B2B marketing has evolved over the years and if recent trends are anything to go by, more and more brands are looking at marketing to support their prospect pipeline and be more performance driven. This includes having marketing teams contribute to actual business ROI and proven growth.
Marketing is a broad term and when it comes to specifically understanding or executing on a strong digital marketing methodology, there is a lot a B2B marketing team can do to boost brand results. Digital marketing and online marketing comprises so much more than it used to about a decade ago.
At the basis of a sound online marketing plan also lies the need to build a strong marketing team structure that aligns well to key business objectives.
For B2B marketing teams who are looking at enhancing their existing team structures, what are the key factors that should be kept foremost in mind?
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Here are five to begin with:
1. Know what you want your B2B marketing team to achieve, in the short term to long term
Marketing encompasses a whole lot more than it did before. For brands who don’t define what they want their marketing teams to do early on in their marketing journey will end up hiring the wrong resources while also allocating time to tasks and marketing methods that will lead to waste in the future.
A clearly defined goal is crucial to then understanding what type of people resources, martech resources as well as what marketing processes will be needed to help achieve those goals.
A brand that wants their marketing team to purely keep prospect pipeline lists healthy will need a very different set of resources and strategies, a brand that wants to focus on enhancing their industry positioning may need a different process and set of resources and team members who accordingly are trained to focus on this task.
2. Keep Global Marketing goals clear
Today’s customer and prospect expects a brand to be relevant and clear in their messaging and outreach. They expect brands to know who they are.
For mid to larger marketing teams, aligning on future global marketing perspectives helps drive a better internal marketing structure. For instance, if you know you want to create a big buzz in the Asia region, hiring resources who can localize online campaigns in the right language at the right time becomes a crucial factor in the marketing structure process.
3. Hire and match both: people resources and martech resources
In several marketing and sales conversations with industry leaders, we have seen how the best of the lot suggest that new people resources get shortlisted also on the basis of their ability to learn and use a variety of martech and salestech.
The right use of martech and salestech with a proper centralized integration process is crucial to aligning brand messaging and outreach.
It is also important on the other hand to ask existing marketing team members and future hires about what martech training support they may need. The martech stack that a brand relies on to drive their marketing initiatives cannot be optimized if everyone who works in marketing is not up to speed on martech use and martech optimization as well as hygiene practices. In fact, while shortlisting future marketing hires, asking them about the various martech they already use can be a good step in shortlisting those that already have a decent amount of experience using the type of martech your brand already has as part their tech stack.
4. Set measurable KPIs at every stage
How a brand builds out their marketing team depends on what they need done from the team. It’s important to also align core KPIs to each marketing member on the team so that the marketing function as a whole can measure and prove their overall results much more easily.
For instance, if you have a marketing coordinator, set in mind core objectives: does the marketing coordinator need to book 4 new podcast guests to be on your brand podcast each month? Or does the marketing coordinator need to build actual brand and media partnerships, if so, how many each month or each quarter?
5. Keep your marketing team lean
The best of today’s marketers and sales leaders will swear by having a lean martech-salestech stack and a lean team.
Many marketing roles can overlap for larger teams. For instance, a head of content profile is expected to look into social media marketing in most cases, but in larger teams, there would be a social media executive or manager dedicated to the task. Understanding how you can build a team that is lean with most of the members performing more than one task can actually prevent over hiring and reduce the chances of layoffs in future as well.
End Note
Marketing is a dynamic function today. Trends are evolving every day and with the growing number of digital marketing channels and platforms, it is crucial to know what type of marketing model and structure is a good-fit to help you drive your core business goals so that you can focus more closely on those.
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