As a business owner or marketer, you know the importance of having a solid marketing strategy in place to drive growth and success. However, it can be challenging to immediately switch from a reactive or ad hoc approach to a more strategic approach. Instead, consider focusing on making your marketing function more “operational,” which can bring significant benefits.
What is an Operational Marketing Function?
But what exactly is an operational marketing function? Simply put, it refers to the people, processes, and technology that support a company’s overall marketing strategy and improves its chances of success.
An operational marketing function establishes a strong foundation for building a more strategic marketing function and adds structure and consistency to marketing efforts. This can help to improve marketing performance over time.
How to Create an Operational Marketing Function
So, how can you create an operational marketing function? There are a few key steps to follow:
Identify your sources of content and ideas. These could include internal subject matter experts, industry experts, and team members or clients you have a relationship with. By leveraging the knowledge and expertise of these individuals, you can create valuable and informative marketing materials.
Decide how to obtain content from these sources. This could be through interviews, webinars, or podcasts. Whatever method you choose, make sure to ask the right questions to get the information you need to create effective marketing materials.
Establish who is responsible for creating the content. This could be an internal team member or an outsourced marketing partner. It’s important to have a dedicated team or individual responsible for turning raw content into finished products.
Determine how the content will be distributed. Will you use social media, email campaigns, or post it on your website? Think about the most effective channels for reaching your target audience.
Track and analyze your marketing efforts. Use data analytics to measure the performance of your marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement.
By following these steps, you can create an operational marketing function that allows you to consistently produce high-quality content and effectively execute your marketing strategy. This can help your business to grow and succeed in today’s competitive marketplace.
Examples of Successful Operational Marketing Functions
But don’t just take our word for it – there are plenty of examples of companies that have successfully implemented operational marketing functions to drive growth and success.
For example, Marketo, a leading provider of marketing software, has reported that proactive marketing, which uses data to predict and drive positive growth, goes hand in hand with enabling an operational marketing function.
Additionally, SmarkLabs uses a simple five-step plan to ensure that our marketing is operational.
Conclusion
While it may not be possible to move from a reactive or ad hoc marketing approach to a more advanced and strategic marketing strategy overnight, making your marketing function more operational is highly attainable and comes with huge payoffs.
By following these steps and leveraging the knowledge and expertise of your team, industry experts, and clients, you can create a solid foundation for building a more strategic marketing function and drive success for your business.
Starting a new business can be a daunting task, especially when it comes to managing marketing and sales efforts. That’s where HubSpot comes in to help.
As a powerful all-in-one platform for marketing, sales, and customer service, HubSpot helps businesses of all sizes grow. And for startups, HubSpot offers a special pricing program to help get your business off the ground.
The HubSpot Startup Program
The HubSpot Startup Program is designed specifically for early-stage businesses that are looking to get a leg up in the competitive world of marketing and sales.
To qualify for the program, your startup must meet the following criteria:
Have less than $1M in annual revenue
Have received less than $1M in funding
Have fewer than 10 employees
Not be a reseller or consulting agency
If your startup meets these requirements, you can apply for the HubSpot Startup Program through the HubSpot website.
The application process is straightforward and typically involves providing some basic information about your startup, including your company name, website, and a description of your business.
Benefits of the HubSpot Startup Program
Once your application is approved, you’ll have access to the full suite of HubSpot tools at a discounted rate. This includes everything from marketing automation and email campaigns to sales tracking and customer service management. With the HubSpot Startup Program, you’ll have the resources you need to grow your business and reach your goals.
In addition to the discounted tools, one of the major benefits of the HubSpot Startup Program is the access it gives to a community of like-minded entrepreneurs and business professionals. Through the HubSpot user forum, you can connect with other startups and ask for advice, share best practices, and collaborate on projects. This community can be a valuable resource as you navigate the difficulties of starting and growing a business.
Conclusion
Overall, the HubSpot Startup Program is just one way that HubSpot helps businesses succeed. Whether you’re just starting out or well-established, there’s a HubSpot plan that’s right for you.
