If you want your B2B marketing experience to mature, then you need to follow the eight pillars. These can map your progress and determine how mature you are. These are eight divided into two groups. The first look at performance and execution, while the other looks at management, processes, and organization.
The first four pillars are what most marketers should be doing already. Changing behavior and how the processes occur is how one can evolve. Without further ado, let’s look at all the pillars.
Strategizing and Evolving
The first pillar involves how one does business overall. If you’re a marketer, you need to set up the business to innovate and adapt to changes in the needs of the customer. It’s important to be flexible, yet make sure you have a plan.
Instead of planning for years, you need to gather data in a process that is always ongoing. Few plans can last even a year because of this changing landscape. Your marketing and sales need to drive change as well.
Let’s look at the pillars and explain them.
Growth
Growth is a widespread term. One needs a coherent GTM, or go-to-market, strategy. This can involve the generation of demand for services and products. Leaders in marketing will use an ABM, or account-based marketing strategy. This can help support programmatic advertising. Also, it’s important to look at channel partners when you sell your offerings. Using indirect channels is important, but partners are an emerging method.
Also, demand generation is one of the most important programs of marketing. You don’t know what the next quarter will bring, especially in a world when it’s challenging to predict what the response rates will be.
ABM can help, turning short-term programs into something that can engage longer. It does this through partnerships. However, many are wondering if it’s the successor to demand gen, and others wonder what tech they need for it.
Those who are strong in their leadership of marketing can address any problems and observe the evolution of direct/indirect selling. Also, they can observe how the marketing world is evolving due to changing behavior, new channels of delivery, and most important of all, COVID-19.
Campaign Execution
It’s important to build campaigns that can keep audiences engaged and change their thoughts and feelings. This does take skill, involving strategy, compiling data, and creating a proposal that can influence the correct people at the best time.
Using external resources for this is getting more complicated, and one has to manage different agencies designed to make this happen. One needs to observe the evolution of all these channels and how to use them correctly in a world where the rules are changing.
How a leader in marketing performs can influence how the organization’s marketing campaigns are executed. Ideally, you want a campaign that will target the right buyers and will be designed to meet the customer. Researching is always a work in progress.
Experience of Customers
When one wants to succeed in marketing, the customer experience, or CX, is a critical issue that one must tackle. Despite its critical importance, many businesses do not have a plan or know how to keep themselves accountable. There is no right way to speed up acquisition and boost revenue.
Some strategies are easy and do not overthink things. Do not be too complex, but instead try to keep your promise. Many businesses fail on their ideal of centering around the customer because they do not have an alignment. A good CS combines addressing pain points, having initiatives, and strategy. This helps to keep your customers retained and improve profits.
When you are a leader, you need to look at the customer’s journey. From their first purchase to how they will be involved in your advocacy marketing. For this pillar, it’s important to enable sales and align marketing.
These four pillars involve organization, managing resources, tech, and reporting systems. By having these all in place, one can continue their path to maturity.
Data Strategy, Intelligence, Insight
If you want to stay in business, it’s important to have data handy. However, we live in the age of too much information and many find it difficult to pick the correct data, interpret it correctly, and use it. One needs to build the right processes to get the needed data and use the best insight to make that data useful.
One in marketing also needs to look at how emerging tech can present new opportunities and how third-party resources like intent data can help ABM strategies.
Build Effective Teams
To succeed, one must also recruit, train, and keep people who can help. This can be a challenge, especially if you want to have a balance between marketing agency outsourcing and having specialist contractors help.
You need people who always want to grow and look at the bigger picture. One who leads in marketing should also pick diverse candidates to improve creativity and speak to every group.
Managing Content and Brand
Investing in one’s brand is always important, even if the focus on it is a bit of a roller coaster. How the brand’s scope works have changed, with the public looking at an organization’s accountability, behavior, environment, diversity, and more.
By using content, you can educate, influence, and engage your audience’s perception of all aspects of your company. To be a successful leader, one must take the internal engagement of the brand and maximize it. Also, communicate through the right channels and take the right opportunities. One can do this by having frameworks for assessing, applying, and developing the brand.
Process and Operation of Marketing
This is the engine of growth that is sustainable. However, getting that engine working can be a tough task, and must know all the tools. It’s important as a leader to create an organization and manage it. The goal is to have it scale whenever there is a changing demand, and try to align with as many areas as possible. Also, one must look at the evolution of skills, revenue operations, and other functions.
It can be a challenge, but by building these pillars, your foundation is in the right hands.
