The Complete Guide to Effective B2B Marketing Planning

In a volatile marketplace, it’s no longer enough to just extrapolate trends from previous years and rely on that to guide future performance. As a marketer in a fast-paced environment, handling shifting customer expectations across multiple channels, you need to be agile and keep your wits about you. You need to be able to implement new strategies and innovate fast.

The pressures you face aren’t just external. The shift to remote work, for example, comes with its own challenges. According to the latest SalesForce State of Marketing Report, 78% of marketers stated it was more challenging to collaborate now than before. 

Not only that, but we’re facing increased internal pressure to prove our worth. CEOs and CFOs want to see a demonstrable ROI on their marketing budget as soon as possible and continue to demand strong performance quarter after quarter.

We get it. It can feel… overwhelming. That’s why you need a secret weapon – a strategic marketing plan.

We’ve been in the trenches for years, helping our clients to simplify and streamline their marketing processes with great success. Suffice to say; we know a thing or two about an effective marketing strategy. 

So we can tell you, without hesitation, that successful marketing is about more than just tactics. You need to develop a marketing strategy that is aligned to both your brand and business objectives, costed and measurable. Then you need to plan for its execution. 

That’s what will give you an edge over your competitors and help you hit critical KPIs in record time. Your marketing plan will guide your business forward and help to keep everyone on your team on the same page. 

So let’s dive right in and build you a marketing plan that moves the needle! 

How To Create a Marketing Plan

This can be successfully accomplished by breaking your marketing planning process down into three steps: 

1. A comprehensive review of your current marketing plan and performance

2. Defining your goals & objectives, and setting some benchmarks

3. Moving forward with marketing planning and execution

1. Conduct a comprehensive review

Before you get going you need to know two things: where you currently stand and where you want to get to. 

While it might be tempting to put the past behind you and focus on the future, successful content marketing campaigns are based on real-world learning. So, take time to look at your current performance. Meet with your team and ask:

• What worked well over the past 12 months?

• What fell short of our expectations?

• What goals did your team hit and miss?

• Which tactics gave you the best ROI?

If you have several tactics already working for you, make it a priority to double-down on them before jumping on anything new. Jumping on to new trends can be fun and exciting in the spur of the moment, and experimentation is vital for staying relevant, but it can also be detrimental. If you reduce your focus on tactics that are currently working and generating an ROI for your business, you risk your marketing strategy spreading itself too thin.

Review your market knowledge

When was the last time you reviewed your target market, audience, and personas? 

People’s situations, wants, needs, and desires shift and change over time. If your business isn’t keeping in touch with your customers and clients frequently, now is the best time to start. 

Are you seeing your customers behaving differently? Are your customers using new platforms or products? Are they interested in new subjects they weren’t interested in before? How is your competition evolving? 

Examine whether your assumptions about your target audience are correct and in line with reality. 

Your business can do this by examining and comparing:

• Your Data – Is it within KPIs and expectations?

• Industry Benchmarks – How do your numbers compare?

• Competitors – How is your competition speaking to your target market?

• Speaking to Customers – The best source of information is from your customers themselves. Set up conversations with them to validate and update your assumptions.

Once you’ve examined the landscape, update your buyer personas with any new details or insights you’ve uncovered.

The Customer Journey and Beyond

Once you’ve updated your buyer personas and validated your assumptions about your target audience, the next step is to look at the typical customer’s journey through your business.

How have customers found you this year? If there are any friction points in your sales pipeline leading to drop-offs, consider how they can be mitigated and managed. 

Identify where your deals usually stall or drop out, and brainstorm ways to retain prospects in your pipeline and ultimately drive them towards a successful sale. 

Once you’ve analysed the customer journey internally, take a step outside the boundaries of your market and look for ways to bring in new strategies or tactics that aren’t actively used in your space. 

These could be trends happening in adjacent markets, strategies or tactics businesses in other markets are experimenting with, or simply new ideas or insights you can absorb from companies in different niches. 

The goal is to think about how your market may evolve in the future. This way, you can get ahead of your competition by first implementing these strategies and tactics.

Run a Content Audit

Content marketing is the foundation of your digital customer experience and a powerful way to bring in new leads, prospects, and sales through organic search. However, most marketers fail to realise that your business must nourish your content marketing strategy for it to flourish.

Take some time to get together with your team and run a content audit to analyse your:

• Top performing content

• Worst performing content

• Keyword performance

In addition to digging into the data, poll colleagues across the business for their perspective. The sales team will have valuable insight to offer on sales enablement content, for example, and the customer service team will be able to identify gaps in customer knowledge that can be addressed.

Remember that search engines value fresh content on some topics more than others. If you and your team aren’t frequently updating your most popular articles and posts, you can find yourselves gradually slipping in the search results.

