The problem with marketing plans
for small B2B companies

If you run a smaller B2B services business (e.g. software development, engineering, etc), especially one with less than ~100 employees, you’re going to want to get real, quickly.

You don’t have the energy, time, or money to waste that some of the bigger players have.

The main dangers of creating a traditional marketing plan are:

It gives you a false sense of security

Creating a plan can make you think that all you need to do is mechanically go through the steps. Don’t do it. It’s way harder than that. Why? Human behavior, low probabilities, limited data, and partially observable variables are the main reasons.

It encourages you to focus on activities over progress

Activities are manageable and straightforward to understand. They’re also generally deterministic. You know when you’ve walked through the various milestones of creating an article for example. But creating an article is just a necessary but insufficient condition to making progress toward sales-ready leads.

It discourages quick changes / pivots / killing off at a rapid pace

Things like editorial calendars and task lists can be great to get your head straight and give you a clue of the direction you want to head for the next 12+ months (especially if you’re new to content marketing), but it also encourages you to keep your head down and charge forward with activities without utilizing feedback. And that’s bad.

It tries to be all encompassing

A lot of marketing plans try to convey how the various aspects of your business tie together. That can be a useful exercise to get everyone on the same page and set priorities, but it can be overwhelming to do anything tactical with for most small companies with limited resources.

Instead, start with a simplified marketing strategy and develop experiments to test around each niche.

The first step in developing a marketing strategy for small B2B services companies – determining a niche

Start with a simple marketing strategy that’s laser-focused on 1 problem-solution pair that you solve and start to iteratively answer these 4 questions:

  1. What problem am I solving?
  2. For who?
  3. How should I try to engage my potential customer?
  4. Where do I stand in the market?

The key is to keep it limited in scope.

You need to answer these questions independently for each problem you solve, as seen from your customer’s perspective (not from your perspective).

Want to learn more about the importance of niches and how to find yours? Check out: Why you need a niche and what to do about it.

Niche Exploration Framework – How to re-frame your thinking about marketing plans (a marketing un-plan)

For each of your niche problem-solution pairs (only start with 1 or 2 niches), you want to have a basic sense of a few things so that you can start to test your thinking.

For each niche you want to explore, you’ll want to have a sense of (at least most of) the following:

  1. Niche market
  2. Problem(s) solved by solution
  3. Solution that solves the problem(s)
  4. Your target customer
  5. Baseline content needed
  6. Marketing method(s) and corresponding channel(s) to test (RocLogic tends to focus on inbound / content / search methods).
  7. Testing – metrics to monitor

How to use your niche exploration framework?

You won’t really do much with your niche exploration framework once you’ve gone through the process of gathering the info.

Why go through the process in the first place then?

To:

  1. clarify your thoughts,
  2. get everyone on a similar page,
  3. and force you to be real with yourself about your readiness to pursue this market segment/niche.

Avoid falling into the trap of thinking that you now have a mechanical process that you just need to churn through.

You don’t.

The “magic” in marketing execution isn’t really magic, but it’s not just a mechanical process either.

Below are some of the complex components that need to all work together well enough for you to stand a chance of executing well:

  1. Your ability to empathize with where your potential customer is coming from.
  2. Problem-solution matching.
  3. Market alignment.
  4. Lead source data gathering in a noisy / messy / data-limited environment

These components involve human behavior, low probabilities, and partially observable variables.

If you feel like you’re struggling to make progress, feel free to reach out.

Yes, I want to get moving

In learning mode? Check these out: