work for you to be successful - and then apply marketing tactics where they're needed on that landscape.

There are five dimensions to truly understanding your B2B marketing situation and plan.

Your business

This is your business plan: Why do you exist? What's your purpose? How will you achieve that purpose? How will you deliver on it?

You may say, "Well, of course we know what that is." It's also important to make sure that everyone has the same understanding of this on your team. That is a surprisingly common missing step. Getting everybody agreed will make it easier to decide together what's important.

Your customer

Like the business plan, you may have a general understanding of who your customers are, or you may be seeing who's buying from you, but it's really important to be crystal clear on who it is specifically. That is your ideal customer. What is it exactly that they need that you are going to be providing for them?

Having that clearly defined and commonly understood across your team will be really helpful here.

Your story

The third dimension is your story, your message. It's really powerful, by the way, to have only one story.

That doesn't mean you just say one thing over and over again. Rather, think of it this way: all of your messages should be chapters of a single story. That consistency across all of the places your customer experiences you will really help you be much more effective, and will prevent confusing and conflicting messaging from different people in your organization.

It's also really important that this story is your customer's story, not your story.

That means you want to talk about how what you do is helping your customer rather than about what you do.

Your customers' journey

The fourth dimension is your customers' experience - their journey working with you.

You need to have an end-to-end understanding of what you want to happen from the first time your customers meet you or hear about you, all the way through them getting to know you, buying from you, using your product and becoming a loyal fan.

Having that clear understanding, actually thinking through what is it we expect to happen here, is a step that sometimes is missed that will really sanity-check your value proposition and your model to confirm that it actually works.

You can use existing customer data, but you can also do you do some research and figure it out.

This is probably the most important dimension in terms of choosing the right marketing programs.

Your marketing budget

The last dimension is your budget - how much you're going to invest in marketing.

This exercise will be really valuable if you base it on the customer journey learning that you did in the previous step. If you look at the seven stages of the customer journey, seeing where the gaps are, where the issues are, will help you focus your investments and your resources to where they can make the biggest difference.

Get a clearer understanding of these five dimensions for your business. It doesn't have to be months long work; any level of understanding of these better than you have today will make it so much easier to choose the right marketing programs and have a clear expectation on exactly what the result of that marketing program is that you want to achieve.

Having that clarity will allow you to measure and see if what you're doing is working, and experiment with new things as needed to meet your expectations.