One Mean Tweet of a Campaign to Drive Brand Awareness, Lead Generation, and Conversion.
As you’ll read in our B2B marketing whitepaper coming out next month, we are very bullish about the notion that there is absolutely no reason that a B2B marketing strategy should be boring!
What is B2B Marketing in Today’s Digital World?
Over the last number of years, B2B Marketing strategies have evolved and marketers, including myself, have realized that clients and prospects are consumers themselves. Clients are people. They have rich and diverse lives with interests, likes, and dislikes, and they consume media like everyone else does, on their favorite devices. So, think about your target audience not only as business prospects but as full-spectrum individuals who are constantly consuming content—get to know them the best you can. Who are they? What media do they enjoy? What social media do they frequent? What would they be interested in? What will catch their eye? What will make them chuckle? What will make their lives easier? Start thinking about the answers to these questions and you’ll find yourself saying B2B Marketing should do all these things.
Consider this: Even way back in 2012, 91% of B2B marketers and advertisers used social media. And its popularity has only increased. That’s why Mean Tweets is the inspiration for our latest marketing campaign. We’ve taken the power of popular culture (Jimmy Kimmel Live’s Mean Tweets segments) and combined it with owned and earned media (Social, Display, and Direct Mail), as well as some old-school telemarketing, to create a B2B marketing campaign we are really proud of. Full disclosure here, we sell some of the same media that we’re using for this campaign. And that’s something else for marketers to consider—use everything you have at your fingertips to reinforce the power of what you sell. What better way to show clients and prospects that you believe in your products than to use them yourself? If you sell print and digital media (or TV, outdoor, radio, newspaper, etc.), use your own products to go after your clients!
From B2B Lead Gen to Sales
And Marketers, don’t forget your sisters and brothers in Sales. Will your Sales team be excited by this marketing effort? Will they want to follow up with prospects and be proud to talk about the campaign? Make sure they are, for they are your most powerful marketing weapons. Because as you know, without a fantastic and dedicated Sales team, Marketing can be a boom splat. Marketers can serve up leads all day long but unless Sales pulls clients through the funnel, it’s all for naught.
And I am pretty sure our Sales team will like this campaign.
B2B Ad Campaign Strategy Details
Target Audience(s):
Media Planners and Decision Makers at all levels of an organization (agencies and client-direct)
B2B Marketing Objectives:
- Educate target audiences about MNI’s digital portfolio of solutions, driving both awareness and consideration.
- Support Account Executives’ efforts in securing meetings and RFPs in Q4 2017//Q1 2018 with MNI Digital specific solutions: MNIx programmatic, DataMatch, Local, Social).
Digital & Print Media Employed in our B2B Strategy:
- Print - 6-Page Cover Wrap - Direct Mail on People Magazine for 4 weeks
- Digital - Display Ads utilizing audience targeting partners ALC and Semcasting.
- Organic Social – Social Media profiles on Twitter to represent each Cover Wrap—Data, Social, Local, MNIx programmatic, and MNI Digital. The Twitter handles are @DataDontMatter, @SocialSkeptic25, @WhyGoLocal, @JadedMediaPlnr, and @NoPainCampaigns.
- Blog – This SEO-optimized blog has hopefully attracted relevant traffic around the B2B Marketing and advertising content, which we do a lot of at MNI Targeted Media Inc.!
- Telemarketing/Salesforce Team – With our 70+ local sales account executives around the country, we follow up with phone calls and emails to drive marketing effectiveness.
- PR – Think about your hook! In our case, we are very proud of the products and solutions we sell our clients and therefore use our owned and operated assets to drive our marketing.
Budget:
A Shoestring!
Timing:
9/1/17 – 9/30-17
8 Tips For Designing a Winning B2B Marketing Plan
Get Your Sales Team Engaged.
You need them to take the leads and convert them!
Focus on the Actions you want your Prospects to Take.
Think about this at every step as you build the campaign. Think about it in micro-actions.
Do you want them to flip a page? Read, Click, etc?
Simplicity
Draw your audience in. Do it clearly and without a lot of complicated words or visuals.
Stand Out/Be Catchy/Be Bold.
Don’t be afraid to be creative, B2B Marketers. It’s not just the B2C folks who can have some fun. And why the heck not? We’re all fighting for share of eyeballs, share of mind, share of milliseconds of attention. Make it count.
Be Relevant.
What issue are you solving for your prospect? Tell them, succinctly. Don’t give them so much information that they have no reason to call. Leave the paragraphs of info at home.
Be On-Brand.
Is it your voice? Don’t stray too far.
Report Back on ROI.
It’s not just Sales and Marketing that care about results. Bring the entire company into the mix.
Everyone contributes and is interested in knowing what drives business.
Be Open to Learning
It’s how you make the next campaign better. Incorporate insights from one campaign to the next.
Want to learn more about successful B2B marketing strategies? We are a B2B marketing company that can help!
Stay tuned for our B2B Marketing Whitepaper coming out next month by signing up here!
