How to run a successful B2B marketing campaign – The best B2B marketing campaigns attend in detail to all phases. Something that many companies neglect. This article exposes these stages and accompanies them with a business case to better exemplify them.
Our example is RAJA, a packaging and equipment solutions company with more than 1 million customers across Europe. They carry out marketing campaigns both offline and online. In the example, we show your campaign of physical catalogues (6 waves a year in Spain) sent through postal mailing.
1. Setting a goal
Every B2B Marketing campaign must have a primary objective. Our ultimate goal is the sale. But that is the ultimate goal. Before we make our brand known, interact with the Client, cause interest, and sell the product or service. We will define our objective based on the stage we find ourselves in. This is important because the way to measure our campaign will vary depending on the purpose we have. Examples of goals could be to increase brand awareness, engagement, and conversion to lead or sales. Remember that the goals must always be quantifiable.
In the case of RAJA, the objective is to attract new clients.
2. Segmentation
What is our target audience? For this, we will identify the shared characteristics in our Clients, and we will do this through our database. Are they Companies, Self-Employed, or Organizations? What annual billing do you have? How many employees do you have? What is your activity? In what geographical areas are they located? These are some questions we can ask ourselves to define our B2B target audience.
Due to the nature of its products, RAJA has the offer to sell to any business. However, it is not addressed to Spain’s more than 4 million businesses. The first filter is to eliminate those records you do not want to impact your recruitment campaigns. This filter includes Customers, returns, cancellations, Robinsons, delinquents, specific negatives, certain geographical areas where they cannot make a distribution, etc.). Still, RAJA’s refined universe reaches up to 1.2 million businesses.
By having such a vast universe, they also rely on analytical models developed by DataCentric to select, within their universe, the businesses with the most remarkable propensity to be a RAJA customer. In this way, they choose between 50,000 and 100,000 records to send their catalogues in each wave.
3. Data strategy
We already have defined our public and our objective. Let’s go for the data strategy, which will explain how to reach our B2B target audience and how to cause interest through our B2B campaign. Depending on the conversion funnel stage, we will have more or less information about our audience. In the early stages, we will have very little information, while the hotter the lead is, the more information we will have about it and based on this, we will develop our strategy.
To reach our B2B target audience in the coldest stages, where we hardly have information, we will use either external data sources or segmentation platforms. External data sources provide data contact information for companies defined by our target audiences, such as company name, telephone number, postal address and contact persons within the organization. Suppose we decide to carry out a B2B digital marketing campaign. In that case, we will go to the segmentation platforms, which will put their technology at our service to impact our target audience. To select the segmentation platforms, we must first analyze the type of users behind these platforms. In the case of B2B campaigns, the most used are Email Marketing communities of managers with permission, such as DirectivesPLUS, some Social Media platforms such as LinkedIn, or self-segmentation platforms (Search).
To send its catalogues, RAJA uses external data sources, in this case, DataCentric, which provide them with the contact details (Business Name, Contact Person and Postal Address) of active companies that share common characteristics with the analysis of your best customers.
4. Creative elements
Once we reach our user, we have to cause him interest. Again it will depend on the information we have about it and, therefore, on the conversion funnel stage.
If we want them to get to know us, we will include generic contact points such as the Home page of our website. Suppose you know us and we have detected an interest in a specific product. In that case, we will impact you with more particular creatives, offers on certain products, and more detailed contact points, such as custom landings in the case of digital campaigns. Once we advance in the conversion funnel and capture information, we will impact the leads through our means. If you are already a customer, we will try to build your loyalty with specific cross-selling and up-selling campaigns.
RAJA, through its catalogues, impacts with creatives that include specific offers of its products.
5. Measurement
Once we have launched the B2B campaign, we have to measure the results to optimize the campaign. But before measuring the results, we must be sure that the results we will measure come through our campaign, not through other movements that have been carried out before or at the same time. If we do not, we will be attributing simulated results to our campaign, and we will not be able to optimize it. To attribute the correct results to our campaign, we will use either attribution models or tracking points when carrying out a b2b digital marketing campaign.
Ok, we have the actual data from our campaign. We must measure the results through our KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). These indicators will guide us on our ‘movement status, allowing us to optimize it throughout the calendar. The KPIs must be defined based on our objective. If we aim to make ourselves known, we will measure the reach or the number of impacts per user. If we object to lead conversion, we will count the number of leads.
Through the reception of the responses in RAJA, we can know the total economic amount that returns to us for every thousand catalogs sent. Its potential segments analyze this to identify the best responders and consider it for the following selections.
6. Optimization
Now that we have launched our campaign and have measured its results, we will be able to make changes to the creatives, and the numbers that we obtain throughout the campaign will guide us to optimize it. A good practice when optimizing campaigns is A/B tests. These tests allow us to measure different creativity to understand what works best for us to achieve our goal.
Finally, it is essential to schedule the campaign and establish a reporting system for our KPIs (weekly, fortnightly, monthly…), to optimize our movement in an organized way.
