By Ana Rincon on Jan 17, 2022
Most of us are well aware that business has changed during the pandemic. A lot of people now work remotely, minimize shopping in brick and mortar stores, worry more about workplace safety and don’t travel for business if possible.
As businesses and industries change their ways of doing things, B2B (business to business) companies must change how they market to their customers. This is not the time to wing it. More than ever, for B2B marketing programs to succeed, you need a good B2B marketing plan that you update as trends, technology and markets change.
76% of US B2B businesses have formal marketing plans. You need to keep yours relevant if you are to compete with businesses that value strategic planning.
A new year is always a good time to review your marketing plan and course correct. Not only that, but data and trends from last year have now been gathered into reports. This accessible information is extremely helpful in enabling marketers to project trends for 2022 and plan their strategies.
As your review your marketing plan, you might may want to pay particular attention to the following trends.
Before we get started, please do not confuse a marketing plan with an action plan. A marketing plan lays out the strategic big picture to move your marketing forward. That is what we will be talking about today. A marketing plan is a framework.
Action plans, on the other hand, detail the very specific and tactical steps to accomplish your overall goals.
Consider this example:
In a nutshell, a marketing plan sets your overall strategies and is intended to guide you long therm. Action plans detail the short term tactics you use to fulfill those lofty strategies.
Your marketing plan is the forest. Your action plans are the trees.
Since your marketing plan is meant to set out long term strategies, you don’t want to change it too often or add so much detail that it will soon be out of date. Save the details for your action plans.
How often you need to review your marketing plan will vary. Before the pandemic, a new business might have reviewed their marketing plan quarterly or possibly a little more often if they were still tweaking it. Established businesses rarely looked at them more than once a year.
But with business and societal norms in upheaval, it is critical that B2B businesses review their marketing plans more than usual in order to keep up with rapidly changing trends.
Whenever you review a marketing plan, you want to pay attention to your target markets. This is particularly true now. Target verticals that made sense in the past might now be struggling due to the pandemic while others may be enjoying increased sales and growth.
Regularly take the temperature of your target verticals and consider new ones. Can you expand into selling to other up-and-coming industries, even if it means you need to make some minor product modifications?
On the other hand, if you sell products that appeal to a wide spectrum of businesses, but your brand is having trouble gaining traction, narrowing your focus to specific verticals for a period of time can help. It is easier and cheaper to generate buzz within a specific vertical than to generate buzz in all industries. Then you can build on that.
Content marketing was getting a lot of attention before the pandemic, but the pandemic has given it a boost in the face of fewer direct sales opportunities. In 2021, 43% of B2B companies said they increased their content marketing budget over the previous year.
The 12th Annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Report produced by MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute, lists the marketing content that showed the best outcomes over the course of 2021. They are
Be sure to look closely at the success and failures of your content marketing efforts last year. Compare them to the efforts of your competition. Are there areas where it would make sense to expand your efforts or allocate a larger budget?
Events could be considered part of content marketing (see above), but we would like to draw attention to them separately. Now that there are COVID vaccines, 52% of B2B marketers indicate their companies will be increasing their in-person events such as seminars and conferences.
That doesn’t mean they will be ignoring virtual events such as webinars in 2022. Marketers expect their companies to increase spending by 33% in digital events and 39% on hybrid events.
Two important parts of any B2B marketing plan are
In other words, your marketing plan should indicate what percentage of your budget you will invest in social media, online advertising, website development, events, email campaigns, public relations, blog writing, review generation, cashback promotions and so on.
The more ways you can reach prospects, the more likely it is they will hear your message and convert.
But it takes trained staff and time to reach people across multipole channels. And 67% of marketers in a recent survey said they had been asked to do more in 2021 with the same resources.
One way to answer the desire for increased marketing while not increasing staffing is to outsource to a good marketing agency. At the beginning of the pandemic, outsourcing took a dip when businesses were not sure how to react. A couple years ago, 71% of businesses outsourced some of their marketing and that number dropped to 61% a year later.
But now outsourcing is again on the rise, and 75% of marketing departments outsource. The companies that outsource tending to be larger and more successful.
The primary challenge in outsourcing? In the Marketing Profs report cited above, most marketing departments found it challenging to find outsourcing partners with topical expertise.
You can outsource any marketing activity, but some common areas to outsource include running SEO, website development, email campaigns, social media campaigns, public relations, design, and aspects of content marketing such as writing blogs and developing webinars, presentations and videos.
Your business can never reach its potential if you are not monitoring and measuring the performance of your marketing campaigns and your marketing content. And that doesn’t just mean your Pay Per Click ads. You want to monitor everything down to the popularity of each blog posts.
You don’t need to include every analytics tool you plan to use in your marketing plan. Leave that for your action plans. But you do need to list what areas you want to measure – and why.
If analytics isn’t an area where your company excels, make a plan to outsource it to a marketing agency that specializes in that area. The days of making key marketing decisions based solely on your gut are gone.
Marketing trends change much faster now that so much of marketing is digital. Add to that the extraordinary times in which we live, and it’s harder than ever to keep up with important market trends.
It’s easy in the day to day of running a business to get stuck in the weeds. But you need to find the time to regularly step back and check your strategies against the realities of the changing world. If you yourself don’t have the time, you can outsource to experts. But you still need to keep your finger on the pulse of where your company is headed if you want to reach your destination.
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