How to develop a B2B marketing strategy in five steps

To develop a B2B marketing strategy, work through five steps: define your position in the market, choose your target accounts and buyers, set shared goals with sales, pick the channels and tools that reach those buyers, and measure the results so you can improve. A strategy is the plan that ties your campaigns and tools together. Without it, you end up running the same activities every year and hoping for different results.

What should a B2B marketing strategy include?

Every B2B strategy is built around specific customers. Before you choose tactics, the strategy should answer:

• Where do we compete? Your market, your competitors and your unique value
• Whom do we sell to? The accounts and the people inside them who buy
• What do we want to achieve? Measurable goals, agreed with sales
• How will we reach them? The channels, content and tools
• How will we know it works? The metrics, the reporting and the feedback loop

The five steps below follow that order.

Step 1. How do you determine your position in the market?

You can only set realistic goals if you know the market you compete in. Map out:

• Your competitors: who they are, how they position themselves, what they do well and where they are weak
• Your value proposition: the specific value your product or service delivers to the customer, and why it beats the alternatives, including doing nothing

This tells you whether what you offer is something the market needs and what your message should focus on. That focus becomes your unique selling proposition.

To go deeper, look at how competitors attract attention online: which topics they rank for in search, where their traffic comes from and which channels they invest in. SEO and web analytics tools can show this. Our guide on how to spy on your competitors' marketing strategy explains how.

Step 2. How do you define your target audience and buyer personas?

In B2B, you target two things: the companies that fit your offer and the people inside them who take part in the purchase.

Start with the companies. Write an ideal customer profile: industry, size, region, the problem you solve for them and signals that they need it now. A good starting point is the companies that already show interest, such as current customers, active prospects and businesses that visit your website.

Then describe the buyers. Build buyer personas for the roles involved: the user, the budget holder, the technical evaluator and anyone else who must agree. For each, write down:

• Their goals and the pain points that make them look for a solution
• The questions they ask during the buying process
• Where they get information, such as search, LinkedIn, peers, events, analysts or newsletters
• What could stop them from buying

Keep personas grounded in real conversations with customers and the sales team, not guesses.

If you sell high-value deals to a known list of companies, consider account-based marketing (ABM). ABM concentrates resources on a defined set of high-value accounts and treats each one as its own market. See how to identify ABM leads on your website.

Step 3. How do you set targets for your B2B marketing strategy?

With your market and audience clear, set goals. Three rules:

• Set goals together with sales. Shared goals create shared ownership and make the hand-off from marketing to sales smoother.
• Tie goals to a timeline: this month, this quarter and this year.
• Make goals measurable and meaningful. Agree on what success means for the business, such as qualified opportunities, pipeline value or revenue from target accounts, not just clicks.

The SMART framework helps: goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Agree on definitions too, such as what counts as a qualified lead. Our list of marketing KPIs to measure performance suggests metrics for each stage.

Step 4. How do you choose the right channels and tools?

Your audience and goals decide your channels. Most B2B strategies combine a few of these:

• Content and SEO to answer the questions buyers search for. See our inbound marketing strategies.
• Email marketing to nurture leads and stay in touch with customers
• LinkedIn and other social media to build reach and credibility with buyers
• Paid search and paid social to reach people with clear intent or in specific roles
• Events and webinars to meet buyers and show expertise
• Partnerships and referrals to borrow trust from companies your buyers already work with

Then choose tools that support the plan: a CRM shared by marketing and sales, an email or marketing automation platform, web analytics and reporting. Pick tools after the strategy, not before.

If you use data about people, follow privacy law. Under the GDPR, people can object to direct marketing at any time, and you must stop. If you use data from a third party, the European Commission says the supplier must be able to show it was obtained lawfully, and email marketing must follow the ePrivacy rules.

Step 5. How do you measure results and gather feedback?

At the end of each period, check whether you reached the goals from step 3. Whether you did or not, hold a review with everyone involved, including sales. Ask:

• Which channels and campaigns produced qualified pipeline?
• Where did leads stall, and why?
• What did customers and lost prospects say about their decision?

Use analytics and your CRM to connect marketing activity to opportunities and revenue. Our guides on gaining insights from your website traffic and determining the ROI of account-based marketing help with the numbers.

Then update the plan. A B2B marketing strategy is not a one-time document. Review it at least every quarter and adjust as your market, your product and your buyers change.

For more on balancing your offer, price, place and promotion, read our guide to the marketing mix.