As we approach the midway point of 2020, businesses everywhere have had to adapt their marketing operations rapidly to continue to ensure effective outreach. The best laid plans have had to be rethought as brands pivot to nurture existing and potential customers in an unusual market.
Marketing strategies are a key component that allow businesses to continue to get their message out and ensure that they are recognised in their fields. With fewer opportunities to attend events and meet people face-to-face to build trust, B2B tech and telecoms companies should look at adapting their marketing strategies with this in mind.
While businesses look to secure their futures, marketing should be front and centre of this plan. How else are new clients going to be sourced or existing clients reassured? Rather than hitting pause on marketing plans until events are back on, it has never been more important to adapt your marketing plans to accelerate business growth and transform your business.
So how can you adapt your existing B2B marketing strategy?
We’ve created 4 top tips to help you transform your business, in order to capture more leads and accelerate growth.
Competitor Analysis
According to Crayon, 41% of business professionals ‘strongly agreed that competitor intelligence is vital to their company's success’. Therefore, examining the industry and compiling a report on your competitors is the first step to adapting your marketing strategy.
By researching your competitors’ marketing strategies, you can start to identify the gaps within the market and start altering current strategies. This will allow you to optimise your marketing, capture new opportunities and accelerate growth.
Utilising Different Channels
When adapting your marketing strategies, you should re-assess your current approach. This may seem daunting, but it sparks a whole range of possibilities to re-invest unused budget into other important areas of your marketing strategy.
An important element of your marketing strategy to invest in is inbound. Most B2B tech and telecom businesses rely heavily on attracting and engaging with leads in order to achieve business growth. Investing in activities such as social media, email marketing and blogging will allow your business to continue nurturing existing leads, as well as generating new ones.
Enhance Lead Nurturing
It’s also important to re-focus your marketing strategy on nurturing your leads. By sending out automated materials such as email workflows/sequences, you can easily use an inbound approach to offer useful materials and solutions to enhance their decision making throughout the buyer’s journey.
A business that can quickly amplify their lead nurturing will see growth acceleration and drive in new business opportunities.
Nurturing your existing customers is also important, as they may look to your business in a time of crisis. Therefore, it’s important to send out regular updates, for example monthly newsletters regarding operational or general updates. This will help to build brand trust and continue to reinforce customer relationships.
Track Performance
Once you’ve adapted and activated your marketing strategy, it’s important to track and monitor performance. This will allow you to quickly change elements of your strategy and avoid any downtime in your marketing.
A great place to start is by looking at your social media analytics. Social media is a key part of most marketing strategies as it is one of the most important touchpoints for existing and potential customers. This data will allow you to continuously adapt your social media strategy based on the posts that received the best engagement.
Tracking website performance is also crucial. Gaining insight into website visits, page clicks and the type of visitor (i.e. organic or redirects), can help you to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy and enable you to adapt it accordingly.
At Ilex, we recognise the value and importance of marketing strategies and their impact on business growth.
We can help you to adapt your B2B marketing strategy and create an entire ecosystem of content and communications. We’re ready to support you as you transform and accelerate your business in any situation.