Maintaining momentum in B2B marketing

A planning vacuum means that most B2B marketing progresses in fits and starts argues Doug Kessler of B2B marketing agency Velocity. Think of marketing as a rock, he says, and it becomes much easier to roll with it.

Ask a consumer marketer for a look at their marketing plan and you're likely to get anything from a 20-page PowerPoint slide presentation to a 400-page binder with tabs, spreadsheets, and Gantt charts. Ask a B2B marketer for their marketing plan and you're likely to get a funny look and some awkward rationalisation: "Erm... we're agile here. Our market moves too fast. If we had a plan it would be out of date in a week."

The result is that the vast majority of B2B marketing departments are run in an ad hoc manner, pacing through the year from campaign to campaign. There are lots of problems with this:

• Tactics replace strategy – you end up just doing stuff, then doing more stuff, without real direction and without real progress.
• ‘Reaction’ looks like ‘action’ - everyone confuses being busy with being effective.
• Progress is intermittent – a campaign works, then momentum and energy are lost.
• Mistakes are repeated – ad hoc marketing is notorious for ignoring all learning, so you never really get any better.
• You waste a lot of money – chasing opportunities instead of using your assets and playing to your strengths.
• Your marketing loses focus – and your audiences never get a coherent sense of what you're all about.

The list goes on and on, and most marketers know it. But they're still happy to lurch from one item to the next on their ‘To Do’ list and call it progress.

If marketing is the act of rolling a big, heavy rock up a steep hill, then most B2B marketers tend to give their rock a push, rest, chat, give it another push, stand back, write a deck, hold an offsite, then realise the rock has returned to the bottom of the hill – before starting all over again.

Why does B2B marketing tend to be so short-sighted?

Maybe it’s because many B2B marketers just aren't as formally trained as their peers in consumer markets (”Ouch”). Let's face it, many B2B marketing directors move in to the job from sales or product management. Others have marketing added into their remit and then never manage to lose it. Few are dedicated career marketers who chose B2B for its unique challenges. They do exist, but they're rare.

Or maybe it's because many B2B businesses are not really marketing–driven like Coke and Nike are. Some fabulously successful B2B businesses have been built with little or no marketing. Some B2B businesses thrive on the back of great engineering and sales alone. They'd do even better with great marketing, but they succeed nevertheless. Coke and Nike wouldn't.

Or maybe it's because B2B businesses have lost faith in their marketing departments and, as a result, ask much less of them (even bigger “Ouch”). Low expectations mean less accountability, and accountability is what drives marketing plans.

But times are changing. The new, digital, social B2B and the new technology arsenal (marketing automation, lead nurturing, revenue performance management) are bringing accountability back to B2B.

Marketing is starting to deliver more to the business – and prove it with charts and graphs and pipelines gushing money. So expectations are rising. Accountability is emerging. And, lo and behold, the B2B marketing plan is making a comeback.

Just scan the agenda of this year's FUNNEL B2B marketing event and you can see the emergence of a new kind of B2B marketing. It's a discipline that's far less likely to stumble through the year and blow the budget. Or let the rock roll all the way to the bottom of the hill before new ways are thought of to roll it back up.

 

Editor’s note

See also the agenda for the forthcoming free RIBA Insight Consultancy Days in Manchester and London on 18 and 25 October respectively.

 

How can you fight inertia and put the momentum back into your marketing?

Take four hours maximum and do these few simple things:

• Write a two-page plan – even if you only show it to team members.
• Make three explicit and quantifiable goals – with deadlines.
• Jot down three strategies for each goal – simple ones.
• Name three tactics for each strategy – also simple ones.
• Put them on a timeline – or chart.

A few hours – two pages – and you'll have done more for your marketing than all those meetings, decks and offsites put together.

Here's to momentum...

 

Author Doug Kessler is a founder and Creative Director of B2B marketing agency Velocity and a guest blogger on Econsultancy

 

Back to top