Your B2B Marketing Channel Checklist

If you do B2B marketing for startups, or you’re devising a go-to-market strategy for a new line of business in a B2B company, it can be a little overwhelming. You have dozens of options, but which channels do you absolutely, positively need to set up, and in what order?

Here’s my answer to that: a handy B2B marketing channel checklist that I have sorted by (1) customer lifecycle stage and (2) recommended timing.

The list is good for any B2B business, but it is an especially useful framework for SAAS businesses, where long-term success is dependent on ongoing sales or subscription renewals. You’ll see the list includes plenty of digital marketing, since as I’ve stated before, that is where B2B marketing is going nowadays.

Generally, startups — whose main focus is on getting that sale — need to focus on the earlier parts of Phase 0 through 3 at first. Larger companies should think about all phases.

Phase 0: Strategize

You need to aim before you fire. Similarly, before you do marketing, you need a marketing plan. Write it down! You can do it on one page — take a look at this simple marketing plan of mine, for example — but you need to start somewhere. (When I do a marketing plan, it’s usually dozens of pages.)

Why do need a written marketing plan? Because if you can’t answer some key questions about your market, then you’re going to have a tough time doing everything else that I’ve listed below. Here are the types of questions that creating a marketing plan will force you to ask:

• Who are your prospective customers and how can you divide them up? These are your “segments,” and they may be divided by industry, company size, need, etc. Don’t forget about the prospects you want to have, but don’t serve yet!
• Who are the key decisionmakers in each customer segment? (If consumers also have a say in the purchase, don’t forget them!)
• How do prospective customers research and make a buying decision?
• How are your competitors positioning and marketing themselves?
• How are you going to brand and sell yourself to different customer/decision maker segments?
• What you are willing to pay for a lead, whether that be marketing qualified lead (MQL) or sales-qualified lead (SQL)? How much will you pay for a good new customer?

This is just a taste of what you should be thinking about, and that’s what your marketing plan is for. Plus it’s great preparation for writing your Sales & Marketing Playbook (see below, under Phase 2).

Phase 1: Awareness

There are two types of awareness challenges:

• 1a) Awareness of a new brand in an already-established industry
• 1b) Awareness of a completely new product or solution.

Tactics vary depending on which challenge you face. Let’s start with the more familiar situation:

1a) Building awareness in an established industry or marketplace

What to build before you launch

There are a few things you really should get done BEFORE you starting making a name for yourself, or else your first good (and free!) leads will come and disappear into the ether with you none the wiser.

• Website. Nowadays literally every marketing thing you do will send people scurrying to Internet to look for your website. So build your website first, and make sure you have the following components from the start:
  • A home page with a high-level explanation of your product. Make sure this is intelligible for all categories of prospective users of your product. If your service indirectly services consumers too, anticipate that with a website that can handle both business and consumer visitors, and clearly guide visitors to the appropriate destination.
  • Secondary pages with audience-specific explanations. More complex products or services can benefit from secondary pages for both prospect browsing and SEO. These pages can describe some combination of (1) product or service variations/sub brands; (2) highly visible features that deserve detailed explanation; (3) industry- or audience-specific solutions; or (4) specific use cases. What makes sense really depends on your offering.
  • A call to action (on every page!). This should be a phone number, web form, or ideally both, that channels hot leads directly to sales. Make sure you track each and every inquiry and know its source — don’t let this information disappear into the ether. (At a minimum, your web form should be designed to archive all inquiries.)
  • Proof of success. If you have customers, you should put logos, testimonials and case studies on your site. Compile reference customers for the sales team to use as well.
  • Special offers/promotions. Now’s the time to put introductory offers on your website. Give visitors a sense of urgency to contact you today, right now. If you have a really useful and in-demand piece of content, you can also provide it free in exchange for an email address or other useful contact information for sales follow-up.
  • A description of your team. People love to know who’s behind a company. So tell them! I’ve found that for startups, especially, team descriptions are usually some of the most visited pages.
  • Search engine optimization (SEO). Make sure that people can find you whether they just know your industry category or whether they only know your name. Here’s how to find out what industry keywords are most important.
  • Acquisition-oriented content marketing. This is an extension of SEO: if you know what keywords people use to shop for a solution in your space, and the keywords can’t be emphasized enough with your “product” website content, it’s smart to author a blog with a few choice articles to guide traffic to you.
• Analytics. Install Google Analytics before the marketing begins, so that you know what happens from the beginning. You can never recover your web history: once it’s gone, it’s gone. Plus Google Analytics is essential to identify audiences for…
• Remarketing. Early customers are super important, and you want to start collecting those people for later marketing, even if you don’t have anything planned out yet. Start setting up your audiences in Google Analytics, so you can hit them later — but really, you should be ready to follow up with the curious as soon as you launch. Make sure you also track it correctly.
• Social Media. Decide on a social media handle and sign up for all your social media accounts in advance: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. LinkedIn is the only one you definitely want to open up and start using. You don’t need to use the others unless it’s important for your marketing plans, but you want them to claim them and make them easily accessible when you’re ready.  You also don’t want to have to evict cybersquatters.
• CRM & Marketing Automation. Your sales team needs to sort and prioritize leads, as well as track their source and progress from the outset. A marketing automation system is not crucial at this stage, but it’s smart to think about procuring one as well. (Here’s how we selected a marketing automation system at Newfi.)

