To translate a business strategy into a B2B marketing strategy, you take the high-level business goals and decide how marketing will help remove the barriers standing in their way. You pick a small number of critical objectives, no more than three, and choose a focused route to reach them.
Strategy is the concentration of resources towards an agreed goal, so this step is as much about what you decide not to do as what you do.
Here’s how the translation works, in short:
Below, we unpack what strategy actually means, then work through two hypothetical examples that show the cascade from business strategy to marketing strategy to tactics.
The first step, before any marketing strategy, is to have the business conversation with key members of the c-suite.
Come out of it with a clear picture of their priorities and where they want to take the business over the months and years ahead. Where they were vague, you should have brought a marketing perspective to sharpen things up.
You’ll have talked, to paraphrase Philip Kotler, about defining, measuring and quantifying the size and profit potential of specific markets. The markets that hold the key to the ambitions they’ve set. And you’ll have helped identify the kind of value, in product, service or experience, that has to be created to make real headway.
If you’ve got this far, you’re already well beyond where most B2B marketers stop. Your stock with senior management is on the rise. But now what?
Here’s the awkward truth. The conversations so far were the easy bit. The real work is turning that high-level business strategy into a high-level marketing strategy.
The operative word is strategy. Not tactics. Not a pile of to-dos dressed up as something more. Not random acts of marketing.
There’s no such thing as a digital strategy. Or a social media strategy. Or an AI strategy. Those are tactics. Before we go further, it’s worth being precise about what the word ‘strategy’ actually means.
Strategy is the concentration of resources towards an agreed goal.
It isn’t about doing everything. It’s about doing what really matters to the business’s most important objectives. And it’s as much about what you choose not to do as what you do.
At its core, strategy is about overcoming the obstacles keeping the business from its long-term ambitions. If nothing stands in the way, you don’t need a strategy. You don’t need marketing either.
Strategy sits between goals and tactics. If goals are where you want to end up, and tactics are your options for what to do, then strategy is the how.
Like any roadmap, there’s more than one route to the destination. Some are more direct than others. Some come with delays, road closures and congestion. A few will force you to rethink the whole plan.
Not every part of a business strategy can be helped by marketing. But many parts can. Sometimes too many. So the job is to pick a small number of critical objectives and pour your time, money and effort into those. Ideally no more than three.
A lot gets said about strategy, much of it vague or contradictory. So it helps to be clear about how business strategy differs from marketing strategy, and how marketing strategy differs from tactics. The two hypothetical examples below show that cascade at a 30,000-foot level.
In the real world you’d develop each of these in far more depth. Although being able to keep a strategy to one side of a sheet of paper is a good sign it’s focused.
Take an enterprise web hosting business watching its revenue and profit erode as pure hosting becomes a commodity. It’s losing share to rivals who layer profitable consultancy and add-on services on top. Here’s how the cascade from business strategy to tactics might look:
Business strategy: Elevate the business from being pigeonholed as a pure website hosting provider to one that can advise customers on their entire approach to digital engagement.
Marketing strategy: Use our in-house experts to help customers overcome key digital engagement issues, and give them a taste of what it’s like to work with us.
Marketing tactics: Build an online e-learning hub featuring our people, delivering bite-sized lessons on digital engagement. Let people self-select streams based on their challenges, then run a targeted nurture programme showing how we help them meet those challenges.
Strategy is about focus and trade-offs. So what got traded here?
At the business level, the focus landed on ‘digital engagement’. They could have gone broader into the crowded ground of ‘digital transformation’, or narrower by advising e-commerce firms on profitable conversions. They chose not to.
At the marketing level, they decided to personalise the brand and bring their own people to the fore. They could instead have focused on existing customers, partnered with an established thought leader like a business school or analyst, or tried to dominate one slice of digital engagement. Each has pros and cons. All are valid.
And on tactics, they chose to build an owned property leaning towards inbound. One option among many. They could have run sponsored content with a major publisher, focused on live events, or, shock horror, bought an ad campaign in the big hub airports.
Now a professional services example. A premium consultancy focused on manufacturing wants to repeat its European success by expanding into the US.
Business strategy: Grow our manufacturing consulting practice by establishing a presence in North America, displacing the traditional big-name generalist consultancies.
Marketing strategy: Show we understand how to solve the real-world problems facing customers in North America in a way no generalist can.
Marketing tactics: Commission primary research into the biggest business-critical threats to day-to-day manufacturing success. De-position competitors with an integrated ‘Cut the Crap’ programme, contrasting the frustration of traditional consultancies (all theory, all PowerPoint, no action) with our Pathways to Profit™ methodology. Concentrate on key foothold clients through a highly targeted ABM push.
At the business level, they’ve accepted they’re entering a mature market with entrenched rivals, but rivals who are generalists. Winning means stealing share. There’s little greenfield here.
The marketing strategy fixes on one customer pain point: generalists applying generalist thinking to highly specific vertical problems. In reality that frustration would come out of serious research, depth interviews, market mapping, competitor analysis. It leads to a strategy laser-focused on real-world issues, set against the theoretical slideware that traditional consultancies pour onto the market.
The tactics then get closer to the customer. Research that proves you’re listening and hands buyers something genuinely useful, because we’re all curious about what others like us are doing. That feeds a clear de-positioning campaign at the brand level, bold enough to cut through, alongside a focused push on named accounts to win referenceable clients who’ll resonate with a North American audience.
In both examples there were multiple options at every level. Marketing could have chosen different strategies. The tactical combinations are nearly endless. But they didn’t spread themselves thin. They made specific choices, guided by the business strategy, that plotted a clear route to the goal.
Plenty of things could have pushed those decisions another way. The timescale for success. How the target market is defined. Where competitors sit. The wider economy. The available budget.
The blunt truth is that strategy is a process of saying no. It’s a rational decision to prefer one approach over another. But in the end it’s a judgement call. Which is exactly why marketing has to build enough credibility with senior management that they trust your judgement.
Start from the business goals and the barriers in the way to success. Decide how marketing can help remove those barriers. Pick no more than three critical objectives, and choose a focused route to reach them. Then make the trade-offs explicit, because strategy is as much about what you decide not to do as what you do.
Strategy is the how: the concentration of resources towards an agreed goal. Tactics are the specific activities that deliver it, such as an e-learning hub, primary research or an ABM campaign. There’s no such thing as a digital, social media or AI strategy. Those are tactics, not strategies.
It’s a roadmap that sits between your goals and your tactics. Goals are where you want to end up, tactics are your options for what to do, and strategy is how you’ll actually get there while overcoming the obstacles in the way.
Ideally no more than three. Not every part of a business strategy can be helped by marketing, and many that can will compete for attention. Focus on a small number of critical objectives and commit your time, money and effort to those.
Because you can’t do everything, and trying to spreads your resources too thin to move anything. Every strong strategy is a series of deliberate choices to prefer one market, message or tactic over another. Ultimately it’s a judgement call, which is why senior management has to trust marketing’s judgement.
We’ve worked with B2B marketers across the world to help turn business strategy into an actionable marketing strategy. If you need help, we’d love to talk.
Simply contact us at hello@consideredcontent.com to arrange a time.
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.