If you’re interested in learning more about the HubSpot Startup Program or any of the other products and services offered by HubSpot, reach out to SmarkLabs for more information.
I hope this blog post was helpful! Please let me know if you have any questions or need any additional information.
Creating a marketing budget for the year can be a daunting task, but it’s an essential part of any business’s planning process. A marketing budget helps you allocate resources effectively, track the performance of your campaigns, and make informed decisions about your marketing strategy.
Before you start putting together your marketing budget for 2023, there are a few things you should consider:
Your business goals: What are your goals for the year? Do you want to increase brand awareness, drive more traffic to your website, or boost sales? Your marketing budget should be aligned with your business goals, so make sure you have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve.
Your target audience: Who are you trying to reach with your marketing efforts? Understanding your target audience will help you determine the most effective channels and tactics to use in your marketing campaigns.
Your budget: How much money do you have available to allocate to marketing? Having a realistic understanding of your budget is essential, as this will help you make informed decisions about how to allocate your resources.
Your past performance: What has worked well for your business in the past, and what hasn’t? Look back at your past marketing efforts and see what has been successful and what hasn’t. This will help you make informed decisions about where to allocate your budget in the future.
Your competition: One great thing about marketing is we often have direct access to view what our competition is doing. Competitive analysis is a strategy that involves researching similar competitors to gain insight into their products, sales, and marketing tactics. At SmarkLabs, we utilize SEMrush for our competitive analysis. By reviewing your competition’s marketing strategy, you can establish how their budget is utilized and compare it to your own practices.
Now that you understand your business goals, target audience, budget, and past performance, you can start putting together your marketing budget for 2023. Here are some steps to follow:
Determine your marketing mix: Your marketing mix is the combination of marketing channels and tactics you will use to reach your target audience. Some common channels include social media, email marketing, content marketing, and paid advertising. Decide which channels and tactics will be most effective for your business based on your target audience and business goals.
Allocate your budget: Once you have determined your marketing mix, it’s time to allocate your budget to each channel and tactic. Consider the costs associated with each channel and tactic, as well as their expected return on investment (ROI).
Set benchmarks: To track the performance of your marketing efforts, it’s important to set benchmarks. Determine what success looks like for each campaign, and set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic, you might set a goal to increase traffic by 20% over the next quarter.
Track your progress: Regularly track the performance of your marketing efforts to ensure you are meeting your benchmarks. Use tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic and conversions, and use social media analytics to track engagement on your social media channels.
Adjust your budget as needed: As you track the performance of your marketing efforts, you may find that some channels or tactics are performing better than others. If this is the case, consider adjusting your budget to allocate more resources to the channels and tactics that are producing the best results.
According to HubSpot, a looming recession has made budget cuts common. Nevertheless, they state that creating a comprehensive marketing budget is your silver bullet for avoiding these outcomes and executing your marketing strategy.
Preparing a budget allows you to plan more strategically. With a set plan, marketers can easily maintain track of the actual goals and responsibilities of their role.
Creating a marketing budget for the year can seem like a daunting task, but it’s an essential part of any business’s planning process. By considering your business goals, target audience, budget, and past performance, and by setting benchmarks and tracking your progress, you can effectively allocate your resources and create a successful marketing strategy for 2023.
Did you know that approximately 42% of marketers still use spreadsheets for marketing attribution?
What is an Attribution Model?
Marketing attribution is the process of assigning credit for conversion to the various marketing channels that contributed to the sale. By understanding how different marketing activities contribute to conversions, businesses can optimize their marketing mix and budgets to better achieve their desired results.
Attribution modeling allows marketers to analyze how much credit each marketing channel and customer touchpoint should receive for a given conversion. A tool like HubSpot can make managing attribution even easier. Over time, marketers can utilize this approach to optimize their programs toward the touchpoints that drive the most value. These models focus on different touchpoints to better understand how the customer behaves when interacting with your marketing.
Why does Marketing Attribution matter?
Some of the different reasons that Marketing Attribution matters include:
Improved decision-making
Increased return on investment
Improved customer journey insights
When considering how these factors impact your organization, it is clear that they provide a reason to learn more about how to improve. With knowledge and the right tools, companies can get complete visibility into the online channels that drive leads and will no longer be in the dark regarding marketing attribution.