Launch and post-launch activities

• PR. As a new company, you’ll be news. Time for a press release, but don’t just load something to Business Wire. Call the press, and maybe give somebody an exclusive about your company. Sometimes launching at an event can be valuable, since press will already be in attendance and hungry for novel stories. Also, be sure that you have prepared your PR story in advance.
• Social Media is nowadays essentially indistinguishable from your PR strategy. For B2B, this most often takes place on LinkedIn, but some companies with a consumer connection may also pursue Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. The only problem is “earned” social media is that it’s hard to replicate success and make a reliable source for lead generation. Note that social media access is no guarantee of virality: most social media companies now sharply restrict to whom your posts are displayed.
• Advertising & Sponsorships. Now it’s time to get real leads, sustainably and replicably, and this means buying them. This is an expensive tactic, but the most reliable one.
  • Digital advertising is usually the fastest way to get qualified leads. Depending on the product and price point, Google Adwords and LinkedIn are usually best. Facebook and Google Display might be of value if you can target likely business buyers adequately (Most of the time with B2B prospects, you can’t).
  • Third-party emails, webinar sponsorships, or display ads. If your audience loves a particular media outlet, it may make most sense to directly sponsor ads there. Make sure you can promote yourself clearly and visibly.
  • Affiliates, lead gen websites, and other website partners. In certain businesses, pay-per-lead sources like Capterra may be useful. Do your homework and focus on lead sources with high SEO ranks for important industry keywords, because they will have the most high-quality traffic.
  • Direct mail can be effective if you can find good target lists. Expect a two- or three-month lead time.
  • Print ads in industry magazines may make sense. Expect a two-month lead time.
  • Out of home. If you have money to burn, sure, spend it on billboards. Due to trackability limitations, your challenge will be deciding whether to renew.
  • Broadcast. TV and radio ads should only be considered once your business strategy and communications strategy is completely mature.
• Events
  • Educational webinars can garner attention and position you as a thought leader. They should be on topics about which people are truly trying to educate themselves — otherwise they won’t get any attention! Brand awareness and a brief product mention may be all you’re trying to get here.
  • Trade shows often don’t have the cachet and attendance that they used to, so evaluate carefully whether your target customer or the press will be in attendance in sufficient volume before you spend here. They are also infrequent, so you can’t rely on them for sustained weekly demand generation. Preparing and booking events takes a very long lead time, so you should start early by building a calendar of suitable events stretching out for the next 8-12 months. Ideally, you want to be a speaker at these events as well.
  • Seminars/dinners can be useful when you have enough high-value decisionmakers in a single area. As with webinars, you have to talk about something that isn’t just raw self-promotion. You may also accomplish similar goals by sponsoring an ongoing seminar series.

1b) Building awareness is a completely new space

Building awareness for genuinely new, “disruptive” products or services is a lot harder task, because you need to educate people that:

1. They have a significant and pressing problem or need;
2. It is actually possible to solve that problem or need;
3. The solution for that problem or need has a name (this is your new product category);
4. And you provide that solution!

“Significant and pressing” are the key words here. Not every company, or even industry, will have this problem or need to solve it to such an extent that your solution is a must-have. You need to find a niche market — that is, companies for whom your solution provides the best solution — and focus your efforts on them. (This is a classic Crossing the Chasm problem — here’s a summary.)

So this means you need to consider all the marketing stuff above in (1a), with the following modifications:

• Website
  • Problem explanation. Your website must make it absolutely clear what the problem is and what your solution makes possible. Clear, direct, and tangible home page copy is essential for this, often backed up by an explainer video. You may need to segment solutions by industry, so as to really sell your product, since companies will need clear examples of the product in use using their problem and solution language.
  • Call to action. You don’t need to build a website for the ages at this point. Build a website that quickly makes the point and drives people to a sales discussion.
  • SEO. Because you’re not in an established industry, SEO is less important. However, it is absolutely essential to make sure that users searching for your brand name can easily find and recognize you on Google. This is especially important if your brand name is confusing, hard to spell, or has many confusing soundalikes. Make sure your home page has all the essentials to make this clear, particularly the page title and meta description.
• Sales enablement. Proving yourself is the most essential task early on. Do whatever it takes to support first sales, which will be essential for proving the product concept in real life and working out the kinks. Gather reference customers, testimonials, and referrals, and get them on the website as soon as possible.
• PR will be much more important because people will find it hard to imagine what they can’t see.
  • Case studies are helpful. Get reference customers to use your product. Demonstrate success and collect the story. Take pictures. Do whatever it takes to help the press understand your concept in action.
• Advertising & Sponsorships.
  • Focus on formats that can fully explain or paint a picture of your solution, either in prose or imagery. Examples are emails or display ads.
• Events are good places for people to interact with your product or salespeople for more detailed explanations.

