What is joined-up marketing, and why is it better for B2B lead generation and sales?

What do you hear when you hear terms like ‘holistic strategy’ and ‘360-degree marketing’? Plenty of people have a one-word answer to that, which is “Nothing.”It is understandable that if you find terms like that off-putting, but somewhere under the jargon is a good idea.

That good idea is that you should approach marketing as a whole — that you should join up everything you do, whether it is content, digital, social media, or design; that you should plan everything with a firm focus on the overall purpose, the results you want to achieve, and how each element affects (and is affected by) the others. It is also about how marketing joins up with other functions and departments — especially Sales.

Put it like that, and it sounds quite obvious. So, how do you put it into practice?

How to join up the essentials of B2B marketing

Your marketing strategy might involve content, digital marketing, social media, and design. That variety is powerful, but without a joined-up approach, it risks silos.

You must avoid a situation in which different teams or team members are working completely independently. They should have self-sufficient initiative, but they also need to be united by a clear and measurable.If your digital team is putting weeks of work into ranking for a search term on Google, but the content team is producing blogs on something completely different, the ranking won’t improve, and the content won’tbe seen.

Agree who the target is, how you will target them, and what success looks like, and people can hold themselves and each other accountable for that goal.

An additional element is to understand and agree as a team how your prospects behave, how they like to research and how they like to receive information. For example, 84% of the C-Suite use social media in their buying decisions, and 80% of decision makers prefer to learn about a potential supplier through a series of articles, as opposed to more overt advertising.If you are targeting board-level prospects, then you can have a strategic conversation about how to use social media to build and engaged community and promote content, how design can create a strong brand identity for people to recognise on LinkedIn, and how digital can help to find the audience for the social media content.

How to join up B2B lead generation with a sales department

Sales representatives can find themselves spending 40% of their time just trying to find someone to call. If marketing can generate an abundance of high-quality leads, then that could be the equivalent of two extra days per week of sales calls.

What is more,modern B2B buying behaviour makes the relationship between Marketing content and Sales even more crucial.

• 94% of B2B buyers will research online before they buy
• 90% of B2B buyers say online content is a moderate or major influence on their decision
• 47% of buyers view 3-5 pieces of content before talking a member of the sales team
• A modern B2B customer is 57% of the way to their purchase decision before the selling business has an opportunity to interact with them

The kind of lead that Sales get will not be a blank slate. They will have read into the business, its offering, and its competitors, and might be heavily influenced by what they have researched. To give Sales the best leads possible chance of closing those deals, Marketing needs to be sure that they are producing content that attracts serious prospects, and that resonates with those prospects’ experience and makes the lead a warm one.

If content is joined up with a digital strategy, then it is easy to discover what the target market is searching for online, and using what kind of language. However, joining Sales to Marketing is even more cultural than it is practical.

Marketing must be receptive to the feedback that Sales offers. If leads aren’t good, Sales should feed that back in a constructive and collegial way, andshare how prospects think and speak. If Marketing has the right mindset, they can use that insight to refine their content and strategy.

To maintain that positive relationship, when a salesperson closes a deal, they should celebrate the role that marketing played in generating the lead (if they did). That will encourage Marketing to recognise the skill and contributionof the Sales team, and remain receptive to their feedback.

Start your joined-up marketing approach today

If you would like expert advice and assistancewith building, designing, and executing a results-driven and joined-up B2B marketing strategy, contact Nutcracker today.We make sure to deeply understand your business and your goals when we develop a measurable marketing strategy that delivers.

Call 020 3941 0305 or emailjenny.knighting@nutcrackeragency.com.