Improved decision-making
Understanding which marketing activities are most effective enables businesses to allocate their resources more efficiently. By mastering marketing attribution, you take the first step to move towards better utilizing strategic marketing and moving beyond tactical thinking. Having a clear plan allows your business to make informed decisions that create a positive impact and, in turn, generate more customers.
Increased ROI
Businesses can optimize their camp by attributing conversions to the touchpoints that played the most significant role in influencing a sale. Digital Marketing can help uncover the strategies and efforts that result in increased conversations and ROI.
Improved customer journey insights
By understanding how customers interact with your brand across different channels, you can better map out their potential customer journey. Marketing attribution can help you determine the specific content your potential customers like, the ways they like to communicate with your business, and the activity that officially converts them to becoming a customer.
What are some of the different types of Attribution Models?
Attribution models can primarily be separated into two categories: single-touch attribution and multi-touch attribution.
Single-Touch Attribution
Single-touch attribution models assign all of the credit to a single touchpoint. The selected touchpoint is usually the first or last touch. Other marketing touchpoints can easily be overlooked when using single-touch attribution, as only one touchpoint receives credit for the conversation. First touch attribution is awareness focused, while multi-touch attribution is conversion-focused.
First Touch Attribution
First touch attribution gives all the credit to the first interaction that led to the desired action or conversation. This specific model is easy to set up and track. It also helps demonstrate how a consumer is introduced to your brand.
Last Touch Attribution
Last touch attribution gives all the credit to the last interaction that led to a closed won exchange. This model can help you determine the touchpoint that influences the consumer at the end of their interaction.
Multi-Touch Attribution
Multi-touch attribution gives each contributing channel a portion of credit for the final conversation. These models are highly informative because they account for the entirety of the buyer journey and allow you to identify where you are having the most success.
Linear Attribution
Linear attribution looks at each interaction that a prospect had before the final conversation and gives equal credit to each interaction.
Full-path Attribution
Full-path attribution gives 22.5% of the credit to the first interaction, the interaction that created the contact, the interaction that created the deal, and the interaction that closed the deal. The remaining 10% is then evenly distributed across all other interactions.
Time Decay
Time decay gives more credit to the interactions that occur closer in the customer’s journey to the completed conversation. This model allows marketers to identify the touchpoints that have directly led to the conversation. The value of this model is based on where customers engage across the funnel instead of the impact the touchpoints had on the consumer.
How can utilizing Attribution Models benefit your business?
Utilizing attribution models allows you to identify the specific touches that are influencing your customer. By understanding the particular click that leads someone to interact with you, you can focus your efforts on bettering these practices.
There isn’t an attribution model that is considered superior to the others. That being said, different factors like buying cycles or business goals can make one model better than the other.
Which model is best for your business?
To determine which attribution model is best for your business, you need to identify the information you hope to gain. There is no shortage of attribution models to help aid your understanding of both consumer behavior and which touchpoints are the most impactful.
Combining multiple models is the best way to get the most thorough insight across the entire buyer’s journey. By implementing numerous models, you are utilizing your tools to the fullest degree to truly understand the activity that will drive your business toward success.
When searching for a digital marketing agency to partner with, there are two agency models to understand and consider depending on the needs of your company. Integrated marketing agencies are an appealing option for businesses looking for comprehensive services and a streamlined approach. Conversely, tactic-specific agencies focus on one marketing modality, such as paid advertising or search engine optimization (SEO), which is another option for companies looking for support.
Throughout this article, we discuss both approaches more in-depth so you’re equipped to make the right decision for your company.
Let’s dive in.
Integrated Marketing Approach
An integrated marketing agency uses multi-channel targeting strategies with the same or similar messaging. Often this means the agency brings together various components of a successful inbound strategy combined with outbound strategies. This may include creating blog content, email campaigns, social media management, and paid ad campaigns.
