A solid marketing strategy is a fundamental element of any successful B2B marketing program, especially in industries as competitive as B2B healthcare, enterprise technology, or health tech. And yet, most of us do not have a written plan. What do we do instead?
There are three common approaches:1. Start a content program that looks like everyone else’s. This likely includes creating a ton of content, doing some SEO work, including some advertising, and hoping that someone falls down to the bottom of your funnel.
2. Another common approach is to choose the en vogue tactics of the moment and make a big investment in them.
If you’re reading this and it feels familiar, don’t worry, this post was written for you. After reading this, I want you to walk away with all the tools you need to develop a strategy that will allow you to make methodical and strategic decisions despite the fact that we live in one of the most disruptive times in history for B2B marketing.
In this guide, I’ll cover the following topics:
Ok! Let’s dive in.
It may seem self-evident that everyone should have a marketing strategy in place to guide their entire marketing program, but in case some still doubt the reasoning behind this, I thought I would spend a short time talking about what I believe are the 4 main benefits of having a comprehensive plan for your work.
The other day I read a statistic that if a pilot takes off from LA en route to Boston and points the plane’s nose just a degree off from the correct flight path, they could end up hundreds of miles off the mark.
The principle is the same here. Your journey to your goals is likely to take many twists and turns, but sitting down to understand WHERE you are trying to go and the philosophy behind HOW you are going to get there will allow you to align your initial efforts in such a way that you’re guaranteed to be heading in the right direction. Now, will that ensure you don’t have to change course down the road? Maybe, maybe not. But that brings me to the next benefit.
We all know that pivots are inevitable in today’s marketing. In fact, they are not just inevitable, they are a necessity. Just today, I met with my digital media team to talk about the latest iterations and changes we are going to make for the coming month based on the results that we are seeing.
A documented strategy allows you to make these pivots in an intentional way with your end goal in mind. Then, instead of the pivots happening to you, you’re able to evaluate your results and make planned pivots. These consistent pivots in response to real world results lead to the next benefit.
A marketing program focused on providing true value to users is a bit like a freight train: it takes work and a lot of torque to get going. There needs to be constant fuel, and the process is a lot easier if you’re using the fuel that is going to get the engine burning as hot as possible. Just like the train, by being intentional about the go-to-market plan—and by embracing constant pivots—you’ll get up to speed faster.
A beautiful thing happens when you get up to speed. You have momentum, and it’s pushing you forward so that it takes less effort to maintain the same speed—in fact, with minimal effort, you can even accelerate. (Check out this post about the compounding impact of a content program executed over time).
The final benefit may seem straightforward, but I think it bears repeating here. We live in an era of unprecedented disruption. Although the principles of how to build relationships and connection with our audiences stay the same, there is nothing static about the methods we use to reach them, the mediums through which we communicate, and the opportunities we have to think in innovative ways. In the midst of all this disruption, distractions are everywhere.
A documented marketing strategy will keep you from chasing the latest shiny object. Instead, you will be armed with the tools to decide whether each new disruptive opportunity will move your strategy forward or not. This will allow you to adopt new techniques with confidence.
Before we go further, I want to address an often asked question: What really is the difference between strategy and tactics? Or, put a different way, I don’t think it really pays to spend a ton of time thinking, it’s action that matters.
These two comments are important to unpack, because there are elements of truth in each. First off, strategy and tactics, although entirely distinct things, are actually complementary. In fact, they depend on each other. A strategy is useless without tactical execution, and tactical execution without strategic thinking won’t drive the results you need. Second, it’s true that it doesn’t pay to spend a ton of time thinking about your strategy if you never get to action. However, you need to do enough thinking.
Still, strategy and tactics are indeed different things. Let’s define both before we go any further:
Both are vital, but they need to be thought of differently.
I’ve already spent sufficient time in this post establishing the norm of disruption, so I won’t repeat it here. Let’s dive straight into talking about what you need to think about to build a marketing strategy that will not just weather disruption but thrive in the midst of it. I think there are three core principles to consider:
Early in my career, I worked with a non-profit organization to launch a content marketing program. They had never done it before, and to be honest, I probably had too little experience to lead the project. So, I made the mistake that many new strategists make; I planned out every detail to the nth degree.
The results were harrowing. It took us months longer than planned to get to market, and each step was so planned out that when results weren’t as expected, people kept following the plan simply because the plan was too rigid to adjust. Ultimately, my agency lost the account.
