Establishing a B2B marketing action plan requires several key steps that we will detail in this article.
It is an operational document to be shared with all stakeholders involved in this plan. Its purpose is to achieve the objectives set in the strategy by breaking down the different actions to be carried out according to the SMART method, therefore with constraints related to marketing budget, tools, and time.
Among the tools you will need, you will find marketing automation software such as Webmecanik Automation, which offers all the necessary features.
Organizing a B2B marketing action plan requires clearly answering the following questions:
- What actions? How should we intervene?
- For whom? Define our B2B targets
- By whom? Who in our organization should be involved in implementing the marketing strategy?
- When? Know your target to reach them at the right moment
- With what means? Financial, Human, Material
This structure is necessary to coordinate the actions of the different members of the marketing team and maintain consistency in the B2B marketing strategy. Through this article, we will therefore present the methodology for implementing an impactful B2B marketing action plan.
Define a marketing plan
To build your effective B2B marketing action plan, it is important to set both qualitative and quantitative objectives that above all comply with the SMART method : Specific – Measurable – Achievable – Realistic – Time-bound
“Improving the conversion rate” is not a SMART objective; the objective you should set would be “increase the conversion rate of our B2B campaigns by 5% in 6 months”.
The strategy defined by management guides you in setting up your marketing objectives; you must also take sales objectives into account in order to drive a complete and structured strategy.
Once the objectives are set, you need to be able to analyze them using indicators. Here we are referring to the reports that we can schedule and automate in our Webmecanik Automation software.
You will seek to know the conversion rate at each stage of your lead generation campaigns.
This allows you to break down the conversion funnel into MQLs, SQLs, leads, contacts, and visitors, enabling us to forecast quantified objectives at each stage.
Comparing the data with that of your industry allows you to position yourself in the market and adapt the action plan.
Define the target of your marketing plan
An objective is always easier to achieve when it has a precise target. You must therefore ensure that you have a target that matches your marketing persona.
To create a persona in your marketing strategy, you must start by thinking about your company’s ideal customer.
Starting from this ideal customer, it is necessary to break down the classic day, known as the “customer journey”, in order to identify the different touchpoints and the right moments to reach your target through your communication channels such as emails, SMS, and forms.
This exercise must be carried out for all customer types, taking into account:
- Job role (specifics & knowledge)
- Industry sector
- Revenue
- Role in the project
- Pain points: difficulties encountered, objectives to be achieved
- Barriers, objections
These elements will allow you to understand the habits of your prospects and build suitable actions.
These personas are not fixed; they can be modified, and new personas can be added to our action plan. To get to know your targets as well as possible, it is preferable to carry out a survey with a representative sample.
The different elements making up the customer journey allow you to create segments in your marketing automation tool thanks to filters based on behavioral data (web tracking) and demographic data (forms, CRM). These segments are the foundation of your action plan and will allow you to create the ideal customer relationship scenario in your marketing automation tool.
Define the performance levers of your marketing strategy
After precisely defining your objectives and your targets, you will need to identify the performance levers to achieve your objectives.
How can you find your levers?
First, producing a report on your actions over the last period will allow you to identify the levers that were effective and helped you achieve your objectives. You can consider them useful and think about possible improvements. Use your statistics and KPIs to support your assessment.
Underperforming levers also deserve consideration regarding how they were used and the results obtained based on the time allocated to this task.
A brainstorming session with the stakeholders in your marketing action plan will allow you to come up with ideas for performance levers. In this way, new actions to meet the objectives will emerge and can be tested during this period.
You will therefore be able to assess your levers: eliminate those that are not effective or no longer meet the objectives, improve and continue those that have brought us results, and initiate new levers that seem to meet the set objectives.
To complete this step, you must now link your objectives and the levers. For example, in your B2B strategy, the levers to improve your conversion rate will be your lead generation campaigns with contact forms and email campaigns.
You will therefore create a quantified objective for each lever, such as increasing your form completion rate by 15%, which would allow you to achieve an increase in conversion rates.
To go further, watch our webinar on lead generation.
Defining the key actions of your B2B marketing action plan
Now that your levers have been identified, you will need to list the actions that result from these levers. The actions already in place will be renewed over the period, and new actions will appear.
If we apply this to the B2B marketing action plan to generate leads, your objective will be to increase the conversion rate by 5%. Thanks to statistical analyses, you know that to increase the overall conversion rate, you mainly need to increase the open rate of your nurturing emails. A new objective appears: “increase the open rate of nurturing emails by 10%”.
Use all your internal and external resources to define your key actions and your frequency/iteration objective
You will therefore have an overall view of the actions to be carried out and the objectives to be achieved thanks to the Objectives – Levers – Key Actions logic. In this way, you will be able to inform all the stakeholders in this plan.
Plan the actions of your B2B strategy
Now that your marketing action plan has been completed with your objectives and the actions to be carried out, you need to organize the actions in order to be as clear-sighted as possible for your collaborators.
Your operational document must therefore enable everyone to know the different actions that will be implemented over the period, but also each person’s tasks and role as clearly as possible.
To prioritize your actions, we will take into account:
- Priority
- The duration of the action
- The actions associated with an action – for example, for the creation of an email campaign scenario, you must take into account the time needed to create the scenario, the different emails, and also the time needed to analyze these actions
- The person in charge
- The annual calendar – major annual deadlines
Budget your action plan
Once your actions have been prioritized and planned for each member of your team, all that remains is to create a corresponding projected budget.
How to build this budget?
To do this, by using the method that starts from the objective and works backward, we can determine an overall marketing budget. So start with your primary objective, in our example increasing the conversion rate of B2B campaigns, and take into account the conversion rate, Customer Lifetime Value, and customer acquisition cost.
The resulting budget should then be divided across each performance lever previously defined according to its priority and importance.
To justify your budget allocation, use statistical reports to prove the ROI (return on investment) of each of your actions and the way you will be able to analyze them.
You are now ready to implement your B2B marketing action plan with a marketing automation tool!