An integrated marketing agency is a great option if you are looking for a marketing hub capable of handling your strategy and execution. It is a holistic approach that looks at your entire business and the potential impact of the different marketing methods and channels on the overall success of your business. An integrated marketing agency makes recommendations based on the most appropriate strategies for your industry and the stage of your business.
When a company is just starting out, it may be hard to know what kind of marketing expertise you need. An integrated marketing agency can provide all the expertise needed in one location, so you don’t have to stress about integrating the different methods into a strategy on your own. This decreases the overall cost and eliminates the inefficiency of employing a separate firm for each type of service.
Effective digital strategies require multiple channels working together synergistically. An integrative marketing agency makes it easier for companies to achieve their objectives with a single point of contact versus managing several different vendors responsible for different aspects of their marketing strategy. For marketers who want to bring multiple aspects of their campaign strategy under one roof, integrated marketing agencies are an all-inclusive solution that covers everything from content creation, promotion, and distribution.
With a thorough understanding of integrated marketing agencies, it’s time to discuss the tactic-specific approach.
Tactic-Specific Approach
As you advance your marketing maturity and budget, tactic-focused agencies can be useful when you need to go deep in a specific marketing channel. For example, you might reach the point where you consider hiring a dedicated PR firm who is exclusively focused on your industry. If your organization has a dedicated in-house team capable of managing multiple marketing channels, and you have the time and budget to coordinate multiple vendor relationships, then a tactic-specific approach may be an effective strategy for your business. This is a big reason why you see enterprise brands using multiple agencies in addition to their in-house staff to fulfill their marketing needs.
You may notice some correlations to the saying– when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail– if you choose to work with a tactic-specific agency. Tactic-specific agencies can help advise on a single marketing channel but it’s unlikely they can advise on which marketing channels would be the most effective for your business. Their recommendations will be specific to the services they offer, no matter how relevant the services are to your business. This comes at the expense of neglecting to recommend other strategies with the potential for greater business impact.
Working with Integrated Marketing Agencies
When working with an integrated marketing agency, know that you may need multiple marketing tactics to accomplish your goals. For example, if you are looking for more leads and sales, choose an agency that specializes in inbound marketing methodology, as well as paid advertising. If you need help with brand awareness or building community engagement, look to partner with a marketing agency specializing in social media management and public relations.
Choose What Makes Sense for Your Business
There are many ways to market your business depending on your timeline, budget, and goals. Hiring a full-service integrated marketing agency is the easiest way to get your marketing strategy and execution taken care of seamlessly through one vendor.
If you have a strong in-house marketing team who only needs assistance in a single area or is able to juggle multiple vendor relationships, you may find the tactic-specific model works best for your needs.
Start creating your marketing plan by outlining what you hope to achieve and defining how much money and resources you can allocate towards it. Then compare your goals to the unique offerings that integrated marketing agencies and tactic-specific agencies offer. If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency capable of handling all things strategy through execution, SmarkLabs does it all.
Feeling bamboozled by marketing tactics, channels, and buzzwords? There’s a lot to navigate when searching for the best marketing practices for your emerging company. Knowing when and how to get a realistic and effective marketing strategy off the ground may even seem daunting.
In this B2B marketing strategy framework, we provide insights on how to develop a manageable strategy for an early market team. First, we’ll cover the four marketing fundamentals essential for every business to define. Then we discuss the ongoing strategies successful companies use to scale long-term growth.
Let’s get started.
Start-Up Marketing Fundamentals
Before you can develop any tactical strategies or marketing messaging, you first need a clear picture of who you are serving and how you provide value to them. Ideal client profiles and buyer personas are essential building blocks that ensure everything else you build remains relevant to consumer needs.
Define Buyer Personas & Ideal Client Profiles
An ideal client profile (ICP) describes characteristics of a business that make it an optimal fit for your products and services.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional descriptions of the individuals who work at the ICP/businesses that would benefit from your solutions.
Having ICPs clearly defined helps your sales and marketing teams to understand which businesses would make great prospects. Your buyer personas will assist in creating effective messaging that aligns with real customer needs and desires.
