If you’ve recently discovered the value of adopting the content and commerce approach for your B2B marketing strategy, your next question might be: “How can I prepare my organization for the content and commerce approach?”
Fortunately, adopting content and commerce is easier than you think. In this post, I’ll lay out three high-level adjustments to consider when preparing your organization to fully take advantage of content and commerce together:
1. Facilitate a round table.
Gather a round table of key people from your organization’s sales, marketing and operations departments to plan both your GTM approach and how to use your B2B eCom platform to facilitate it. These three departments will work together to assess your GTM needs, means of execution, and methods of measuring success. Remember this is a round table, not a linear process where one person or group completes their tasks and passes the project down the line. All people and groups involved will need to work collaboratively to ensure success.
Now let’s take a look at how sales, marketing and operations will work together in this process.
Operations will play a key role in validating your GTM process with the capabilities, business rules, and objectives needed to ensure its success. In it’s simplest form, this is answering these questions: What do we need to do it? How do we do it? Why are we doing it?
Next, Sales will evaluate the tools and content to ensure they will have what they need to connect with their buyers. Sales should not evaluate tools and content based on previous strategies or techniques.. Instead, encourage your Sales team to look at their key objectives and determine if they will be able to meet them with this new approach.
Finally, Marketing will provide the GTM stories, content, and campaigns they will be putting in front of your buyers. They will need to determine how best to deliver this content through your tools to the intended users. Working together, these three departments will need to work collaboratively to ensure the new content and commerce approach is being used to its fullest capabilities.
2. Adopt a marketing mindset.
The second adjustment to consider making is to adopt a wholesale marketing mindset. To successfully adopt a wholesale content and commerce approach, you will need a wholesale marketing strategy. By treating your wholesale buyers as your audience, you will now have to think about how, what, and when you should market to them.
For example, with content and commerce, your B2B portal becomes a destination and an opportunity for your buyers to learn about your brand and products. Your marketing team can now utilize creative marketing initiatives to draw buyers to this new destination, educate them, and allow them to buy - all in the same portal. And if your portal is a destination, you can utilize ad campaigns to draw them back around order deadlines, and during trade show events and promotions. Strategies such as this not only push revenue in the short-term, but also increase long-term revenue by keeping a steady flow of content in front of your buyers’, and increasing their understanding of your brand and product.
3. Ensuring engagement and accountability.
Finally, the third adjustment to consider is to implement a feedback loop that allows your marketing team to continuously measure, improve, and optimize their efforts within your content and commerce approach. Creating this feedback loop allows you to assess your order results and customer engagement in the context of the content you’ve created, no more guessing. Correlating these two allows your team to double down on what’s working and drop what’s not. Over time, your team will be able to optimize their B2B marketing efforts and increase efficiency and revenue.
Implementing a content and commerce approach into your B2B marketing creates so many opportunities that you will need a plan to fully take advantage of them. On a very simple level, you’ll want to assemble a team to assess your needs and capabilities, introduce the wholesale marketing mindset into your marketing efforts and, finally, create a modern and continuous improvement plan that fully utilizes the power of your new approach. There will, of course, be details unique to your industry and organization. However, implementing this framework will allow your team to plan and be prepared for any adjustments that need to be made for your organization to accommodate your new content and commerce approach.