3 Ways to Execute Better B2B Marketing

Executing exceptional marketing is tough. Especially today when both the technology and techniques available to marketers evolve at a lightning pace. What’s ‘in’ today can go ‘out’ in the blink of an eye. Additionally, buyers are bombarded with messages and communication from a variety of sources making it even more difficult to capture the attention our your market.

As I have been working through some planning for 2017 and beyond, a few trends emerged that I felt are worthy of sharing. Here's my top B2B marketing execution tips for 2017.

1. Be agile
The concept of Agile marketing originates from Agile software development. The goal of agile marketing is to improve the speed, predictability, adaptability and transparency of the marketing function. In other words, if you are working with the agile framework, you can foster rapid and continuous growth, execute better and faster, and position yourself to easily adapt and overcome challenges.

The main features of Agile Marketing:

Sprints
A sprint is the total time allocated to the entire team to complete a project. This is typically a 2-6 weeks’ time frame, however it may vary depending on the complexity of the project. If the project is complicated, the sprint needs to be split into additional sprints, with each sprint covering a part of the project.

Stand up meetings
These meetings are held daily for a maximum allotted time of 15 minutes. Each team member has to update the entire team about the work done the previous day, the current day’s plan and if they are encountering any issues or challenges. Any issues should be addressed then and there.

Project tracker
Generally a board with sticky notes is used to track the progress of an Agile marketing project. This acts as a central point which everyone in the team has access to. Alternatively, there are online tools to help manage this. However you choose to do it, this is an essential element of having the agile process work.

Teamwork
While there is a project owner, it is the entire team’s responsibly to achieve the project completion. Everyone is responsible and held accountable for the success and failure of the project.

2. Make Artificial Intelligence your friend
​AI is probably one of the hottest topics, and it's applicability to marketing is no exception. An efficient marketing strategy requires you to analyze huge amounts of data. If you do this manually, it can take a lot of time and the results can go very wrong with the slightest of human error.

As a result, more and more companies are using artificial intelligence programs to achieve better transparency, build good relationship with customers and ensure the data analysis is clean. Always remember one thing, though - AI software still isn’t capable of fully replacing us (...yet). It will just give you enough insights based on the data provided. You will still need a human touch to get the most out of this technology.

3. Make it personal
When you have good insights on your customers, you should leverage this to make a tailor-made marketing plan to specifically benefit individual clients. Doing this manually takes a hell lot of a lot of time - too much time, in fact, which is why we have not seen it being applied as well as it could be yet. However, today there are some great tools available to help accomplish personalized marketing automation. Here are a few things you can do to enhance the personalized marketing experience for clients.

• Collect user data using landing pages and feedback forms.
• Send out personal emails for a one-to-one marketing experience.
• Use email tracking and analytics to measure the response rate and customer engagement.
• Use automation tools for inbound marketing.

​Alright - time to get crackin'! Do you have any other ideas to add to this list? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.