Marketing is expensive.

Successfully marketing your business online requires many hours of coordinated effort. This effort must come from a skilled team moving productively together in the right direction.

In this article, we look at why a carefully considered strategy is crucial if you want to enjoy a return on investment in B2B marketing.

The discussion focuses on these key areas:

• Straight-line productivity versus zig-zagging
• The Dog’s Breakfast website
• Why Willy-Nilly destroys your bottom line

Straight-line productivity

As I mentioned earlier, marketing is expensive.

Skilled team members demand high salaries, and creating content and platforms is extremely time-consuming.

Large salaries multiplied by large numbers of hours means large costs.

It’s incredibly easy to burn through significant amounts of cold, hard cash on marketing activity that can look impressive but simply doesn’t deliver results.

This results in revolving doors, direction changes and painfully slow zig-zagging progress towards your business goals.

To pull creative teams together and make sure every hour spent on marketing activity moves you in the right direction requires that

1. You know what that direction is
2. Your marketing team understand this direction and do the work required to follow it

Strategy is the first step here.

An effective B2B marketing strategy takes a holistic approach, looking at the current situation and data, your business objectives, market forces, and available resources.

From there, the strategist develops a road map that will take you to your end goal by the straightest possible route.

The other key ingredient is to align the team with the strategy and ensure it is executed as planned, with data collection along the way informing course adjustments.

This is not easy – but this is what must happen if you want to see a return on B2B marketing investment.

The Dog's Breakfast Website

The other key area where a lack of strategy results in a massive cash drain and wasted opportunity is B2B website creation.

The situation is similar in that many hours of work from an expensive, skilled team must be coordinated to deliver an effective outcome.

Failure to follow a considered website strategy results in what I call the Dog’s Breakfast website.

You can recognise the Dog’s Breakfast website quite easily.

They often have a nice enough home page but then quickly degenerate into an in-cohesive mess of random content and images with no clear user direction or journey.

They don’t rank on Google. And they don’t deliver leads.

In many ways, a Dog’s Breakfast website is the most damaging failure in B2B marketing because your website is the most important digital marketing asset you have.

It’s where everyone goes to learn about your business, and it can make or break you.

Why Willy-Nilly destroys your bottom line

When individual marketers without strategic guidance are left to run their own race,  marketing activity generally becomes uncoordinated and ‘Willly-Nilly’.

This is because different team members see things in different ways depending on their areas of expertise, skill sets and personal agendas.

Willy-Nilly will not cut it with your market.

In the fiercely competitive B2B marketing space, any inconsistency leads to a lack of trust and sends the user back to Google to find someone else.

You don’t need me to tell you that spending cash on things that damage your reputation is a recipe for bottom-line damage.

Meet the author

I’m Deb Croucher, a former veterinary surgeon with a passion for B2B marketing.

In 2008, I permanently traded my stethoscope for SEO after successfully leveraging Google to power my vet business.

Diagnosis and treatment is still part of my day though!

In Brilliant Digital, I identify issues, uncover opportunities and formulate marketing strategies that support business success and longevity.

You can read more B2B marketing articles here. I love to chat so feel free to drop me a line!