A B2B marketing strategy is the plan that concentrates your marketing resources on the one or two problems that most affect the business. It sets clear objectives, chooses a differentiated way to reach buyers and commits a budget to it. It isn’t a list of tactics like SEO, email or paid ads. Those come later, once the strategy tells you what to do and why.
Here’s the short version of how to build one:
The rest of this guide walks through each step, with examples. If you want the reasoning behind why most B2B strategies fall flat first, start below.
Look across the marketing of most B2B brands and a pattern shows up. Smart teams, skilled people, decent budgets. And strategies that are average at best.
In truth, they lack the focus and clarity to make a real difference to the business. (The kind of difference a CEO actually notices and cares about.)
The reason is rarely talent. It’s that most businesses don’t have a rigorous process for doing strategy, so they rush into tactics instead:
You get the picture. Tactics feel like progress because they’re easy to start. Strategy is the harder, slower work of deciding what’s worth doing at all.
You can skip stages, of course. Maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe you’ll land on the right approach at the right moment. Maybe. But that’s hope, not a plan.
So here’s the 6-part framework we use instead.
Before you can propose a solution, you have to articulate the problem. Every good B2B marketing strategy starts here.
This step depends on one thing being true: that you already understand the business’s core strategy. We cover that in a separate guide on how to translate your business strategy into a B2B marketing strategy. If you haven’t read it, read it first. It’s the foundation everything else sits on.
Assuming you’re up to speed, you’ll then go deeper into the real challenges marketing needs to solve to move the business forward. There could be any number of them.
We lack credibility in the market
We’re too expensive
We’re seen as a niche provider
We’re not innovating fast enough
We’re unknown to our key decision-makers
We’re not seen as relevant to potential buyers
We’re underperforming on revenue
We’re getting the wrong kind of revenue
The list goes on. Once you’ve found the core problem, everything else in the strategy focuses on overcoming it.
That’s really all strategy is: the concentration of resources towards an agreed goal. It’s about overcoming barriers to success. If you turn up several problems, work out which one matters most and start there.
Unless your circumstances are truly unique, you have competitors. In my career I’ve often heard someone say, ‘We don’t really have any competitors.’ Almost every time, they’ve been wrong.
A useful way in is to ask: who, or what, is your competition?
The who is usually clearer than people think. Even businesses that feel they have no direct rival tend to have one in the customer’s eyes. And what the customer thinks is the only thing that counts.
You’ll hear the objection. ‘What, those guys? We don’t compete with them. Their product doesn’t do half of what ours does.’ Maybe not. But what if their product does just enough, at a reasonable price? Be a little more open, a little more cynical, and rivals start to surface.
Reframe the market slightly and you’ll find competitors you never knew you had. A bit of time on a search engine usually reveals the real picture.
The what is trickier. It covers the other ways a customer can reach the outcome your product delivers.
They might be workarounds. They might involve partnering with someone else. They might sit in a completely different sector to yours.
Then there’s the competitor almost everyone forgets. Doing nothing.
Often a customer decides their problem isn’t important enough, or looks too hard to solve. So they muddle on as they are. Inertia wins more deals than any rival product does, and it rarely shows up on a competitor list.
For the companies that really are like yours, work out where they’re positioning themselves. Many B2B markets are noisy, with lots of firms claiming overlapping territory. You can choose to fight over an existing position, but that tends to be slow, expensive and hard to win.
It’s almost always better to carve out a space you can own.
Your marketing objectives should be tied tightly to the business strategy. At heart, this step asks a single question: what does success look like?
You’re deciding what you want to achieve across the short, medium and long term, and how you’ll know when you’ve succeeded or failed.
Take a manufacturing consulting practice trying to break into North America. Objectives for the year ahead might include:
Notice they’re all specific. They can be measured. You could run them through the SMART test if you like: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-based. The only one I’d query is ‘achievable’ because it quietly nudges you towards being too conservative. And that’s generally counterproductive.
So don’t be timid. It’s far easier to start ambitious and scale back than to start small and scale up. Push for the most audacious objectives you can, short of the hopelessly unrealistic. It’s a balance.
The point of all this is to move from the general to the specific. You narrow the focus until you know exactly what has to happen for the business to call this a win.
More often than not, that means focusing on behaviour. Talk is cheap. People lie. It’s what they do that counts. So ask: what do I want someone in my target market to actually do as a result of my marketing?
The knee-jerk answer is ‘buy my product’. But that’s rarely the direct action B2B marketing produces. Unless you’re in a direct-sale situation, and even then a string of smaller actions usually comes before anyone signs.
Notice the plural. Strategies.
If you’ve only got one possible strategy, you haven’t spent enough time on the problem. There are always multiple ways to hit your objectives. Aim for at least three viable options. Get this right and choosing between them should be genuinely hard.
Each option should be able to answer six simple questions:
Most marketing attention today goes on communications. That’s only part of the picture.
The ‘differentiated proposition’ in question four isn’t only about the claims you make or the space you want in a buyer’s mind. Go back to the classic four P’s and that proposition can live just as easily in pricing, place or the product itself as in promotion.
