4 Steps for Driving Double-Digit Growth with Strategic B2B Marketing 

The success of marketing requires a specialized approach and even within the world of business-to-business (B2B) marketing, there is no effective one-size-fits-all approach.

The proof is in the results seen by companies generating substantial lead generation, revenue growth and return on their marketing investment (ROI) from taking a customized marketing approach. Here are four steps to creating a customized marketing program that will deliver sustainable, double-digit growth for your company.

Start with a Marketing Audit

Double-digit marketing results are only possible if you understand where you stand with your marketing key performance indicators (KPIs), such as keyword rankings, domains linking to your site, organic and overall search traffic, lead generation, sales attributed to leads generating by marketing, and the value of new customers acquired over the course of your relationship with them.

All of the above is part of marketing due diligence that is best performed as a comprehensive marketing audit that identifies what’s working well, what isn’t, and additional marketing activities that will generate results – this is especially critical for effective B2B SEO. 

A thorough marketing audit will evaluate:

• Your Website: brand storytelling, thought leadership, content marketing quality, design, usability (UI/UX), and performance
• Gaps in Onsite Search Engine Optimization (SEO): keyword research, strategic copywriting, crawl issues, etc.
• Offsite SEO Opportunities: linking domains, Google PageRank, opportunities for free and paid directory listings and articles, etc.
• Social Media: LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram
• Pay-per-Click (PPC) Campaigns: Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn Campaigns, and any other paid campaigns – also known as search engine marketing (SEM)
• Marketing Campaigns: email, direct mail and advertising
• Events: in-person and virtual
• Public Relations (PR): press releases, articles, news, presence on third-party websites
• Marketing Technology & Automation: website infrastructure, marketing automation (HubSpot, Zoho, etc.), and use of other technologies
• Marketing Reporting: how you measure and communicate marketing progress
• Competitive intelligence: digital footprint and anything else you want to learn from them (competitive intelligence market research)
• Other Options: product marketing/management, channel programs, pricing, and anything else not listed here that’s part of your marketing activities

Tell the Story of Your Brand

A customized approach to your marketing should be built around a deep understanding of your target market, the problems they face, and how you solve them – this is the value you need to articulate to them to resonate and generate leads.

One of the best ways to establish your brand story is to start with a workshop that includes a series of interviews with company leaders and key, customer-facing team leaders, including those in sales and marketing over 1-2 days. These interviews will provide insight into the elements of your brand story messaging that will resonate with your target market. Topics include:  

• Your Target Market: types of businesses targeted by demographics (size, vertical market, type of problems) and the roles within those businesses that interact with your company
• Their Goals: these need to become your goals if you can solve the problems holding them back
• The Buyer’s Journey: who the influencers and buyers are, what makes them tick (i.e. personas), what drives them to seek out solutions to solve their problems, and how they make decisions
• Differentiators: how your solutions have more value than direct competitors and strategic alternatives (i.e. indirect competitors including apathy)
• Opportunities: where markets you could target but aren’t – for example, those who are unhappy with their current provider, those who resist buying your solutions from anyone, and those who’ve never considered your solutions in the first place but would benefit from them represent Blue Ocean Strategy opportunities.
• Brand Story Fundamentals: what problems you solve, how you solve them, providing evidence that you’ve effectively solved them for many before, and the positive impact of solving them in a measurable way are critically important to articulate as part of your brand story

When conducted effectively, the brand story workshop leads to a detailed guide for what you need to communicate, and to whom, in all of your marketing communications. In the hands of professional copywriters, this brand story messaging will yield an engaging story that you can weave into your website, content marketing, email campaigns, videos, social media, PR, presentations – everything, because it’s the story of your prospects achieving their goals with your help.

Build Momentum with Agile Marketing 

Your marketing is never finished: competitors don’t stand still, new ones arrive, traditional approaches decline in effectiveness, and new opportunities emerge. Drawing from agile methodology, marketing needs to be rapidly implemented, continuously improved, and subjected to constant refinement and improvement built on KPIs aligned to your business goals, especially lead generation, new customer acquisition, revenues, profitability, and overall business value – this is the true purpose of marketing. 

That’s why cookie-cutter marketing efforts or those that take a design-first approach cannot drive sustainable business growth. An agile marketing approach ensures that marketing is strategic, efficient and results-driven, and agile enough to change course when something isn’t working or declines in effectiveness.

Get Help 

When you’re ready to put a better marketing strategy to work for your software company, you don’t have to do it alone. Partnering with a B2B marketing agency allows you to leverage their experience of working with dozens or hundreds of companies at a fraction of the cost of hiring internal employees – just make sure you find one that has B2B marketing consulting experience so they can formulate the strategy that will deliver results, which often starts with a comprehensive marketing audit.

If you choose wisely and your B2B marketing agency helps you grow, you can build up your internal team and be able to cost-justify it, while guiding your agency to deliver even higher value for you over the course of your partnership.