Creating a Strategic B2B Marketing Plan for an HR Company

Let’s kick this article off by providing you with some context:

• An HR company in a B2B environment can be complicated in terms of the organisation of its business units.
• Decisions are taken by different persons (the projects managers) who have their own expectations and needs.
• In order to create consistency in the marketing approach, we had to regroup all needs and translate them into strategies and actions that respond to the different department objectives.

Challenge:

• Facing the large amount of information and demands, we proposed to the customer to build and create a strategic and detailed marketing plan.
• This plan had to contain tactical actions which could be done to meet the various objectives coming from the different sub-departments.
• The objectives of the departments, given in figures, had to be translated into marketing objectives relating to the B2B environment (get, keep, increase).

Solution:

• step 1: Describe the business unit in terms of marketing: vision, mission, main activities, customer profiles, rate of cross selling…
• step 2: Analyse each department : its challenges, possible segmentation, positioning statement, existing products and services.
• step 3: Summarise the business objectives per department and activity, prioritise them and translate them into marketing objectives ( get, keep, increase). Knowing the global marketing budget allowed for the business unit, split it regarding the business priorities.
• step 4: Define specific marketing campaig,s facing the objectives, the split of budget and calculate the estimated ROI of each action.
• step 5: Timeline the campaigns.

Examples of actions per marketing objective in a B2B market:

• Get: email (or DM action per e-mail) to prospects which defines the different services + an advantage to become customer (reduction or free service) + call to action.
• Keep: seminars, loyalty events, workshops, relational events.
• Increase: propose a complementary service to existing customers.

Key success factors:

In a B2B complex environment with a large amount of information and objectives, the first key is to develop a “helicopter” view of the business to define the priorities.

Only after this analysis, you can propose a tactical marketing plan that can be implemented in order to achieve the business objectives and the ROI.