B2B Marketing Campaigns
Part #6
Introduction
B2B marketing campaigns are the lifeblood to your marketing efforts and a keystone to your broader strategy. In essence, a B2B marketing campaign is a dedicated grouping of brand, content and channel assets designed to drive predefined actions with a target audience using a core offering.
As you can gather from the description, B2B marketing campaigns consist of many items already covered previously in this guide, but rather than being broad in nature, they are heavily focussed and specific in terms of their objectives, targeting and CTA’s.
Commonly speaking, most B2B marketing campaigns can be classed as either awareness/brand-building, demand/lead-generating, or retention/lead-nurturing. Regardless of whether you are looking to drive brand awareness, lead-generation or nurturing, marketing campaigns are commonly the best way of achieving all three.
There are ten key components to a B2B marketing campaigns and building on from that, three main campaign types that can be utilised:
- Inbound Campaign: A campaign that primarily Pulls your target audience towards you campaign core offering using a variety of inbound channels and mechanisms.
- Integrated Campaign: A campaign that Pulls your target audiences (like Inbound Campaigns), but also Pushes your campaign core offering towards them – using a variety of inbound and outbound channels and mechanisms.
- ABM Campaign: A campaign that primarily Pushes your campaign core offering towards target audiences using a variety of outbound channels and mechanisms.
1. B2B Marketing Campaign Components
B2B marketing campaigns commonly consist of ten key pieces, many of which will be developed before the actual activation of the campaign itself. Each component comes together to form a campaign strategy and you will ideally need to create a strategy for each campaign you run.
All the below items should be captured in a single document or spreadsheet that acts as the guiding asset for many stages of the campaign’s lifecycle.
1.1 – Objectives
The usual starting point for any of your marketing initiatives – your campaign objectives will detail exactly what you want to achieve through the activation of your campaign. These objectives should be SMART in nature (such as ‘generate 20 MQL’s within 3 months of campaign activation’) and be directly associated to the scale and focus of your campaign strategy.
1.2 – Targeting & Segmentation
Here you will define the key targeting selection for you campaign in terms of the industry/market and persona/audience – then break these down into any relevant segments. Depending on the campaign type, your targeting options will vary.
To add an extra dimension, you will also need to determine what stage in the B2B buyers journey your target audiences are in that you will be targeting – which will have enormous impact on the entire strategy and help shape both your communications structure and content creation.
1.3 – Core Offering
Here you will define exactly what the core offering of your campaign is – or put another way, what you are hoping to drive awareness, interest, and purchase-intent in. You are not limited to these options, but often your core offering will either be your products, services or any other entity that serves the purpose of driving revenue.
1.4 – Communications Structure
The communications structure relates to the underlying campaign narrative, messaging, and value proposition of your core offering. This also includes the value proposition of your core offering which will probably contain differentiated benefits and value-add depending on the type of market or industry – or at the very least, contain nuances that need to be treated independently from each other.
1.5 – Content
The content assets and pieces you will create to help deliver your campaign’s key offering (and communication structure) to target audiences.
These content assets are core to delivering the campaign narrative, messaging, and value proposition of the key offering – so choose the content type and number of pieces you create wisely. Further to this, you will need to keep in mind the journey stage in which you are targeting and use that to guide your content type selection and creation process.
1.6 – Channels
Your channels act as the primary delivery mechanisms for your content assets, which in turn deliver the value proposition and campaign messaging used to promote your core offering.
With this in mind then, within the context of your campaign, channels are the mechanisms that will either pull target audiences towards your core offering, or push your core offering towards target audiences. This may sound all the same, but it’s a fundamental difference in the dynamic of how the channels operate.
1.7 – CTA’s & Conversion
Regardless of whether your campaign is geared towards awareness/brand building or driving demand/lead-generation – your campaign will require calls-to-actions, lead capture ability and conversion devices embedded across your content and channels.
It’s usually a good idea to work backwards, so select the primary CTA (the action you ultimately want your target audiences to take) – then insert secondary CTA’s throughout your campaign to help transport your targets towards this primary CTA.
1.8 – Nurturing & Follow-Up Process
Related to the above point, conversions can be generally defined as either soft or hard. As an example, a hard conversion would be a ‘purchase or enquiry’ whereas a soft conversion would be a ‘content download or trial signup’.
Labelling your conversion points (soft or hard) enables you to better map out your nurturing workflows and enable you to decide when you should follow-up with previously engaged contacts (for example, if your primary CTA is a sales enquiry and you label this as a hard-conversion – then you could set a general rule that the sales department steps in and follows-up with every lead who has hard-converted).
1.9 – Logistics & Campaign Structure
This firstly includes general admin-based items such as expected budget, timeline (for both the development and activation stages) and information on required resources and required team members/internal stakeholders.
1.10 – Measurement & Tools
This refers to the data and insight you will capture post-activation of your campaign, as a way of measuring overall success, identifying strength/weakness and areas for optimisations or improvements. Ultimately, you will need to identify your overall ROI with regards to the campaign and determine how you can improve your process and strategy for future campaigns you run.
Within this component you can also select what tools and platforms you will use to enable the campaign such as CRM, analytics, ad platforms and automation systems.
2. B2B Marketing Campaign Lifecycle
B2B marketing campaigns (all three types) usually abide by a common lifecycle process – although some of the below stages can be categorised as optional.
- Stage #1 – Planning: This stage is where you will assemble the foundational elements to your campaign strategy, including your objectives, targeting/segmentation, deciding your core offering and detailing the logistics such as budget and roles.
