Quick guide for Media Planning for B2B Brands
Introduction
B2B Brands know the importance of Content and Media in its growth. For B2B Marketers the topmost challenge is to create content and strategically delivering it to the pre-defined audience using multiple channels. The role of media planning is crucial in driving customers as well as growth for any B2B Brand.
B2B Media planning takes end to end approach in marketing. Media planning starts with identifying the ideal customers for your business - and constantly implementing various marketing tactics for conversions.
Here is an overview of the guide.
- Knowing the audience
- Auditing current digital enablement landscape
- Auditing maturity level
- Mapping the current digital landscape
- Designing Strategy
- Budget
- Reach
- Tactics
- Pipeline growth.
- Working at Search and Social Media Marketing
- Setting up an ROI measurement system
Knowing the Audience:
93% of companies who exceed lead and revenue goals report segmenting their database by persona.
In previous blogs, we have learned why persona is important for B2B Marketers. It is good to know who are you trying to help. Garry vee said, 'the best business strategy will always be trying to help genuinely.' But before you offer help or solution, you need to understand who are you helping, with who you want to build a relationship and what are their challenges in business. Persona or understanding your audience helps you to learn the challenges your prospective client faces.
For detailed learning, we suggest you read our 'persona' blog. Here is an overview of persona and it's benefit in media planning.
Blog - The Importance of 'persona' in relationship building and branding.
How knowing audience help in B2B media planning?
- To learn challenges a prospective client faces.
- To create personalised content that helps the buyer to make a better purchase decision.
- To prioritise the best demand generation tactic.
- To design the funnel.
- For a better understanding of marketing and sales goals.
Auditing current digital landscape
Different B2B Brands have different goals. Media planning strategy varies with the stage, size, budget and revenue goal of a business. A small B2B Business needs a different budget and strategy to acquire prospective clients than the big one. Before you start designing media planning it is important to know the current digital landscape of your business.
- Auditing marketing maturity level:
B2B Marketing has a different level and stages. It is crucial to measure at what level you are at? For better understanding, we divide the whole marketing operation into three levels. Please note, different agencies have a different approach towards maturity levels.
Level 1: Your marketing team has tentative documented marketing goals but those are not being implemented regularly. Marketing activities are confined with vanity metrics and largely use to attract prospective client but further do not consider them in the pipeline. Ideal for a start-up that is in MVP phase.
Level 2: You have documented marketing strategy that is approved with the sales team. Sales and marketing operations are aligned and you have designed a media planning strategy. You publish content strategically and have prospective leads in the pipeline. You often nurture those leads and send to the sales team to enable it for sales. This level has a moderate level of sales activities and needs help from agencies to scale up the operation.
Level 3: This level includes higher sales activities. Your marketing team constantly send high-quality MQLs to sales and sales has a higher conversation rate. At this level, you use intent-driven multi-channel approach and leverage multiple demand generation tactics to fulfil one common revenue goal. At this level, most of the marketing operations are outsourced and ROI is measurable.
If your marketing activities are in level 1 and 2 - you need to further consider improving the level to achieve a feasible revenue goal. Media planning can be done according to the maturity level marketing has achieved.
- Mapping the current digital landscape
Today almost all businesses are digitally enabled. To some extent, everyone uses digital services to grow brand. But it is necessary to know to what extent your B2B brand has gone enabling digitally.
Some questions to answer before you design a marketing strategy. Answer it to as 0, 1, 2 and 3. Where 0 is for 'No' where 1 to 3 is the level of marketing you are implementing. (we are assuming that you have documented strategy)
Digital channel and content creation:
- Do you have a multi-channel reach to an audience?
- Yes: 3
- Yes (but only two channels): 2
- N0: 0
- How often you post on social media? (For priority channel)
- Seven plus time a week: 3
- Five times a week: 2
- Three times per week: 1
- Not at all: 0
- Do your employees follow your social media handles?
- Yes: 3
- No: 0
- Do your people create content on social media that represent their expertise in a domain?
- Yes, they do every week: 3
- Yes, but once in a month: 2
- Yes, rarely: 1
- No: 0
- Do you have professional content creators in your team?
- Yes, have a team: 3
- Yes, have a couple of 2
- Yes, have one: 1
- No: 0
- Has your content marketing and sales team aligned?
- Yes, they have a shared strategy: 3
- Yes, but often have conflict: 2
- No: 0
Scoring 0-6: You have a very weak digital approach to growth.
Scoring 7 - 12: You might be doing well either in social media or content creation. That is not enough though.
Scoring 13 - 18: You have good social media and content creation strategy.
Demand growth:
- Do you use multiple marketing tactics to pull leads in the pipeline?
- Yes, more than three tactics: 3
- Yes, two effective tactics: 2
- No, only inbound: 1
- Do you use ABM?
- Yes, have full-scale ABM Program for all maturity level: 3
- Yes, have ABM but not scalable: 1
- No: 0
- Do you consider virtual events?
- Yes, very likely: 3
- Yes, sometime: 2
- No: 0
Scoring 0-1: You have a poor demand growth strategy.
Scoring 2- 4: You have a non-scalable demand growth strategy.
Scoring 4-6: You have scalable demand growth tactics.
Lead database:
10. Do you have a data team?
- Yes: 3
- No, but other team looks after it: 1
- No: 0
- If yes, then do you leverage intent and audience behaviour data?
- Yes: 3
- No: 0
Scoring 0-3: You have no data-driven approach.
Scoring 3-4: You have started up with data-driven marketing and need to be committed on the goal.
