Top 6 B2B Industrial Marketing Priorities To Do More With Less This Year

As we settle into another year, reality starts to set in as we begin to put our January plans into action.

After the excitement wears off, it’s easy to begin losing steam as we tackle another set of yearly and quarterly goals, another set of wishlists and stretch goals, and another set of roadblocks and uncertainties, with deadlines looming and (if we’re being honest) a limited amount of time to get it all done.

We’ve noticed that, sometimes, the best plans are the ones that allow a bit of fluidity and the ability to adjust course as you go, based on what you find. Even better are the adjusted plans that allow you to reach the same goal with less effort, and the plans that help position you for the future.

With that in mind, here are six recommendations for marketers in the B2B industrial and technical space:

1- Build a smarter content calendar that does more with less

Plan themes that fill your content calendar for the year, covering the overlap of:

• What your best customers and prospects are most interested in learning about and/or experiencing challenges in
• Your core services and core competencies
• Your SEO strategy

Designing a content marketing strategy around the intersection of these three items is really where you find the greatest ROI from your time and effort. If you don’t have persona interviews, now is a great time to get a few scheduled; the second best thing is to take a salesperson to lunch and ask them what your best prospects have been talking about lately.

2- Identify and improve rankings for business-critical target keywords

We recommend that everyone maintain a list of target keywords, not just based on SEO research for volume and difficulty, but also based on impact to your business.

• Which keywords—if you ranked in the top three positions, or even on the first page in Google—would have the most outsized impact on your sales and marketing success?
• What content would you need to write in order to get into those positions?

While there is also value in a more traditional approach and making incremental improvements to existing rankings, the most action-oriented approach is to define where you want to go, and then take targeted action towards getting there.

3- Get in front of GA4 – the new Google Analytics

If you haven’t yet done so, it’s time to embrace the next generation of Google Analytics — GA4. Google has sent several notices to Analytics’ account owners regarding this change and the action required to upgrade to the new generation of analytics, which will entirely replace Universal Analytics (UA) on July 1, 2023. Starting in March, Google will begin configuring accounts automatically with a few basic settings, but you’ll have more control, and more data, if you manually confirm that you’re tracking everything that you need to make good decisions.

The good news is that GA4 can run in tandem with the existing UA property on your site. This will allow GA4 to start collecting data now, so that when data stops flowing into your UA property later in the year, you’re already set up, tested and ready to go. Google Analytics will not allow you to retroactively collect or modify data, so waiting to set this up may leave you with a gap in analytics. Over the past several months, our team has been proactively implementing and testing basic and advanced GA4 configurations for clients, including conversion and goal tracking, to ensure that our clients are ready ahead of time with ample comparison data.

Why GA4? GA4 includes updates and improvements in terms of more action-oriented analytics, as well as improved data privacy, which is yet another reason to implement it sooner rather than later, although for full GDPR compliance you’ll still need to take additional steps, including IP anonymization and/or a cookie consent banner. You can learn more in this Google Skillshop course that goes over the differences between UA and GA4.

4- Establish a quarterly sales/marketing SWOT meeting

It’s a great practice to hold a quarterly review of your marketing health, and it’s also critical that sales and marketing work closely together. In these meetings, you can prioritize focused efforts on the highest impact activities and make sure that ongoing attention is paid to ongoing sales and marketing projects—those that are never “done” and tend to take a back burner position:

• Filling gaps in sales enablement content
• Updating content that describes your best-fit clients and your processes, so that they remain in sync with how sales talks to prospects
• Adding to your case study library (related: How to Write a Better Case Study)

5- Leverage and improve your tech stack

If you haven’t yet begun harnessing the power of a CRM and connected marketing automation system, there’s no time like the present. Moving your entire sales team onto a CRM (or changing CRMs) is a large task, but it’s much more manageable when you take the first step by experimenting with and harnessing the power within the marketing team, along with 1 or 2 champions from the sales team.

6- Make data-informed decisions to increase lead quality

Make a practice of regularly reviewing lead quality—what channels, campaigns and keywords do your best fit, most-likely-to-close prospects come from? And where do the least qualified leads come from?

Make a coordinated effort to invest more time and effort into what’s working, and less into what’s not. The data you’ll need will come from your analytics, your CRM and other sources, but must be paired with your intuition as marketers, as well as ongoing conversations with your sales team about what makes a good prospect.

What are your industrial marketing priorities and projects for the next 12 months?
Whether you need help gaining traction with your digital marketing, your major initiative is a website redesign, or your whole marketing strategy needs a fresh set of eyes, we’d love to hear from you and learn more about your challenges.