The challenge with traditional business development
A lot of companies consider themselves ‘sales-led’. But is this a good thing – or is it simply because your marketing has never been down well? Sales has limitations, after all. For a start, each new team salary adds a significant operational cost. And with sales, your commercial reach is limited by the laws of physics (and human nature):
- time: the duration of the working week
- space: the distance your sales team can travel to meetings
- humans: the limits of your team’s personal networks, and their motivation to chase down new deals.
The reality is that for every customer who converts via sales, another will find you by marketing – and may never have found you otherwise. This is why the healthiest B2B growth strategy is for sales and marketing to work in sync: sales pursuing immediate opportunities, and marketing keeping the pipeline full.
This produces a more stable growth curve, that’s more resistant to economic fluctuations and ultimately drives down your cost of sales.
So: how does the marketing actually contribute to growth?
Inbound marketing explained
Navigate B2B are specialists in inbound marketing: the discipline of creating content that anticipates your customers’ research needs, pulls them into your website, and increases the changes of the right types of prospect making an enquiry.
When done correctly, inbound marketing contributes around 20% of a company’s total new business. And since we produce content that’s designed to last, our clients see their marketing ROI increase YoY.
Inbound marketing is valuable because customers are often only receptive to sales when they’re ready to buy – and by that point, they’re already calling up your competitors.
By contrast, inbound marketing meets people throughout the buyer journey, including in those early-funnel phases when they’re researching a problem (and may not yet be aware of the need for a solution).
When implemented properly, a firm should have dozens (or even hundreds) of high-ranking assets which reach into every industry you sell into, every problem you solve, and every service you provide, producing a very wide ‘net’ to capture prospects at scale.
The Navigate B2B approach
1. Understanding your business and your customer
As a marketing function outsourcing provider, Navigate B2B works side-by-side with your commercial team (and preferably in your office). This is so we can understand your customer, their problems, and your value proposition intimately, and produce genuinely insightful and effective marketing information.
We use this to develop a content strategy for blogs, case studies and website landing pages that anticipate your customers’ full range of research needs.
2. Authoritative thought leadership in all channels
We produce content that senior buying professionals actually want to read, watch or listen to – across blog, marketing emails, social media, podcasts and more.
Successful people have standards, after all. You’re in a competitive market for attention, against whatever else your customer could be reading. We produce content that doesn’t just rank in Google and ChatGPT; it’s rated highly by customers as genuinely useful information that helps them in their businesses.
3. Website & martech transformation
A company’s website is its most important piece of marketing technology. We reimagine online spaces: from static shop windows (“Look at us!”), to familiar environments for your customers to explore (“what are you looking to solve?”).
We offer a proprietary platform for new websites, based on years of testing, and proven to improve SEO / GEO rankings and increase the chances of a successful conversion.
We also introduce modern CRMs, including training up your team, and introduce proven reporting & tracking technologies to demonstrate and optimise marketing ROI.
4. Reporting, analytics & ongoing marketing optimisation
Reporting is some of the most important marketing you do. Our automated marketing dashboards update in real-time and form the basis for our quarterly marketing reports.
These reports tend to be highly valued by companies’ boards of directors, demonstrating how your marketing investment is making an impact, and producing insights which feed back into your business strategy.
By continuously monitoring performance across your website, blog, email marketing and social media channels, we ensure clients understand which areas are contributing to growth, and optimize the approach for ongoing improvement in your marketing ROI.
See how we can help grow your business.
Interested in adding a high-performance marketing function to your business? Navigate B2B collaborates with founders, CEOs and sales teams to build inbound lead pipelines based on your new business strategy.
Let’s grab a coffee and see how we can help.
3 key elements of successful B2B content marketing
There is no secret to effective B2B content marketing. Some companies do manage to hire the right people, and pursue the right strategy to build a sustainable inbound lead pipeline.
These are the 3 key elements that drive B2B marketing success…
01. Treat your content like a product
You’re the best at what you do – so why publish second-rate content? Meet your customer at eye-level. Flatter egos with intelligent, useful B2B content that senior people genuinely want to read.
02. Take an investment mindset
Seek out quick gains for early payback, test the market and let data build – but really focus on those 5-year, 10x returns. Done properly, ROI on content marketing builds over time, with the best investments paying you back for years to come.
03. Obsess over the data
It is not sufficient to report your total monthly site visitors. Track smart metrics such as seasonal trends YoY, and content lifetime value and fine-tune your approach over time.
Time to get to work.
Time waits for no business. Put these steps into action today and start driving
marketing ROI.
Case studies
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Executive search firm
MARTECH-SPECIALIST EXECUTIVE SEARCH FIRM
The Rosenstein Group is the leading executive search outfit for martech firms, spanning martech, ecommerce, supply chain, sales enablement and digital agencies.
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Print Manufacturer
PRINTING FIRM: FULL-SERVICE DIGITAL MARKETING
Park approached Navigate B2B in 2019 in search of a new buiness marketing function. The company was a leading supplier in the market, but a new approach was needed in order to add new leads to the top of the funnel and accellerate the pipeline.
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Loyalty Martech
INVESTMENT-BACKED SAAS, TO PROFITABLE BUSINESS
When we first met in October 2017, Currency Alliance was a startup with big ambitions: to work with every major loyalty brand worldwide.
Thought leadership…
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Intelligent marketing reporting for business growth
Marketing reporting should indicate whether your efforts are contributing to growth. This starts with having control of the data.
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How a balanced B2B commercial strategy de-risks your growth
Pursuing different sales & marketing tactics in parallel helps companies adapt to market conditions, learn, and optimize their growth strategies.
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Composable architecture unlocks the direct-to-consumer model
DTC is a notoriously difficult business model. Composable architecture improves brands' control of data, maximising their chances of success.
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Major marketing trends hinge on composable architecture
For the major marketing trends to be fulfilled, brands will first need to modernise their tech stacks in order to make better use of data.
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Communicating sustainability with data visualisation
Data can help consumers understand why their personal actions are important, and to believe that they can help.
