Feeling like your marketing isn’t performing the way you expected? Maybe it even feels like it’s stuck in the past.
Business owners in the B2B space come to me with their marketing challenges. Those challenges stem from numerous factors. But what I often see can be tied to one or more of these three scenarios. Maybe you’re facing similar situations.
LOSE THE VANITY METRICS
Tightly defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is crucial to marketing successfully. It instantly fixes the “Vanity Metrics” issue that frustrates many business owners and gets them focused on what matters.
Vanity Metrics are data points that make a marketing team look busy but don’t tell you if the business is actually growing. They are metrics that look great on a dashboard and track surface-level platform activity—but possess zero correlation to pipeline velocity, sales opportunities or closed revenue.
Say your B2B brand sells to 1,000 companies in a given regional market. Do you really care if you get 10,000 website visits or a 100 Likes on your LinkedIn posts? No, that’s because the only metric that matters is: “Are we getting in front of those 1,000 companies?”
TALK TO ME ABOUT CONVERSION
Your Ideal Customer Profile also drives creative and copy that converts.
Most B2B marketing fails because it’s boring, outmoded and says the exact same thing as the competitor (“We offer quality, integrity and 20 years of experience”). By clearly showing how your product uniquely resolves a specific pain point, you deliver marketing that gets them thinking, “hey, these guys understand me”.
Worn out messaging will sabotage every marketing campaign. Go out of your way to make sure your external communications focus on the unique solution you provide. One example is the classic Case Study, which is a great way to tell a story that puts the customer in the spotlight and explains how you helped them succeed.
ATTRIBUTION
You may have experienced the “what’s working” challenge. Back in the day, there was a famous retailer that stated “I know half of my marketing is working, I just don’t which half.”
That quandary is alive and well today despite the prevalence of highly measurable digital marketing.
In a chaotic, multi-touch B2B buyer journey, tracking every single digital tactic is a nightmare. But when a strategy is tightly focused on a specific pain point, attribution becomes clearer. If you launch a campaign specifically addressing Pain Point A, and suddenly three new leads mention Pain Point A in their initial discovery calls, that’s connecting the dots!
REGAIN CONTROL
Here’s the bottom line. Marketing isn’t the problem. It’s the lack of accountability and direction. Contact Affinity Strategic Marketing today to regain control of your marketing. Together we’ll define exactly who you are targeting and why your marketing messages will cut through the noise.
Michael Quill
Director of Marketing
