A good B2B marketing plan spells out all the tools and tactics that you’ll use to achieve your sales goals. It’s your plan of action—what you’ll sell, who’ll want to buy it and the tactics you’ll use to generate leads that result in sales. It doesn’t have to be long or formal but should document the decisions that you’ve made through some careful thought and research. If you’re a B2B equipment manufacturer and haven’t started or recently updated your marketing plan, open a blank document on your device and let’s do this now.

Business Definition

 Start by describing your company and its products or services, explaining how your offering is unique among your competition. Specify your company’s strengths as well as its weaknesses. How is your product or service better? Where do you fall short? List any threats to your business that you are concerned about. Is there a weak department or inexperienced person that’s undermining the efforts of the rest of your organization? Finally, write down any potential opportunities in the marketplace that you have recognized and may be thinking about. There are no bad ideas while drafting this B2B marketing plan. Write them all down and review them with other team members later, as necessary. This important exercise is called a SWOT analysis.

Target Audience

 Next, describe who your prospective customers are. Include any person or organization who could be interested in what your business offers. You can describe them by their job title, business type and even demographics such as gender, age, earnings, and location. Are they business owners?…production, maintenance or safety managers? Think about what traits would qualify them as possible prospects. The more specific you are in defining your target audience, the more effective your marketing will be. Segment your target audience, if necessary. Perhaps your prospects are in the pharmaceutical industry, but others are in food processing or metalworking.

Marketing Goals

 Now decide what you want to achieve with your B2B marketing plan. Increasing sales through lead generation is obvious, but to what degree and in what time frame? Be specific. Do you want to position your brand as a premium, quality product or an economical solution to a common problem? Perhaps you want to brand your company or product as the solution to remember when a need arises. Maybe one of your goals is simply to increase website traffic to a certain level. Make a list of your marketing goals now, making sure they can be measured.

Connections

 Your strategies start with knowing how to connect with your prospective customers. What is it that they want (or need) and how does your business fulfill it?

1. Describe briefly what your customers want, keeping their pain points in mind.
2. Describe briefly what you offer. Focus on how your offering is unique.
3. Now list the connection points between A and B.  List as many connection points that you can think of.

Example:

1. Our customers want to improve employee safety due to ongoing shop slips and falls.
2. Our business offers industrial vacuums that are more efficient and easier to use than our competitors.
3. Connection points: We provide the solution of safety at a superior value. We can connect with people responsible for shop safety including those in HR and safety positions as well as plant and maintenance managers.

Strategies and Tactics

Now that you’ve listed your goals, identified your customers and focused on how you connect with them, it’s time to outline your major strategies and marketing channels (tactics) you’ll use to reach your goals.

Marketing Tactics

Here’s a short list of some marketing tactics effectively used by companies that have included them in their B2B marketing plans:

• Content marketing (creation of educational marketing content like case studies, white papers, articles, webinars, videos, website and blog posts)
• Social media marketing (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Search engine marketing (pay-per-click  advertising and retargeting)
• Display (banner) advertising on network sites, social sites and in emails
• Search engine optimization (influencing visibility of your website in the unpaid results section of a search engine like Google, Bing, and Yahoo)
• Networking events (trade shows)

Understand the Buying Cycle

As you think about your strategies, it’s good practice to target prospects in all stages of the buying cycle:

• Stage 1: Research/Information Gathering – When the majority of people search the web for a product or service, they’re looking for information before they buy. So, initial glimpses of your brand on the web should include messages that are heavy on offering helpful information and are very light on selling. Compel folks to click over to your website to learn, but don’t expect them to contact you or buy right away.
• Stage 2: Comparison/Shopping – It should make sense that most buyers will want to know what other brand/product/service choices that they have before taking action. They’ll visit your website and will likely leave without contacting you so they can shop around. You can retarget people at this stage with “why chose us” messages, even without identifying your competition.
• Stage 3: Ready to Buy – After researching and comparing product/service offerings, individuals will finally be ready to make a purchase. If you’ve established some credibility with them, they’re open to have contact with you and get a price on your offering.

 Now write what your strategies are and the marketing tactics that you’ll use to execute them.

• Strategy #1:
• Tactics for Strategy #1:
• Strategy #2:
• Tactics for Strategy #2:
• (Add more as needed)

Budget

Your B2B marketing plan certainly must have a cap on spending for the marketing tactics you’ve outlined above. I purposefully saved mention of this topic for last so your thought process through the previous steps was unrestrained. Not all tactics are expensive. Low budget strategies could include a business blog, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and email marketing. Most small businesses can afford search engine advertising and display advertising on networks including those of Facebook and Twitter. As you start to tally costs, you may need to alter your tactics to fit your budget. Save the more expensive tactics for when they’re more affordable.

 Write down your marketing budget for the year or the time frame that suits your business.

Your B2B marketing plan is off to great start!

If you put careful thought into your notes that you’ve just written, you’ve successfully started your B2B marketing plan! Review and refine it with your team, put it into a final format and share with all the appropriate people. You’re in a much better position now to take action toward achieving your goals in growing your business.

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This post is an excerpt from the Boost Your Brand Start Guide, a free white paper which you can request in the right column near the top of this page. It contains a worksheet with fields for starting your B2B marketing plan.