B2B Marketing Campaigns: 10 Questions that Drive Increased Results

Have you noticed that B2B marketing programs tend to revolve around a single marketing tactic? Companies run an ad campaign, a direct mail campaign or an email campaign and call it done.

If you or your marketing people are still looking at a single marketing tactic as a “campaign”, you have an opportunity get a lot more mileage out of your marketing dollars simply by changing the way you think of a campaign.

In fact, you could increase the effectiveness of your campaign by 75% or more.

Let’s broaden the definition of a marketing campaign to include all of the tactics and other elements necessary to find and engage prospects, and develop them into sales opportunities. The expectation is that money and other resources spent on the campaign will result in more potential customers who are ready to talk to a sales person. Not just more names.

In the high ticket, complex sale arena I’ve never seen an ad, a direct mail piece, or an email message that could accomplish all of that alone. No matter how good the copywriter and/or graphic designer might be.

When you develop a marketing campaign, it’s helpful to take a close look at what you really want your prospects to do and how your marketing is going to help make that happen. This is where your focus should be – on the desired results first, and individual tactics second.

Here are some good questions to ask as you develop your own marketing campaigns. The first six are relatively common in developing good direct marketing programs. The last four will make the real difference.

1.         Who is the target audience?

2.         Where can we find them?

3.         What do we want them to do?

4.         What can we offer that will be of great enough value to get them to do what we want them to do?

5.         How many different ways will we make the offer?

6.         How many chances will we give the prospects to respond?

7.         What will we do after prospects accept the offer?

8.         How many different offers will we need to make in order to get an acceptable number of prospects to become qualified leads?

9.         When will we know a prospect is ready to be passed to the sales team?

10.       How many sales-ready prospects do we need to generate to a) justify the campaign, and b) consider it a success?

We know from experience and plentiful 3rd party research that 75% - 80% of the prospects you generate will not be ready to talk to a sales person yet. But many of them will buy at some point.  This is where single-tactic marketing programs really drop the ball. How will you maintain a relationship with the majority of your prospects if all you have is an ad campaign?

When you think about what you’ll do to advance the prospects after they accept the initial offer, you’ll be moving beyond mere demand generation and into a more complete lead generation effort – with powerful results. You’ll see that integrating multiple tactics produces a logarithmic effect.