Phase 2: Consideration

At this point, prospects are evaluating you and your solution. (They may be doing this just after launch, so you had better think about this phase early on.) Remember that in B2B contexts, you are likely dealing with a number of different decision makers with varying interests and perspectives, and you need to make all of them happy. You also need to help your internal evaluator/champion represent the virtue of their decision to the one who writes the final check.

• Website
  • Detailed product descriptions tailored to the needs of the various customer segments and individual decision-makers
  • Case studies/success stories to prove and illustrate that your solution works for companies in their industry, which may also take the form of print collateral, videos, and sales presentations
  • Buying guides, white papers, and e-books to help evaluators understand your solution and make an “educated” decision
  • Live/self-guided demos to let people get a taste of your product
  • Freemium versions that allow users to test the product in action without committing financially (just make sure it’s clear what the potential benefits are for upgrading to premium)
  • Collateral like brochures, printable case studies — for the higher-ups who tend to like ink on dead trees
  • Content marketing to establish your credibility and build SEO
  • Live chat to start dialogues and pull people deeper into your website
• Sales & Marketing Playbook. This is a purely internal document that clarifies all the main points sales needs to know about the basics of your market: your customer segmentation, key decision makers and needs, competitors and talking points, key value propositions, etc. This document also helps to onboard new salespeople.
• Sales enablement materials. What’s appropriate here depends on sales needs and customer expectations. Examples include:
  • Sales presentations
  • Templated sales proposals (or responses to RFPs)
  • Templated sales lifecycle emails and CRM actions
  • Product brochures 
  • Printable case studies
  • Sales scripts
  • Reference customer lists grouped by industry and need
• Analyst Relations. In some B2B spaces, analysts can be important for making recommendations to potential customers.  To learn more about the advantages of this strategy and how to implement it, I recommend Samir Ghosh’s article on how to leverage analysts for B2B marketing.
• Webinars for ongoing, structured orientations to your product
• Demos with sample data, to help users see what it’s like to use your product

Phase 3: Decision & Action

At this point in B2B marketing, sales is often taking the lead. But marketing can support sales with:

• Intro offers/coupons/discounts. Get them in the door ASAP!
• Marketing automation for nurture. Not all evaluators are ready to buy at once. Use nurture campaigns to answer questions and keep prospects warm.
• Sales automation. Work with sales to make their dialogue professional, thorough, and success-oriented.

Phase 4: Solution Onboarding & Success

Congratulations! The B2B sale has been made. But it’s crucial to make sure the solution is implemented successfully, lest your customer churn away or bad-mouth you to others. In many cases, this phase is managed by a post-sales or success team, but marketers can help them by making sure that their support is on-brand and professional. Typical communications in these stages are:

• Lifecycle marketing automation for onboarding and other lifecycle events. In a world where people evaluate and start using products at any time, day or night, avoiding human contact, you should create automatic, timed emails that make sure clients:
  • Activate, fund, or otherwise make their accounts usable, especially if it’s a multistep process
  • Get started using the system
  • Learn how to be successful with the system
  • Make sure customers increase and deepen their use
  • Send internal alerts to sales/success teams if users SLOW or STOP using the product
• Success team enablement & documentation
  • Implementation guides
  • Customer support databases
  • Documentation
  • Manuals
  • Quickstart and How-To Guides
  • FAQs
• Satisfaction measurement such as surveys can help you gauge whether users are truly happy with what they’ve bought

Phase 5: Post-Sales Retention & Expansion

This phase often gets neglected, but marketing efforts can reduce churn, increase follow-on sales, upsell to higher-value service packages, and earn referral business. Think about:

• Email newsletters highlighting new products, features, and (if appropriate) pricing specials
• Product communications specifically for the launch of new & significant feature bundles
• Customer nurture programs check in with customers at key moments in their lifecycle (say before annual renewals) to make sure they are happy with their solution. These check-ins may be segmented by decision maker.
• Referral/rating programs, compensated or not, to encourage positive word of mouth
• More satisfaction surveys, to anticipate and stem churn — and identify positive case study candidates!
• Customer gifts and holiday communications
• Customer advisory boards can help you get ideas from and build loyalty with your top customers.

Anyway, this will get you pretty far. Did I miss something? Write me!