Aim to create 2-3 personas and 1-2 client profiles. Your ICPs and buyer personas can be developed based on what you know about past or current clients.
While larger companies may conduct customer interviews to guide the creation of buyer personas, it won’t be as realistic for smaller businesses with less time, fewer resources, and fewer customers. Further, the information obtained from an interview typically reflects just one individual’s problems while an effective buyer persona should be representative of the broader problems your solutions solve.
If you need more insights, look to 3rd party resources such as LinkedIn or online job boards where you can pull information from job listings matching your customer profiles. You can also use professional information sources or industry associations for more information.
What to include in your Ideal Client Profiles:
Demographics including industry, job titles, levels of seniority, location, and company size
Once you document your client profiles and personas, your contact database should be segmented in order to send relevant, targeted messages that resonate with your target buyer personas.
With a deep understanding of your ideal clients, you’re ready to learn how the buyer’s journey further assists your sales and marketing messaging.
Understand the Buyer’s Journey for Aligned Messaging
Mapping out your buyer’s journey will provide you with valuable insights into the decision-making process your buyer personas go through before converting.
By understanding the pains and problems experienced along the buyer’s journey, sales reps and marketing specialists can better empathize with prospects when describing your solutions.
Inbound marketing methodology focuses on providing timely educational materials aligned with the buyer’s journey that draw leads to your site based on their specific needs.
In recent years, there’s been a fundamental change surrounding who holds the power in the sales process thanks to the integration of pocket-sized technology. Buyers have access to more information than ever to compare products and services—making high-quality, relevant content that assists customers along every stage of the buyer’s journey essential for your business to succeed.
The goal of the content associated with your website, emails, and social media is to advance buyers through the sales and marketing funnel. The buyer’s journey will help you prioritize the topics covered in your content.
Competitive analysis involves researching major competitor products, sales, and marketing tactics. Often the first objective is to understand their marketing strategies. The second is to see how they position themselves in the market and how you want to position your company in response.
Your competitive analysis ultimately is the research that fuels how your marketing strategy will develop. A well-performed competitive analysis will support data-driven business and marketing strategies, paving the way for you to excel in capturing market share.
Start by defining what questions you have or insights you hope to gain that will assist you in your business and marketing goals. Then gather the information to answer those questions from your competitors’ websites, blogs, social media, and through analytical tools. Reviews can also reveal immeasurable value regarding the positive experiences and pain points consumers have using your competitors’ products and services. Throughout your competitor analysis, consider how you will position your brand in the market landscape.
Set SMART Goals and Choose your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Using the SMART goal framework ensures your marketing objectives align with your business goals. SMART is an acronym used to create goals that include Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely elements.
In the early stages, your goal may be to increase awareness of your brand. As time progresses, your goal should shift to increased leads and ultimately revenue. Examples of KPIs that align with these goals are shown in the table below:
Goal ->
KPIs
Increase brand awareness
Website visits
Increase leads
Conversion rates
Increase revenue
Sales
It’s important to have an understanding of how many deals or opportunities are needed in your pipeline to close a new customer. Set your marketing goals using the closest key metric that leads to new opportunities–typically new sales leads.
This is the best place to start as you build your marketing program. In later stages of your company’s development, you may advance to more complex goal setting using revenue attribution reporting. Set your goals further up the funnel until you get to website traffic.
A typical funnel looks like this:
Visitor → Lead → Marketing Qualified Lead → Sales Qualified Lead → Opportunity → Customer
You will need to determine how many marketing-qualified leads you need to generate in order to convert the number of sales leads from your goal. This conversion formula can be modeled up to the top of the funnel at “visitors”.
Let’s recap.
Foundational Steps Checklist:
Document 2-3 buyer personas and 1-2 ICPs
Map out your buyer’s journey
Complete a competitive analysis
Set SMART goals and identify the appropriate KPIs
These steps will assist you across all decision-making moments in your business.
With those boxes checked, it’s time to talk strategy.
Create Your Content Strategy
“Content” refers to the digital marketing assets associated with your company that demonstrate your expertise within your field and help communicate your unique solutions to potential customers. This may include blog articles, videos, ebooks, case studies, white papers, or reports to name a few.
