Do B2B Marketers Hibernate Come Christmas, New Year and Financial Year-end?

A friend who works for a telecom company raised this question to me just yesterday. Day after day for months without fail, just like an alarm clock, we get bombarded with mails which share product updates, thought leadership articles and event invites. And suddenly, just as Q3 comes to a close, all you get is a seasons’ greeting card. Given this, how can one grouse someone for asking if we are hibernating?

Unlike B2C marketing, where the merry season brings with it sales, discounts and crazy promotional tactics, B2B marketing suddenly takes a back seat. And rightly so! What’s the point in jamming someone’s mailbox when they are either holidaying or, preparing for year-end results or, are knee-deep in planning their next year’s strategy?

These 2 months (15-Dec onwards till mid-Jan and the whole of March), as most have found, are most effective for strategy revisiting. There is less dilution of your concentration and the year-end is a perfect opportunity to analyze what worked and what did not. This is, of course, not to state that B2C marketers do not carry out these activities. 

While defining ‘What will my brand speak about next year?’ it will do us good to visit:

1.       “What worked and what did not?”

2.       “What are the key messages we will talk about”?

3.        “Are my people aligned right?”

4.       “Which channels will be most effective for me?”

5.        “What kind of budgets will I need?”

You will notice that I have put budget-consideration as the last step and that’s the way it would be in the ideal scenario. Unfortunately, this is not the way most organizations see it. B2B marketing is often considered an overhead and changing that mindset will not happen overnight. In the meanwhile, keeping a larger number in mind and then breaking it into different activities and channels might be a good idea. One could always revisit the overall number, towards the end, for tweaking and fine-tuning.

‘So what’s the game plan?’ - B2B Marketing Plan for Newbies

When the opportunity to create a ‘Product plan’ came to me the very first time I had the look on my face which clearly reflected my thoughts (at least that’s what my senior colleague said)….”Hmmmmm I think I will throw 4 emails, 2 events and a webinar together and voila the plan is done!”. 

Of course it doesn’t take a real genius to figure out that it’s not all that simple. So here are my newbie learnings in a nutshell. 

When one is faced with the challenge of creating a game plan – a full fledged global cross-channel campaign – especially for a B2B product, one simply can’t put those 4 emails, 2 events and a webinar together and say “I think this is the best way to take this product to the market”. While the MBA classes had taught the same thing to me, somehow translating it to the real life scenario is well a completely different experience. So start with the basics – an opportunity study is the best thing to do. I don’t mean go out carrying a survey questionnaire and stopping Tom, Dick and Harry to share their thoughts (I agree that for a B2C market this might be the only way, so don’t beat me over it), but rather understand your market from these angles:

· Global and regional – What is the current market size? What are the predicted future trends? Don’t worry – these things are quite easily found. Google – the world’s best invention. 
· Your ‘Target prospective clients’ strategy – Have a broad target segment in mind. Is the offering a cross-vertical product? Is the business targeting a particular segment or will the product be for any company, irrespective of its size? Will each segment’s need be same? 
· End customers perspective – It’s not enough to research the above two and slap them onto a powerpoint presentation. You need to establish how this product will affect your customer’s customer. If you do not have an end-to-end framework established, if you cannot convince the prospects that the product will enable them to gain their customers trust and build a relationship then you might just have failed before you started. 

 Once the dynamics of the market are clear and you have an understanding of the business’ objectives – the revenue projections from product, any particular regions planned for short-term and the long-term – you will need to define what marketing’s objectives will be. 

The key thing to remember is never to spread yourself too thin. No plan can achieve it all at the first go. Break up the objectives into logical sections – you may want to direct only particular regions in first year or, particular customer segments. The main thing is this should tie in with the organization’s business objectives. 

The last step, and perhaps the most important one, is identifying the marketing strategy – 
· What is the key messaging that will be used for your targeted sections? – This can be a common messaging or can even differ depending upon what your opportunity study has told you 
· What is it that you hope to achieve – What is the intent – is it awareness or, opportunity generation or, both? 
· Define the marketing approach – Will you talk about the value the product will bring to market to each of the segments? Will you showcase success stories to strengthen your proposition to build awareness or, will you use thought leadership?

After this it is simply a matter of deploying the most effective channels – yes, those 4 emails, 2 events and a webinar! The key thing being knowing what works where. The best thing to do would be study how your competitors are marketing their products – which influencers are they tying up with or, which events are they showcasing their wares. Set-up your Gantt charts and then define the budgets. 

And here, I am going to end with a slightly controversial statement. Having a ‘Budgets-then-Plan’ point of view will restrict the scope of your reach. Of course budgets are important. However, once you have the key activities you will like to undertake in mind, you can scale them up or down to suit the available budgets. This approach allows you to have a more long term perspective rather than ‘Do it now and get it over with’.