Once your audit is complete, you’ll have identified gaps in your existing content and be able to plan for content creation, updates, or removal where content is no longer relevant.

Conduct a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis is a great situational awareness tool to use with your marketing team as a way to solidify your decision-making process.

In order to set your KPIs and revenue-generating tactics, you will need to make some decisions on your priorities. Knowing your team’s strengths and weaknesses will highlight gaps you need to fill, the tactics you can expect to execute well in-house, and those you’ll require additional resources for.

This framework can also help your team get clear on the opportunities you can pursue right now to complement your marketing plan, and any threats to the success of your plan, whether they come from internal or external sources.

2. Establish marketing performance goals and objectives

Establishing where you want your marketing strategy to take you is the next critical step in the marketing planning process. 

Begin by brainstorming how marketing can align itself to achieving the business’ overall objectives. Where does your company want to be in the short, medium and long term? Your marketing efforts need to be strategically aligned so you and your team can establish a plan for the role you play in getting there. 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. 

Look at your current KPIs – are they still in line with your business goals and the outcome you’d like your marketing team to achieve? 

A great way to verify your KPIs are “up to snuff” is to reverse-engineer each KPI starting with the end goal in mind. 

For example, let’s say you have a revenue goal for the next quarter on a critical service you offer to your clients. You can work your way backwards from the end goal (revenue) and determine what lower-level indicators lead to that revenue. 

This process may look as follows:

• Revenue goal of £100,000 in Q4

• Each sale of your service brings in £5,000 monthly, or £15,000 quarterly

• You’ll need seven sales in Q4 to reach your revenue goal

• Your average conversion rate from warm lead to sale is 10%

• You’ll need 70 warm prospects in your pipeline for Q4

• 25% of cold leads become warm prospects

• You’ll need to reach 280 cold leads in Q4

If your KPIs align with your sales process, such that you track:

• X/280 Cold Leads from Online Content Marketing

• X/70 Warm Prospects from Email Follow-Up

• X/7 Sales from your Phone-Based Sales Team

Then your business is well on its way to meeting its performance goals for the quarter. 

Of course, this is just a hypothetical example. Still, you’d be surprised at the number of B2B businesses who don’t take the time to properly verify their KPIs and update them as their marketing goals change. 

Pick and Prioritise Your Marketing Tactics

There’s no shortage of tactics your business can use as part of its digital marketing strategy. 

There’s everything from:

• Organic and paid social media marketing

• Paid search engine marketing

• SEO-focused content marketing

• Email marketing strategies

… and these are just the beginning. 

The tactics you ultimately decide to use will depend on your business’s strategic objectives, KPIs, and brand positioning. 

Set Your Priorities

By getting your priorities straight, you and your marketing team will have the clarity to execute the tactics you choose successfully. 

Determine which tactics will have the most significant impact by asking yourself:

• What are our must-have campaigns? In what mediums?

• What are our “nice to haves”?

• Is this particular tactic just a “passion project”?

• How will this drive progress on our KPIs and the business’ overall objectives?

Prioritising your tactics is an essential first step, but it’s also important not to limit your progress and think beyond your boundaries. 

The competition evolves quickly, and B2B buyer expectations are rapidly changing. 

The only way to stay ahead of the competition is not to focus on just what you have to do but to expand your focus to what you’d be able to do in an ideal world. 

Aim high, scope out tactics that are beyond what you believe to be pragmatically possible at this time and include them in your plan for regular review. In this way, you can keep your future top of mind and continue to develop your capabilities towards that end. When you’re able to, you can allocate resources to keep your business ahead of the competition. 

Incorporate your review findings

This is where your review comes into its own.

Let’s say you want to build a community around your brand on social media. As part of that, you want to explore if your business should take advantage of TikTok and find your audience on the platform.

Before jumping ahead, you will want to ask:

• Is TikTok an appropriate platform for our business and brand image?

• Does our market research suggest that there is an opportunity for us there?

• Do we have the necessary skills in our team to execute this well?

• Do we have the budget to outsource any requirements we can’t handle in-house and the time to dedicate to it?

• Is there any ramp-up time required before we begin to see results?

Part of tactical execution is anticipating challenges before they occur. Sit down with your team and think about what you need to flag. 

Is there anything in your strategy and the tactics you’ve chosen that could potentially throw you off course? Are there any challenges you already know about or face that you must address? 

What are your unknowns, what additional information could help you execute your strategy successfully? 

Are there any marketing automation tools you could lobby for that would increase your ROI, save costs, or make your pipeline more efficient? 

Once you’ve answered these questions, prioritised your tactics, and established a clear path forward, your team will be well on the way to success.

Allocate Your Budget

Finally, we get to your marketing budget. 

As much as we’d love the freedom of an unlimited budget, tightening budgets that have to do more often force us to prioritise our marketing efforts. To match our CEO and CFO’s expectations, we need to focus on what we anticipate has the highest ROI.

