How the Best B2B Client & Agency Teams Implement Successful Marketing Campaigns

Discover 5 best practices for clients and agencies working together to implement successful B2B marketing campaigns.

Every successful B2B marketing campaign is built from the same foundation – a close partnership between the B2B client and its agency.  Both teams work together to combine their unique strengths and achieve the client’s end marketing goals, achieving success and driving meaningful results.

1. Agencies help their customers to use multi-channel approaches to marketing campaigns

People within a business are naturally focussed on their internal processes. Susceptible to tunnel vision,  B2B clients may be missing opportunities to engage a broader market through different platforms. Working with an agency avoids this problem – pairing the inside knowledge of the marketer with the external perspective of an experienced team who have in-depth knowledge across all channels.

When Volvo Trucks, one of the largest B2B truck companies in the world, wanted to showcase the dual clutch gearbox in the brand’s heavy-duty trucks to their target audience, they worked with their content marketing agency to create video content. Volvo were able to generate leads and prove ROI by linking from video-based content in social media to a dealer landing page.

Its agency explained: “To succeed with content marketing, you must have a multi-channel way of thinking simply because a brand’s audience is scattered among a lot of different platforms, channels, and media”.

2. Agencies help B2B clients achieve their targets by using innovative tools and platforms

The message is clear: however you implement your B2B marketing campaigns, make sure there are people on it who can look at your audience broadly and offer campaign ideas that will engage the masses. Don’t risk being internally-focussed and repeating the same campaigns as before.

B2B clients face their own business pains and rarely have enough time time to focus on the minutiae of platforms, infrastructure, and ecosystems that will bolster their campaign’s performance.  The new wave of B2B marketing agencies, however, make effective use of technology their core competency – helping their clients to reach target audiences through the most effective means.

GE Healthcare wanted to use storytelling to raise awareness about its next generation medical equipment – something B2B brands are often accused of failing at. Its dedicated media agency OMD pitched the idea of using podcasts to help build brand affinity and customer engagement. The eight part series ‘The Message’ led to high levels of engagement, even positioning as the number one podcast in America.

B2B clients and their agency teams can implement successful marketing campaigns when they share a relationship built on trust and innovation. B2B clients want to rely on agencies who have  an understanding of recent technologies and platforms, and a genuine desire for to meet the marketing objectives of the campaign.

3. Agencies and B2B clients work together to create marketing campaigns with a future view

It’s tempting to create a marketing campaign that delivers quick wins. While it may be fruitful in the short-term, real campaign success relies on driving qualified leads that can be nurtured into long-lasting customers.  Successful campaigns are based on a mutual discussion around where the client is going.

With its design agency, packaging giant Tetra Pak created a hyper-targeted campaign with a creative mailer, followed by email comms and access to a content marketing portal. Working with their agency, this B2B client succeeded in moving away from communications about its product’s technical features and towards presenting client benefits. Despite shipping only 72 sample kits to qualified leads, Tetra Pak achieved campaign success. Including click-throughs from the associated emails, Tetra Pak’s campaign garnered more than 500 responses from its target audience.

B2B clients and their agency teams implement successful marketing campaigns when they both understand the market, objectives, and act as shared custodians of the campaign. B2B clients know how to infiltrate the market, while their agencies help to build creative campaigns that generate leads and prove genuine ROI,

4. Agencies help B2B clients to continuously clean, improve, and act on relevant data.  

B2B clients and their agency teams implement successful marketing campaigns by capturing and managing relevant data about their leads, so a strong understanding of the target audience is crucial on both sides. 53% of organisations say data-driven marketing is their top strategic priority for 2016.

However, data input, cleansing, and organisation requires a large amount of time that B2B clients simply do not have. If they can’t invest this time, it’s likely that campaigns will result in poor quality leads and leads that become colder as time goes on. In order to achieve success, B2B clients can offload this burden onto their agencies who can allocate the resource to data management, keeping lists up-to-date at all times.

5. Agencies help B2B marketing agencies to push their marketing campaigns to a wider audience

In today’s always switched-on world of digital marketing, B2B clients need to be everywhere, all the time – an impossible feat when they have numerous internal tasks to focus on. Unfortunately this can mean they aren’t effectively reaching out and engaging their audiences.  

Tomorrow People recently worked with Claranet SOHO to create a wider awareness of their Office 365 campaign amongst the SMB audience, driving sales as a result. Using paid media and remarketing across social platforms including Facebook and Twitter, the agency increased the amount of qualified leads generated and bolstered the number of registrants for the Office 365 demo.

B2B clients can implement successful marketing campaigns by working with agency teams who can invest time in expanding audiences across different platforms, engaging them, and nurturing suitable leads thereafter. Agencies can nurture leads from conversion to demo interest on behalf of the client, before handing them over to the client’s sales team. The client can focus on their end goals while being certain that their campaign will run successfully.

Conclusion

The case is clear: agencies can add improvements beyond the brief for marketers when implementing B2B marketing campaigns – by seeing your audiences, technologies, databases, and business outcomes with fresh eyes. When you share goals, you’re setting the scene for longterm success.

Takeaways

• Successful agencies look for fresh audiences when implementing B2B marketing campaigns.

• Agencies can make sure your B2B marketing campaigns use the right technology for the job.

• To implement your B2B marketing campaigns, plan for desired outcomes, not just inputs.

• Agencies can implement your B2B marketing campaigns with improved data quality.

• The best B2B client/agency relationships are built on trust and understanding.

Why not continue your journey with ‘The CMO’s definitive guide to high-performing promotional campaigns’ ?