Scoring 5-6: You are leveraging Intent data and further implementation will help you build better content experience for your audience.
Martech:
11. Do you have MA enabled?
- Yes, fully operational: 3
- Yes, partially operational: 2
- No: 0
12. Do your marketing operations are unified?
- Yes, truly unified: 3
- Yes, partially unified: 2
- No: 0
13. If yes, then do you have a budget for it?
- Yes, have separate martech budget: 3
- Yes, have shared in total marketing budget: 2
- Yes, have shared in the total budget: 1
- No: 0
14. Does martech help integrate your operation with all stakeholders effectively?
- Yes, Very effectively: 3
- Yes, effectively: 2
- No: 0
Scoring 0-1: You should have enabled MA for better growth.
Scoring 3 - 6: You need to improve MA to increase operational efficiency.
Scoring 6-12: You have sophisticated marketing technology installed.
Revenue driven approach:
- Do you have KPIs set to measure the result?
- Can your marketing team report the revenue they achieved through marketing?
The answers to these question should always have to be yes as it serves the high-level objective of marketing and media planning.
Designing Strategy:
Successful B2B companies have documented media planning kit. If you are a B2B Business that just has been started up, it is recommended to jump on designing the strategy from the scratch but if you are a B2B Business which in level 1 and level 2 of marketing and has poor or moderate digital landscape score - updating the marketing strategy is crucial.
The marketing strategy should be agile. The buyers in TAL shows agile and flexible behaviour in a buyer journey.
Media planning should be done considering varies factors. As we know the target audience and have mapped the digital landscape, we can design or update it according to it.
Following factors need to be considered while designing a strategy:
Goals.
Why do you create content? Why do you plan content marketing? Those 'why' must be answered with goals. The goal should be SMART and directly have an impact on revenue generation.
Common media planning goals are:
- To promote the brand and increase brand awareness.
- To create an audience that pays.
- To create an account base for sales.
- To generate revenue regularly to support business growth goals.
Budget.
Budget is one of the critical aspects to look at. The budget should support all operation of marketing, from content creation to martech buying. Sometimes a large share of the budget is outsourced as B2B brands need to scale their operations. The budget is varying with your goals.
With Business Analytics, you must have the predictive model of ROI and future spending as operation scale up.
Reach.
The market reach is important. Once you design persona, the next task is to define the total penetration and coverage you want to achieve with demand gen operation. The audience you want to reach for generating leads must be compliant.
The reach may vary with the region and tactic of demand generation.
Marketing tactics.
It is not suitable to use ABM for all size of companies. When you decide your business goal, persona and audience reach - you have to decide the tactic of marketing that will able to drive demand.
Some marketing tactics are:
- Content Marketing
- Inbound
- Social Media
- Paid advertisement
- ABM
- Lead nurturing
- Content Syndication
Pipeline growth and revenue.
A successful media planning has a clear picture of how it's sales pipeline looks like. The pipeline must be run with leads. It is important to push leads faster to increase pipeline velocity so that could benefit the revenue goals. Using right tactics, content and data it is possible to achieve pipeline growth.
Working at Search and Social Media Marketing:
Demand generation is the most lucrative marketing tactics and widely used by B2B Marketers. When we focus on high-level goals such as revenue generation we often ignore the most important aspect of marketing, that is to be seen without approaching. SEO enables B2B Brands to expand their reach on the internet.
Search marketing can be achieved by creating a lot of quality content and optimising it for SEO.
Inspiring people to create content and distribute on the internet helps your brand set up a digital presence and that is for free. Perhaps, search marketing and social media marketing are the highest ROI generator for the long run as it involves little budget.
Social Media:
LinkedIn is one of the favourites and effective social media channel for B2B Brands. Although, B2B Brands should increase their presence on the millennial-driven platform such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to engage with young decision-makers and buyers.
We have explained how social media marketing can help B2B Brands in this blog.
Setting up an ROI measurement system.
We want more revenue is not a perfect strategy. How much we want and how cost-efficient should the acquisition is? - are some questions you need to include in your strategy.
At the beginning of media planning, B2B Brands must define the goals and one of the important goals is generating revenue and mapping the return on investment.
ROI is a factor that tells marketers how successful the campaign was.
While implementing media planning marketers have to have a track on the spending of budget on marketing operation. Generally, it takes months to convert an account and year to see revenue. So using BA and Predictive analysis, it is important to pre-define the ROI and work toward achieving it.
Defining metrics such as CPL and CPA should be in the stack and frequently reviewed.
On a high level, we talk about dollars but to reach it we have to achieve every metrics that connect the high-level goal.
Such as - increase organic traffic by 30%, increase email CTR by 2%, Increase landing page conversation by 20% per month, generate 1000 MQL till the end of the quarter.
To pass through every goal and track ROI, marketers need a smart dashboard. Using Demand integrates service like DI enabled marketers to track the goals and spending on the campaign.
Let's overview the timeline of goals and its spending.
Phase 1: Increase email open rate by 12%. (Initial spending)
Phase 2: Increase email CTR by 2%
Phase 3: Increase web traffic by 30%
Phase 4: Generate 2000 MQLs per month. (Allocating budget to marketing teams and MA)
Phase 5: Nurture leads through the pipeline and engages 11-12% of total MQLs to sales. (Distribute budget to sales)
Phase 6: Convert 5-7% of MQLs to sales. (Calculating the cost per acquisition and CPL)
Calculating ROI.
Conclusion:
Media planning gives you a complete budget and growth overview. Strategically implementing media with the use of martech and data helps marketers to drive the growth.