Realistically, that means some of your favoured projects just won’t make the cut for this round of spending. However, make sure they are kept in view each review cycle so you can continue to explore them. 

Split Available Spend

Split your available marketing budget by:

• Quarter - Most businesses allocate more for Q4, less for Q1. This is niche-dependent.

• Campaigns - Which marketing campaigns have proven ROI? Which are a business priority?

• Channels - Which channels have a proven ROI? With which media are you experimenting?

By knowing your numbers and allocating early, you can see what marketing efforts are and aren’t possible, plan to use your budget efficiently, and not overreach.. 

When you know your constraints, you won’t over-promise what you can deliver, and it allows you to make a case for additional allocation further on. 

Make sure you’re allocating your budget and tracking your spending for the whole content creation and marketing process, from content creation all the way through to promotion.

3. Create your marketing plan

By this point, you’ve established the goals for your marketing strategy and reviewed your current capabilities and constraints. You’ve chosen the tactics you’re doing to pursue based on that information and planned your spend.

Now it’s time to determine where you’re going to focus your resources and plan out your content creation, repurposing, and promotion.

Content Strategy Development

You need to develop content around themes or topics for a solid content strategy. Brainstorm your content pillars and sub-topics, based on your keyword strategy. 

For keywords, think about the terms your prospects are using to search for information online, as well as what you want to be found for on search engines.

Research the high-intent keywords that actual prospective buyers type into their search bar rather than “browsers” with no intent to buy. 

Lastly, look at your competitor’s strategy. A competitive analysis will help you to see if you can target some of their keywords in your content marketing plan.

Events, Launches, and Flagship Content

It goes without saying that you also need to plan your content so that it hits key points in your company’s promotional schedule. Review the events or launches that your business needs to highlight and build marketing campaigns around and flagship pieces of content for them.  

Remember, it can take 5-6+ months for your content to begin to move the needle traffic-wise, depending on the authority of your website and brand. This is why planning your content ahead of time is crucial. 

Take note of major events in your business at least 6+ months out, so you have plenty of time to plan your approach, build momentum, and do your content ideas justice.

Tailor Content to the Customer Journey

Not everyone is a buyer straight away, which is why it’s essential to tailor your content marketing efforts to provide value at all stages of the customer journey. 

Are there specific points you want your content to focus on? Do you have any gaps you need to fill? Any blog posts or landing pages you need to create? What level of awareness do you want your ideal prospect to be in when they read your content? 

For example, content tailored towards creating awareness and helping prospects to evaluate your offering will be more educational. You’ll need to focus on showing them different facets of the problem they’re trying to solve, while uncovering the benefits of your services and how their lives will improve working with you. 

Content centred around customers, on the other hand, might also focus on onboarding and educating new buyers. It might also aim to build a community around your brand, be more “social” and “casual” in nature, and have the goal of bringing people together to learn from each other.  

Building Brand Experiences and Community

Which brings us to building customer experiences through your content that rallies people around your brand. You can do a lot with white papers, case studies, and original research, But think about what you can create to make your content more of an experience. 

Your experience-building could consist of:

• Live presentations and webinars

• Panel discussions

• AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions on social media

When you know the major milestones and projects your business has for the year ahead far enough in advance, you have the ability to maximise your marketing impact. 

The final step is to have a good grasp of your production schedule, which we’ll cover by discussing the benefits of a marketing calendar. 

Use a Marketing Calendar

A marketing calendar, an editorial calendar, a content calendar or content plan… Whatever you want to call it. It all helps your business to streamline its content production and ensure you’re publishing content consistently and at a high-standard. 

Your calendar creates the framework for effective project management. Using it, you can break down the timelines for each project, campaign, and individual piece of content. 

What should be included in a marketing calendar?

• Ideation and brainstorming

• Outline development or story boarding

• Initial content drafts

• Editing rounds

• Content revisions

• Creative design

• Publication to your CMS

• Content promotion and amplification

What you include in your marketing calendar is up to you and your team, but tracking each point relevant to your business is critical to keeping a consistent publishing schedule. 

Some teams manage their output through Excel or Google Sheets, however we find that in an omnichannel environment, even a simple content marketing plan outgrows a spreadsheet these days. Instead, we recommend you use a dedicated content planning tool that also helps with content tracking and analysis.  

Concluding Thoughts

By knowing what your business will do before you execute, you’ll stay on track, stay consistent, and increase your chances of blowing your KPIs out of the water!

We hope that this comprehensive guide has covered everything you need to know to get started with your own detailed and strategically aligned B2B marketing plan. 

If you’ve got any questions about campaign planning, content strategy, or how marketing automation can help with both, we’d love to answer them. Feel free to reach out for a chat.