Setting and Achieving Successful Marketing Campaigns

Author: Rachel Durkan Category: Branding, B2B, Marketing Date: July 27, 2018

Most small businesses don’t have the luxury of mistakes in their early years. Immediate, steady growth is critical to success. And, a successful branding and marketing strategy can take 6-12 months to produce an impactful return on investment (ROI). In the B2B small business marketplace, establishing a set of successful marketing campaigns with clearly defined goals is the key to efficient growth and long-term success.

In short, the most successful B2B marketing campaigns establish multiple goals for both brand building and either direct ROI or other key performance indicators. Every marketing campaign should reinforce your brand, value propositions, and differentiators to your target audience, as well as provide a direct pipeline for turning warm prospects into sales.

At Paradigm, we recently worked with a client to help introduce a new niche specialty to its prospective clientele, and we used the two-fold brand building/ROI approach to create a successful marketing campaign that ultimately established the client’s authority in its new service offering and cultivated precisely targeted warm leads for the sales team.

In this instance, the client was a staffing agency serving the pharmaceutical market, and it had just rolled out a new division of its business that was aimed at drug launch excellence. We created a comprehensive thought leadership piece that positioned the client as an expert in the industry, published it as an advertorial in a leading industry magazine, and then distributed it in three ways: via a multi-touch sales strategy that included direct mail, email, phone and Sales Navigator outreach; via a hyper-targeted LinkedIn ad campaign aimed at prospects; and via social media. We also ran targeted digital ads, encourage clicks to the article.

Over the course of a single month, we converted 10% of the client’s original prospects into qualified leads, netting a dozen viable prospects for the sales team to meet with. Recognizing that each prospect equates to at least a quarter of a million dollars in potential revenue, we – both Paradigm and the client – considered it a successful marketing campaign with an outstanding ROI.

While measuring your ROI is usually a pretty straightforward process, it can be a little more challenging to gauge the success of the brand building aspect of your B2B marketing campaigns, especially when your business is not part of a particularly niche market. One way to do it is by running pulse reports, which are done by a third party and ultimately collect data to determine where your company ranks among the competition, but they are very expensive, ranging anywhere from $2,500 for “mini reports” to $10,000 for more comprehensive versions. And considering they should be run regularly to most accurately measure your benchmark data, they can be downright cost prohibitive. In those instances, social media and email management tools can serve as a valuable resource because they provide all types of data, like impressions and engagements, that can be used to measure brand building success. In the case of our client, we were able to measure impression and click-through data of the targeted ads we ran encouraging clicks to the article.

Ultimately, brand building – when done successfully – and positioning oneself as a thought leader, expert or advisor within your particular industry can make it easier in the long term to capture inbound leads and close sales.

For help establishing a successful marketing campaign for your B2B small business, contact Paradigm Marketing & Design today to schedule a consultation.