An effective content strategy aims to assist potential customers by providing educational information that helps solve problems. Creating content that is integrated with search engine optimization (SEO) best practices will assist your website in being discovered by people actively searching online for answers or help. SEO content focuses on positioning your products and services as timely solutions to those consumer problems.
The topics you choose to cover in your content should be based on keywords that align with how your buyer personas define their problems, as well as the topics that establish you as an authority in your field.
Content Strategy Breakdown:
Categories. Identify 3 to 5 categories of information you want to be known for. Start with the broad topics where you want to be viewed as an authority and which align with your products and services. You can add more categories as your company grows.
Subtopics. Identify sub-topics related to the broad topic categories, based on what your audience is searching for.
Campaign roadmap. Create a campaign roadmap based on those topics and define how each campaign will convert across the stages of your funnel.
Distribution. Create a plan for how to distribute and promote your content, such as through email, social media, and paid advertising.
The content your team creates– whether blog articles, videos, ebooks, or case studies– will serve as more than just resources housed on your website. As you distribute the content through the various channels, these assets will serve as fuel for creating demand for your products and services. We’ll discuss demand generation in more detail below.
But first, you’ll need a go-to market strategy.
Develop Your Go-To Market (GTM) Strategy
When preparing to bring a product or service to market, your GTM business strategy should integrate your sales strategy and marketing strategy to position your product as the best solution to consumer problems. Your GTM strategy is developed based on the four foundational marketing steps we discussed at the beginning of this article.
HubSpot offers 4 questions to help you hone in on GTM:
Product-Market Fit. What problems does your product or service solve?
Target Audience. Who is experiencing the problem?
Competition and Demand. Who offers the same service? How much demand is there?
Distribution. How will you sell the product or service?
With your GTM plans in place, you’re ready to start executing your marketing campaigns.
Advance More Buyers Faster with Demand Generation
Demand generation is everything your brand does to create awareness and interest surrounding your company’s products and services. This includes all marketing efforts to help your organization reach new markets, promote new product features, build consumer buzz, generate PR, and re-engage existing customers.
The purchase decision for B2B products and services typically involves extensive online research and comparisons. Personalized online messaging for specific consumer problems is the best place to start when developing content for use in demand generation campaigns.
Below we give brief descriptions of the modern channels for distributing your message and creating demand.
Paid Media.LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, Google display, paid search, video ads, and other promoted multimedia are effective channels for expanding brand reach, generating more website traffic, and retargeting past web visitors.
Social Media. B2B companies are embracing online brand development and with it, commanding their social media presence to engage, attract and inform their audiences. Your business can demonstrate credibility and nurture customer loyalty through educational content and resources aimed at helping your target audiences. Whether you share blog posts, case studies, e-books, or how-to videos, your social media marketing strategy will be successful if centered around actionable, helpful content.
Email Promotion. Email marketing is the process of targeting your audience and customers through email promotion. Boost conversion rates and revenue by providing subscribers and customers with valuable information to help achieve their goals. Read more here on email marketing tips.
No matter which channels you choose, the key to success in digital marketing remains the same– consistency.
Time to recap! In this b2b marketing strategy framework, we’ve covered:
4 early marketing fundamentals every business needs established
Foundations to content strategy development
Initiating a Go-To Market strategy and creating demand for your solutions
All that’s left is to ensure you can efficiently track, measure, and analyze your data.
Connect Your Tech Stack
You are likely already using a CRM and various marketing tools. Make sure they are set up correctly to track the metrics you’ve defined as your KPIs. If you’re looking for a CRM and marketing tool all-in-one, HubSpot is ideal. It offers a comprehensive integrated system for managing email, social, paid, website, and more all in the same place as your sales processes. HubSpot is also scalable. As your business grows, you can transition from the free version all the way to enterprise.
Your B2B Marketing Strategy Framework
Whew. We gave you a lot of information in this b2b marketing strategy framework. We know B2B marketing may seem complicated. But running a successful startup marketing strategy doesn’t have to be stressful. Download our content playbook to get started.
