Many B2B marketing campaigns are not fundamentally flawed. They are good ideas that suffer from lacklustre execution. Or a great idea, and great plan – targeted at entirely the wrong people.
We see a number of these issues happening again and again in the B2B marketing industry. Sometimes the devil really is in the detail. Here are 10 common mistakes and how to avoid them.
1. Not engaging the sales force at the outset – ultimately, the sales force will define whether all your work has been a success. Did your campaigns increase sales opportunities or not? Were they the right kind of opportunity? Talk to them in person before you start to ensure you know what’s expected of you. A lot can get lost in translation.
2. Not listening hard enough – in creating a campaign, as the marketer, you’ll have a lot to add, and you can bring great experience to bear. Don’t forget that the sales and product experts have as much to add too. Ask a lot of questions before you make any broad statements, and don’t assume anything until you’ve checked it. A small misunderstanding can result in a campaign going very wonky later on.
3. Not finding out what current customers think – despite point 2, the best point of reference for any campaign is the people who will eventually be receiving it. Beg, borrow and steal to get the chance to speak to a few tame customers or prospects! For some help in framing up your client interview, see my post on B2B marketing client interviews.
4. Assuming leads can be “generated” for all propositions – it’s a huge and expensive challenge to “make” market opportunity. There is an ongoing debate in the industry about whether “making” demand is possible. Our view is that it can be uncovered, found, prompted, but probably not “made” – certainly not without mammoth budgets. The best way to proceed is to map the market size and build relationships in the long term – so that as opportunity arises you can get to it quickly.
5. Never reaching the real decision maker – many marketing campaigns are simply targeted at the wrong people. Completely understandable, given that the companies we are marketing into may have a hundred thousand employees or more. Being a “data junkie” is the key here – make sure you’re obsessed by the data the campaign will be sent out to. Its relevancy and its quality. Also, it stands to reason that your DM or email will hardly ever hit exactly the right person first time – it’s a process of repetition and refinement.
6. Misqualifying or overblowing new prospects – all campaigns are under pressure to generate leads. As a result, marketing departments can pass “leads” back to a client that don’t live up to expectations. Understand in detail what the sales team’s definition of a lead is – and don’t take it at face value – question them hard on it. Passing back non-leads will only lead to dissatisfaction, but opening the door to a key account (even if it doesn’t strictly meet BANT qualification) can be just what is needed. Sometimes sales don’t always mean exactly what they say.
7. Not following up on leads or nurturing slow burners – sometimes the sales team will commit to follow up on your campaigns themselves. As they get busy, or as other leads turn into bids, the salespeople can become distracted and drop the lead follow up. Make sure you have a plan if this starts happening. Also, have a strategy for “slow burners” – these are people who have expressed an interest but are not ready to move forward yet. How will the campaign keep them warm until they are ready to buy?
8. Not understanding the product or service – the IT world and the marketing world both become more complex by the minute. For us marketers, it’s a big job just to keep up to speed with the day job, never mind what the latest solutions do and how they work. The best campaigns are a perfect unity of customer need and product understanding. To develop the perfect campaign proposition, see a demo for every release, visit a site where it’s in use every day, speak to customers regularly and directly.
9. Assuming the buyer understands the market – it would be very easy to imagine a campaign being designed that proved in concrete terms why your software was palpably, demonstrably better than your competitor’s… and then finding out that the targets of the campaign didn’t understand the nature of the market at all and didn’t respond to the campaign as a result. At the same time, an experienced and savvy IT Director might well know the market backwards and dismiss a campaign as underestimating his/her knowledge. Understanding what the typical buyer does know about the market before getting started on your campaign is key.
10. Measuring activity rather than outcomes - marketers strive to measure the impact of their activity and rightly so. Marketing needs to demonstrate its value to the business. But a lot of metrics measured by marketing are fairly meaningless without knowing how much revenue they’ve generated. Whilst it’s easy to measure hits on a website, clicks from an email, number of mailers sent, number of event delegates (and these should still be measured) unless we know the ultimate impact that these activities had on business through the door, we can’t know how much of a return on its investment we are getting for our marketing spend.
