by Sarah Kelleher 
One thing my customers always want to know is how other companies are achieving success. The question applies not only to the technology they’re using, but the marketing strategy itself.
We principally work with B2B organisations and have seen hundreds of successful (and some unsuccessful) campaigns launched. As such, we have picked up some great tips and tricks along the way. In this post, I’d like to share with you my top tips for B2B Marketing Success.
Have a clear goal and keep it at the heart of your campaign
Every time you think about creating a nurture program, marketing campaign or even a one-off email, your first step should always be to think “why am I running this campaign?”
Ideally, the answer should relate back to your business goal, e.g. “to improve retention rates of new customers”. Just in case you were wondering, “because I haven’t emailed my database in a while” is not a good answer…
Once you have your goal in mind, every single aspect of your campaign should relate back to that purpose. Each time you make a decision about content, timing, medium, imagery, call-to-actions, reporting and so on, you should be questioning how this helps you achieve your goal.
Know your customers
It may seem like an obvious one, but not all campaigns are truly centred around fulfilling the needs of the customer. One of the best ways to get to know your customers’ pain points is to speak to your sales team. They are talking to your customers all day every day and will have the best idea of common themes which come up time after time. Having a consistent tone of voice across the business is important, but if you aren’t speaking the language of your customers, you will never connect with them
Prioritise your efforts
It can be tempting, especially if you have a shiny new marketing automation platform, to come up with lots of exciting ideas and try out every new feature at once. However, this can lead to several half-baked campaigns, none of which perform outstandingly.
A far better approach is to prioritise your campaigns and start simple. Identify existing pain points, particularly processes that are manual or repetitive and look to improve and automate these. Common examples of these are regular data imports, newsletter sends and manual lead processing. You can use the time you save to work on more sophisticated campaigns, such as new customer on-boarding.
Pick the right success metrics
Once you hit launch, it can be tempting to move straight on to the next campaign, particularly if you have a very busy marketing calendar. However, taking the time to evaluate your campaign’s performance and feed the results back into your future marketing can make a huge difference. This doesn’t mean creating endless spreadsheets of click-through rates and bounce rates. What it means is identifying the metrics that matter to you. Then evaluate them against your original goal (remember tip 1?).
For example, if your goal is to drive event registrations, look at the conversion rate of your registration page. Then break that down by source. The newsletter click rate on its own might not tell you much on its own. But if your newsletter subscribers have the highest conversion rate on the event registration page, then testing your call-to-action to improve the click through rate should be a good way to drive more registrations. Use these sorts of findings to give you meaningful and actionable feedback for future campaign success.
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There you have it: my recipe for B2B Marketing Success. If you’d like to learn more about how to use Pardot to achieve your business goals, our training courses provide you all the knowledge you need to succeed. Find out more and book your place here