Marketing campaigns aren’t just the domain of consumer brands with big budgets. B2B tech startups can use campaigns to create focus in their marketing efforts, and make smaller budgets go further.
This article looks at the five ways marketing campaigns could benefit your B2B tech business.
1. Create focus
As a startup it’s unlikely you have a huge amount of resource. You might not have significant track record or IP around what marketing tactics work best for your business. With a smaller team it can be easy for marketing to get caught up in day to day tactics and responses to requests from the rest of the business, from tidying up pitch documents to writing up the latest case study. A marketing campaign can create focus for smaller teams. They layer tactics in a more coherent way around a particular objective.
2. Commanding attention
It’s not possible to command a high level of attention all of the time. If the Coca Cola Christmas advert were running all year round, by late January you’d have zoned it out. Marketing campaigns enable your business to create a spike of attention. They capture more interest than your usual day to day marketing because you’re building momentum around a specific topic for a focused period of time
3.Tap into context
Talking of Christmas, did you know that for PR and journalists, Christmas happens in July? Christmas is a recurring if not slightly noisy context to tap into and for some businesses can drive a significant proportion of their annual revenues. We’re not suggesting you find a way to align your B2B SaaS marketing campaign with Christmas, but the advantage of campaigns is that you can align them with a wider context or trend that is relevant for people. Whether that’s Climate Action Week, an HR conference, London Tech Week or Davos, building a marketing campaign around an event or broader context means you can tap into existing momentum and interest.
4. Clearly measurable
B2B marketing campaigns built around specific objectives can be a great way to measure impact, particularly if you’re still learning what works and what doesn’t for your startup. Most B2B Startups are going to be focused on good quality leads as the ultimate measure, but you can also test out what messaging, channels, and creative works best. Make sure you’re clear before you start what you want to test and how, and take a baseline.
5. Team collaboration
It’s difficult if not impossible for marketing teams to develop and run campaigns on their own. There will need to be collaboration at a bare minimum between marketing and sales. The team will need a clear target and process for moving leads from MQL to SQL. But it can be highly effective to integrate people across the wider business into a campaign. That might mean tapping into the product team to talk about the launch of a new feature, using technical teams to share knowledge, or working with customer success to add work on growing existing accounts. This collaboration and coordination is fundamental to a great B2B marketing campaign.