1. Start by researching the clientele

Most marketers agree that this is very important, but companies often pay far less attention to customer research than they should. Studying the clientele you only guess and do not know for sure what the problem of customers is, then your marketing decisions will not be backed up by real research, which means that the chance of making a mistake will greatly increase.

Keep in mind that customer research goes far beyond anecdotal evidence that your audience is on a particular channel or prefers to shop in a particular way.

Before you start developing a marketing strategy, you need to make sure that you are on the right track. Will your work bring valuable results? What if you’re just trying to kill fish with dynamite instead of fishing?

2. Conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis

Have you spoken to your clients? Fine!

But…

Collecting survey results and customer interviews is only the first step.

These are data, not conclusions and insights.

The same is true for installing Google Analytics on your site (if you haven’t already, you should). Just collecting data doesn’t mean you’ve learned something useful from it.

Now you need to analyze this data.

• Take into account the results of the study of the clientele.
• Pay attention to similar behavior and actions of customers on your site.
• Have a sales team, to find out what questions customers ask them most often.
• If there are active pages on social networks, see what people write to you.
• If you have a customer support department, find out what problems customers face most often.

When analyzing data, remember that two different approaches can be applied: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative analysis…

Intentionally inconclusive and not necessarily based on numbers. (For example, you could ask a customer, “What annoys you the most about product X?” to get an idea of ​​what problems customers face most often.)

Quantitative analysis…

Based on questions that can be answered in the form of data, numbers, and/or statistics. (For example, you can find out which questions are the most popular on Google and use that information to determine what problems shoppers have most often.)

To get the best possible understanding of the market and customers, you need to apply both approaches.

We most often use the following two methods: 1. Find out from customers what their main problem is and leave room for an answer. If you ask leading questions (for example, “Is X a significant challenge for you?”), you can miss the real problems.

2. Ask a question, let clients answer as they see fit, and then compare the answers and find common trends based on several interviews.

3. Define key objectives and metrics

Any company is chasing success. But the definition of “success” is different for every company, as are the ways to measure it.

The same is true for B2B marketing strategies: A “successful” strategy can be one that increases sales, builds brand awareness, generates more leads, increases referrals, or something else.

Our article on how to define key marketing metrics and objectives for B2B content describes how to approach this from a content marketing perspective, but it can also be extrapolated to other marketing strategies.

1. First, define your company’s goals: what does success mean to you?
2. Based on this goal, figure out what actions and outcomes will help achieve the company’s goals and succeed.
3. Tie these actions to metrics against which you can track progress.

So, you will have an approximate map of the metrics that matter most, as well as their relationship with the overall goals of the company.

4. Map out the corporate customer journey

At The Foundation, we always start our content marketing strategy by mapping the corporate customer journey.

The customer journey map is an opportunity to get to know the different customer touchpoints within your B2B marketing strategy as they move through the sales funnel, as well as learn what influences their decisions and what questions they may be asking.

Also at this stage, you can understand what content will answer customer questions, how many times it will be searched in search engines, and what format is best for it.

To map the customer journey, start with the following:

1. Identify key stakeholders (and those to be engaged) for each stage of the buying cycle
2. Understand what will affect them the most at each stage
3. Make a list of questions they are likely to have (this is where customer research comes in handy)
4. Use a tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or UberSuggest to get a rough estimate of your monthly Google searches for the most popular questions.
5. Brainstorm some content ideas that answer these questions (you don’t have to go deep into these ideas at this stage)
6. Make a list of the types of content you plan to use at each stage

5. Decide what marketing tactics to use

You have studied the clientele, mapped the customer journey, conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis, selected key metrics, and painted your goals according to the SMART system.

Now is the time to decide what you will do to achieve these goals.

Let’s use the following example:

• There were 40 downloads of case study materials from your site in the third and fourth quarters of last year
• With 10 of those 40 leads, you were able to complete the deals, i.e. with 25%
• The completion rate for the rest of the materials available for download from your site was only 10%, therefore, case studies brought your company the best result.