It’s a good idea to review your B2B marketing strategy every six months. Hopefully, you are already used to reviewing your marketing results every month to see any obvious changes or fluctuations that may require attention. However, an audit requires a more strategic look at the overall marketing strategy and the key figures.
Below we provide 4 tips for reviewing your B2B marketing strategy and questions to ask yourself. An audit can take anywhere from 2-3 hours to 8-12 hours, depending on the scope of your strategy.
Review 6 months of lead generation and lead conversions
For many B2B marketers, the strategic goal is to fill the sales pipeline and increase sales. So it’s important to take a look at what is generating leads and what is converting leads into new customers.
Questions to ask:
- Which channels are leads generated on?
- How is the lead quality? (Quality over quantity is best for B2B.)
- Do Certain Campaigns Bring More Leads? Better quality leads?
- How long / many touches does it take to convert a lead?
- How long does it take to sign the contract after the lead generation?
- Are there any barriers to converting leads?
Assess your brand presence in the market
A win-win moment for any marketer is when the sales team tells them that prospects have “heard” about your business from a variety of different places. That’s a strong brand presence. As a B2B marketing agency, we recommend that you assess the visibility of your brand on the market at a high level. There are metrics you can determine, but for many companies this will be qualitative rather than quantitative.
Questions to ask:
- Do interested parties know our brand?
- How is the level of awareness? (Sales often have good insights here, or you can listen to the sales calls.)
- What increases brand awareness in our market?
- Is our brand present in all necessary media? (Industry fairs, social media, industry publications, etc.)
- If our brand is new or undergoing a rebranding, is the branding consistent?
- Where can we actively expand our brand visibility?
Identify opportunities
When evaluating lead generation and brand awareness, you need to think about opportunities too. In some cases, opportunities from mistakes are identified. In other cases, small successes are identified as opportunities that can become big successes. Marketers need to take calculated risks. For example, don’t allocate your entire budget to an expensive video on a whim; instead, set aside a small amount to experiment with video marketing.
Questions to ask:
- Are there gaps in our marketing strategy?
- Is there a campaign or channel that we haven’t tried yet?
- What works that we would like to expand?
- What is the failure that we are overworking or wanting to pivot away from?
- What do the key figures tell us?
- What do prospects and new customers say to sales or customer service?
- Is there a need in the market that our competitors are not addressing?
- Are our competitors overturning something that we haven’t even tried?
Identify new and creative ideas
It is important to consistently execute your marketing strategy to get results and gain the trust of your target market. However, it’s also important to incorporate fresh, creative ideas into your strategy. During your audit, try to find new and creative ideas to explore. This can vary greatly, from identifying new blog topics that your prospects love, to launching new campaigns that really hit a nerve with your target audience, to finding a new channel like email, the decision maker seem to prefer.
Questions to ask:
- What are the pain points of my target buyers?
- Has a new pain point / problem emerged lately?
- What do new customers love about our products / services?
- Did a particular blog or e-book perform well?
- The new saleswoman converts leads quickly. What’s your message?
- Are there new ways to share the benefits of our products or services?
While looking at the metrics for your B2B marketing campaigns is critical to evaluating the success of your strategy, avoid getting down the rabbit hole of analysis. A common problem with audits is that marketers get too far in the weeds and overlook the bigger picture or context.
Author: Kara Jensen
Follow @BopDesignSD
Kara Jensen is the Creative Principal of Bop Design, a B2B marketing and web design and development company based in San Diego, CA. With the aim of communicating the unique business value of each customer, Kara forges links to target markets through strategic design and effective marketing concepts. Kara has 10 years … Show complete profile >
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