This story illustrates a principle that is more important now than it was all those years ago. A strategy must be about overall direction, guidelines, and metrics. It’s about setting the direction and keeping you focused on the things that can’t pivot so that you and your team can be open to changing the rest of the approach easily when something new comes up, whether it be declining results or an entirely new way to reach your audience.
When I work on branding projects, I tell my clients a simple phrase that is more important today than it has ever been: Your company is only as important as the memory it leaves in its customer’s mind. Great branding identifies that unique memory and helps organizations to engineer it into every part of their being.
With the rapid rate of change and evolution, you’ll be pressed to make decisions, adopt new technologies, or explore new tactics that may or may not be in alignment with the core of your brand. You need to first understand what that core is in order to be able to say no to things that will compromise you and yes to things that align.
The final essential is flexible governance. You must design your workflow to allow you to pivot quickly. This may mean reevaluating the strategy on a 90-day cycle to make sure it’s still relevant, it may mean committing to adopting a new tactic and establishing a process for deciding which one to take on, or it could entail any other number of things. The main point here is this: build a strategy and governance workflow that plans for evolution. Survival of the fittest, after all, is a real thing.
Every great strategy is built on a foundation of research and data. Data provides the quantitative inputs that help you make informed decisions while research adds the color and flavor to your approaches that may not be revealed just by looking at numbers and metrics.
The first thing that you need to do as you embark upon the strategy development process is to look under the hood and evaluate where your program is, where there is opportunity for growth, and where there is already momentum that you can capitalize on. I recommend evaluating your data from three different perspectives.
With a firm understanding of your data under your belt, it’s now time to do some qualitative evaluation of your efforts and the efforts of your biggest competition:
The final bit of research is 30-minute in-depth interviews. These interviews are a valuable tool to utilize for internal stakeholders, current customers, past customers, and prospects. For details about how to conduct a great interview, check out this article.
In my in-depth interviewing, I work to extract the following insights from each group:
The moment has arrived, it’s time to build out the strategy. It all starts with a framework.
Every good strategy focuses on telling a single comprehensive story in a consistent way. This framework allows you to build that story intentionally so it can guide all your efforts. Let’s quickly unpack each element:
The final step in building out this framework is the story at the center of your campaign. The ideal positioning lies at the intersection of category, audience, product, and brand. Spend time thinking through this, throw creative ideas against the wall, let it simmer in the back of your mind. Crafting the right story will be essential to your success.
Once you’ve developed the strategy framework, it’s time to build out specific objectives, strategies, and metrics.
The final piece of your digital strategy is the channel map. A channel map outlines which channels you will utilize to tactically execute the strategies you’ve identified, the frequency with which you’ll utilize those channels, and how you’ll measure success in each of them.
I find it especially helpful when building a channel strategy to identify the priority of each channel. This really allows me to focus my efforts.
A deep dive into frameworks for measuring results could be the subject of an entire post. So here, the only thing I will say is that we are big fans of using a growth-driven design approach. Here’s why: it encourages you to look at only the most important metrics and pushes you down the road of constant improvement and iteration.
Once you have a strategy in place, it’s time to evaluate whether your tech can support the strategy. Let’s take a quick look at how to do that before we wrap things up.
If you aren’t sure what tech you need in place, here is a simple checklist of the core pieces that you need to have in place to be successful:
With this list in mind, I encourage you to evaluate which technology you want to keep because it does what you need it to do, which technology should be discarded because it is extraneous, and which platforms need to be upgraded with more robust tools.
This process is essential because having the wrong tech in place can ruin a strategy, no matter how brilliant. Keeping this in mind, it’s also incredibly important to make sure all other options have been explored before migrating to a new tech platform. Migrations are simply too difficult and complex to be taken lightly.
Now that we’ve covered the core aspects of building out a marketing strategy, it’s time to talk through how to move into implementation. I find it helpful to follow this simple 6-step framework:
And there you have it! In this post, I hope I’ve given you all the tools to develop an effective marketing strategy—and put it into action. If you found this post helpful, I hope you’ll subscribe to receive new posts in your inbox whenever we publish. Our mission is to help B2B healthcare and tech companies build brands that will be remembered, and you can be sure we’ll fulfill that mission with each additional installment. You can sign up here.