Think as broadly as you can. A genuinely differentiated product will usually outperform even the most creative communications campaign.
Whatever strategy you choose will cost time and money to deliver. Some options carry a price tag many times that of others. Some look right on paper but can’t be built in the time you’ve got.
If you’ve run the numbers and talked to the right people, you should be able to judge how much of your budget to put behind your chosen strategy and the tactics that bring it to life.
The constant danger in B2B marketing is scope creep. The slow, relentless swelling of costs. All those wouldn’t it be cool if moments that leave you hunting for more money and more time:
You might be excited by all of it. But what senior management sees is another marketing programme with runaway costs.
You can’t dodge every surprise. They wouldn’t be surprises if you could. But you can prepare: plan rigorously, brief clearly, hold your partners to account and build in a contingency, just in case.
What if the agency has a brilliant idea you’d love to run? What if there’s a chance to go viral? Are we really going to let the bean-counters win?
I understand the pull. I was once creative director at a large B2B advertising agency and it was my job to talk clients into big, bold, exciting things. If only we could find another ten, twenty, thirty thousand, imagine what we could do. And I meant well. More money meant a bigger splash for their brand.
But marketing isn’t art. It’s business. It’s about investing scarce resources to deliver outcomes for the organisation.
If you can show a strategy delivering standout results, the kind a CEO and CFO understand, you’re in a strong position to go back for more budget. Show them that every pound, dollar or euro comes back as ten and the decision makes itself. Until then, dream like an artist but budget like an accountant.
There’s a saying in the military that no strategy survives first contact with the enemy. B2B marketing isn’t so different.
For the few things you control, there are many you don’t. Competitors launch new products and campaigns. Your audience shifts its priorities. Budgets rise and fall with the fortunes of the business. None of that should be able to derail your ability to deliver value.
If you did step four properly, you already hold alternatives to your current approach. Options that could each meet the needs of the business, and that differ meaningfully from one another.
Here’s the thing about most of the trouble you’ll face: it’s predictable. Not certain, or you’d have built it into the core strategy. Just unsurprising. For example:
These are all plausible. Spend any length of time in B2B marketing and you’ll have lived through a few. In 20-odd years I’ve met all of them, more than once.
So when you build your options, think through what you’d do if the not-so-unexpected happens.
You could run a formal scenario-planning exercise, sketching out possible futures and how each what if would hit your strategy. You could role-play your toughest competitor and ask, how would we kill us if we were them? Or you could keep it simple and ask what you’d do with half the budget, half the time or half the people.
Marketers are wired for optimism. Of course the product will land. Of course buyers will beat a path to our door. Of course the campaign will go viral. The evidence usually points the other way.
This is difficult work. Things will go wrong. The world is never quite as we picture it. The more you prepare for that, the better your results.
Doing strategy is hard. It’s far easier to reach for tactics: email, lead gen, Google ads. But without a strategy underneath them, you risk committing random acts of B2B marketing. Underwhelming at best, career-limiting at worst.
There are no easy hacks here. No 1-2-3 playbook that magically delivers growth. If there were, everyone would already be using it.
Get the right people, data and support in a room, though, and you can build a strategy that points your marketing at what actually matters to the business. You can find the barriers to growth and the real ways round them. And you can deliver the kind of results that drive success for the business, its stakeholders and your own career.
A B2B marketing strategy is a plan that focuses marketing resources on the specific business problems marketing can solve. It defines the problem, the objectives, the target audience, a differentiated proposition and assigns a budget behind it. It sits above tactics like SEO, content, email or paid media and decides which of them are worth using.
Strategy decides what you’re trying to achieve and why. Tactics are the specific activities that deliver it such as email marketing, lead generation or paid ads. Businesses run into trouble when they start with tactics before they’ve set a strategy because the activity has no problem to solve and no way to measure success.
There are six:
At least three genuinely different, viable options. If you can only think of one, you haven’t explored the problem deeply enough. Done well, the options should be hard to choose between.
Often it’s doing nothing. Many buyers decide their problem isn’t urgent enough or looks too hard to solve, so they carry on as they are. Inertia beats more deals than any rival product, so it’s worth planning for directly.
We’ve written a number of articles on how to plan and create strategies for B2B marketing. Here are some you may be interested in:
How to translate your business strategy into a B2B marketing strategy (with examples)
9 questions every B2B CMO should ask their CEO
How to write a great B2B value proposition (with examples)
There’s a saying we love that says: From inside the jar, it’s difficult to read the label. As we say above, strategy is difficult. It’s especially difficult when you’re looking from the inside out.
We’ve worked with B2B marketers in businesses large and small to help them take a more strategic approach to their marketing efforts.
If you’d like to find out how we could help you, get in touch at hello@consideredcontent.com and we’ll arrange a time to talk.
Jason Ball is the founder and managing director at Considered. With a multi-decade career in B2B marketing, he’s worked with world-leading brands such as Adobe, Google, EY and Cisco together with niche specialists in technology, manufacturing and professional services.