- Stage #2 – Development: The first part is where you develop your communications structure, map your content and channel requirements along with deciding on CTA’s, nurturing and conversion devices – before piecing together your campaign structure. Once this is complete, you can begin the second part which is the actual creation of content, setup of channels and development of any other asset or mechanism required.
- Stage #3 – Activation: This stage is where you publish your content and go-live with your channels – effectively activating the campaign.
- Stage #4 – Continuation: This stage can be viewed as ‘post-activation’ and involves the continued maintenance and operation of the campaign.
- Stage #5.1 – Optimisation (Optional): This stage is optional and refers to a period of optimising key areas of you campaigns in relation to the data insights that have been captured.
- Stage #5.2 – Expansion (Optional): This stage is optional and refers to the creation of additional campaign assets and/or the activation of additional channels.
- Stage #6 – Closing: This stage refers to the discontinuation of the campaign along with final ROI reporting. It’s important to note however that some campaigns (mainly Inbound) could run indefinitely with no pre-set expiration, but rather frequent periods of optimisation and expansion to maintain effectiveness.
3. Inbound Campaign (Campaign Type #1)
The first major type of B2B marketing campaign is the ‘Inbound Campaign’ that as its name suggests, is designed using a variety of inbound channels to pull target audiences towards a core offering. One of the most used approaches to an inbound campaign is utilising content marketing, whereby assets are created on particular themes/topics likely to resonate with target audiences and personas.
These content assets are bundled with actionable CTA’s, conversion devices and nurturing workflows to effectively take a visitor from becoming a lead, all the way to eventually becoming an SQL and beyond.
Key Attributes
- Inbound (Pull) Channels: This campaign type exclusively uses only inbound channels in a way of reaching and attracting target audiences to your content/core offering – with the goal of eventually converting them.
- High/Med-Level Targeting: These campaigns don’t feature contact/company level personlisation but will rather focus on a single/small number of target personas, usually within a single target market. This means that the campaign will focus on the key challenges and interest areas of the persona or market as a whole – that casts a larger net.
- Long-Term Duration: With the high reliance on automation and nurture workflows, these campaigns can take a ‘build once, run forever’ approach. That said, it’s wise to constantly review performance and either optimise or expand the scope over time.
- New & Existing Customer Focus: These campaigns are optimized for both generating new customers/revenue and for targeting/nurturing existing/legacy customers.
Inbound Campaign Flow (Example)
The below is an example of an Inbound Campaign flow structure.
4. Integrated Campaign (Campaign Type #2)
The second major type of B2B marketing campaign is the ‘Integrated Campaign’ that is designed using a variety of both inbound and outbound channels to pull target audiences, but also push your core offering towards them.
These campaigns carry greater ‘impact’ that their inbound counterpart due to the simple fact that they utilise a greater number of channels and involve your sales team earlier in the process. Integrated campaigns do rely on an inbound element, but this is bolstered by an outbound element that involves targeting companies/contacts directly.
Key Attributes
- Inbound (Pull) & Outbound (Push) Channels: This campaign type uses a combination of inbound and outbound channels – as a way of capturing organic interest, but also to place the core offering in front of pre-selected contacts and companies.
- Med/Low-Level Targeting: These campaigns will feature a combination of more specific targeting, and high levels of personalisation within the outbound element.
- Medium-Term Duration: Integrated campaigns commonly have a pre-set closing date, especially as the resource needs are greater, and as the cost tends to be higher (when compared to inbound campaigns).
- New Customer Emphasis: These campaigns will predominantly focus on generating new customers/revenue as opposed to targeting existing/legacy customers – but the outbound element means you have flexibility to target both.
- Sales Team Involvement: With a heavier sales generating stance than inbound campaigns, your sales team will have far more involvement.
Integrated Campaign Flow (Example)
The below is an example of an Integrated Campaign flow structure.
5. ABM Campaign (Campaign Type #3)
The third major type of B2B marketing campaign is a ‘Account Based Marketing (ABM)’ campaign that is designed using primarily outbound channels to push your core offering towards target audiences.
Whereas with Inbound campaigns (and Integrated campaigns to a large degree) you are essentially casting a wide net by targeting personas across an entire industry or market – with ABM, you target individual contacts (buyers) at an individual account (company). So another way of looking at this is, with the other two campaign types you are broadly addressing the challenges, needs and interests of an entire industry/market then targeting personas within these, but with ABM, you are addressing the challenges, needs and interests of an individual company then shaping this for each buyer.
Key Attributes
- Outbound (Push) Channels: With targeting focusing on individual contacts/companies, these campaigns commonly only use outbound channels as a way of ensuring that the highly-personalised content and messaging reaches the buyers its designed for.
- Low-Level Targeting: These campaigns will feature heavy personalisation based on in-depth contact/company research meaning you will essentially be building new buyer personas frameworks (based on your target buyers) and introduce Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) into the mix (based on your target company).
- Existing & New Customer Focus: This campaign type is equally effective for targeting existing or new customers. If a larger company with an extensive client base, then ABM is primed for expanding the account using mechanisms such as up/cross-selling to achieve greater revenue.
- Sub-Types: There are three main types of ABM campaign all offering a different approach to your targeting and subsequent strategy (1:1, 1:Few or 1:Many). Although the 1:Many approach has value, it’s probably accurate to say that best results will come by using 1:1 or 1:Few as a way of lazer focusing your messaging, content and value proposition.
- Marketing/Sales Alignment: ABM campaigns demand alignment between these two departments like no other. From initial account/contact selection, to messaging development, to content creation, to follow-up and post-conversion actions – marketing and sales need to execute an ABM strategy as a single unified unit.
ABM Campaign Flow (Example)
The below is an example of an ABM Campaign flow structure.
