Building Blocks of a Tailored B2B Online Marketing Program

Ryan Young
February 20, 2018

If you visit the About Us page on our website, you will notice text on the left-hand side that reads, “Our Mission: Deliver strategic online marketing programs tailored to maximize results.” While this sentence does indeed capture what it is we strive to accomplish across clients, there is one word that stands out and truly makes a difference: tailored.

Tailoring B2B online marketing programs to meet and exceed client expectations is at the core of what we do at KoMarketing, but accomplishing this requires internal legwork and alignment with our clients.

While there are many steps necessary to execute a truly-tailored B2B online marketing strategy on behalf of our clients, I’ve outlined a few of the most critical below.

Complete a Client Discovery Questionnaire

Before we provide strategic online marketing recommendations to our clients, we first ask them to answer a series of inquiries that are listed in our questionnaire. This document serves as the bedrock of the program, as it allows us to gather critical information pertaining to the client’s business and industry. We frequently refer back to this document as we get the online marketing program launched.

Here is some of the information we request from each of our clients at the beginning of the program:

Overview of Business – company history, competitive advantages, key products and services, etc.
Target Buyers – roles and titles, experience level, purchasing decision-making ability.
Existing Keyword Strategy – top 10-15 focus keyword terms that are currently being utilized.
List of Top Competitors – those that compete in search as well as general business (these are not always the same).
Lead Generation Tactics and Lead Scoring Model – key benchmarks for leads to move through the sales funnel.
Reporting Tools and Goals – Analytics programs currently being used and existing KPIs.

Gather Buyer Personas and Data

Delivering a tailored online marketing program is impossible without fully understanding who the audience is and which members of that audience are likely to invest in the products or services. While B2B buyers across industries share some similarities, it is critical to get to know the client’s specific buyers at a granular level to ensure content and other online marketing efforts are hitting the mark.

We recently partnered with a client that shared a wealth of buyer persona insights with us. Some of the buyer persona data shared included:

Existing Buying Process
Decision Criteria
Barriers to Success
Success Factors

Asking questions and examining this data has allowed us to pinpoint buyer needs and ensure all of our efforts are speaking to buyer needs and existing pain points.

Schedule a Product Demo

By the time we gather information from the initial discovery questionnaire and buyer persona insights, we have a wealth of data at our disposal about the business and target audience. While this is a solid foundation, we must also understand the ins and outs of our clients’ products and services beneath the surface level. Enter product demonstrations.

Sure, product demos are classically designed for the seller’s prospects. However, to deliver tailored online marketing programs, we must act as the buyer and have an understanding of the client’s capabilities and points of differentiation. Having a client present a product demonstration allows our team to see the products or services in action and ask questions pertaining to the business that may not have come up without seeing the demo.

Obtain Brand Guidelines

As an online marketing program vendor, it is our responsibility to ensure we are adhering to the brand guidelines of our clients. Before we begin making website recommendations or writing website content, we always ask for existing brand guidelines documents. These documents typically include factors such as:

Logo Variations / Usage
Font
Color Schemes
Brand Voice
Points of Organizational Emphasis

Having brand guidelines for reference allows us to make recommendations or create new assets with confidence that they align with existing content or messaging living on the website or across other digital channels.

Read, Read, and Read Some More

All of the above steps are crucial to take when it comes to preparing to execute a successful online marketing program. However, as the saying goes, “knowledge is power.” Client websites are a goldmine for other key information that may not have been covered throughout the above-mentioned steps. It’s important to read through all sections of the website, and it’s probably a good idea to spend some extra time in the resources section. This is where we typically access knowledge-building assets such as:

Case Studies – learn more about the client’s existing relationships with customers and how they serve each of them on an individual level.
White papers – absorb knowledge about industry best practices and specific use cases.
Data Sheets – learn the ins and outs of the performance and other technical characteristics of the product or service.

Final Thoughts

As a vendor of truly-tailored online marketing programs, it is essential for us to become experts on our clients’ products or services and fully-aligned with existing marketing and business strategies. Without doing so, our efforts would be vanilla and the results would reflect just that. In today’s competitive online marketing landscape, it takes much more than “out of the box” strategies to succeed.

Feel free to drop a comment below or connect with me on Twitter to keep this conversation going!