B2B organizations are tasked with more than ever these days—branding and design, CRM and data projects, email and social media marketing, digital communication and media initiatives, and the complexities of account-based marketing (ABM) and data-driven initiatives that are proven to boost revenue and elevate the importance of B2B marketing roles.
One way to summarize the B2B marketer’s role: They’re focused on activating data across the buyer’s journey to drive engagement and conversion—no small feat!
Queue the superhero soundtrack! With the ever-increasing responsibilities of B2B marketers, it’s important to have the right in-house and agency resources in place to leap at a moment’s notice. This extended team approach enables scale and acceleration of key, prioritized initiatives, often queued up very quickly due to competitive and other market or team dynamics.
“With the ever-increasing responsibilities of B2B marketers, it’s important to have the right in-house and agency resources in place to leap at a moment’s notice.”
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Partnering with a B2B agency can bring fresh ideas and a wealth of expertise gained from working across various brands, channels, and industries. Let’s take a look at four key areas of value B2B agencies can deliver.
1. B2B agencies provide a new perspective.
Agencies are innovators with perspectives on marketing trends, best practices, and proven marketing initiatives. This added perspective can bring tremendous value in the form of new ideas, optimization of existing programs, and insight to guide prioritization based on the projected level of impact for your business.
B2B agency teams can also offer expert insights and analysis on tools, technologies, and team structures and the caliber of results they’re actually providing. This can be especially valuable as your team works to optimize existing technology investments and possibly expand or update them. Agencies bring a technology-agnostic approach and should offer an unbiased opinion of best-fit tools and tech focused on ROI (aka, they’ve been through the fire of trial and error so you don’t have to).
By partnering with a B2B agency, your team will benefit from an innovative point of view and insight across an array of programs, leading to more innovation guided by a proven approach.
2. B2B agencies provide proven strategies and structure.
Agencies start with a strategic methodology and process focused on driving initiatives forward. When you work with an agency, you’ll have a mutually agreed upon roadmap that will further align, define, and drive strategic marketing plans. The focus should be on key phases and time-bound, measurable elements.
With a foundational strategy in place, documenting key milestones will help both in-house and agency teams understand and assess resources required, ownership areas, and dependencies. Additionally, it will provide a framework for analyzing program performance and making meaningful optimizations over time.
With all of B2B marketing’s moving parts, it’s imperative to have this structure in place at the onset of an agency engagement to help both teams stay focused on the end goal.
3. B2B agencies can accelerate go-to-market plans.
Vroom. Vroom. B2B marketers want to move fast, but organizational challenges and other factors beyond their control can prevent them from accelerating plans. With a B2B agency partner, resources are freed up, allowing opportunities to come forward that will expand your marketing footprint and impact.
This is the time to think about projects that may be at the proof-of-concept or pilot phase and drive them forward. These projects can deliver key learnings from which you’ll continue to build and scale. This is also the time to evaluate technology investments that aren’t being maximized and define initiatives to prove their value while delivering results.
Partnering with a B2B agency is a great way to move faster in a smart, proven way and up-level overall marketing learning, optimization, and impact.
4. B2B agencies provide measurable results.
Last but not least, always begin with the end in mind. This applies to all marketing efforts and is even more important with an extended team of agency experts. Along with a clear strategy and roadmap, an agency can help you define measurable objectives early on and establish specific milestones.
This may require up-front research on existing data and benchmarks. The goal is to understand and project what success looks like. The timeline for analyzing and reporting on program impact should be a key—and prompt—part of the initiative roadmap.
Additionally, B2B agencies can provide expertise in reporting templates or dashboards that will help institutionalize marketing data. Agencies see a variety of reporting tools and reports and can advise on the best way to derive insight and drive improved performance over time. Tapping this agency insight to help establish more measurability across marketing efforts is time well spent.
All of that sounds great, right? If you’re not sure where to begin as you’re evaluating opportunities to boost B2B marketing impact, it may be time to evaluate the organization’s team resources, capacity, and expertise areas with a SWOT assessment—or strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Taking an honest look at organizational strengths and gap areas should help uncover and prioritize areas of opportunity, along with any mitigating risks to successfully move these initiatives forward.
Next, take these opportunities and challenges to your agency partner to ideate solutions focused on business results. Together, define areas of opportunity bringing a new perspective, strategy and structure, acceleration, and measurement together to expand capacity and achieve B2B marketing results!
Would you like to talk more about what’s possible? Contact us for a quick assessment of your current initiatives and a roadmap for where to focus your digital marketing efforts next.
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