Business-to-business marketing is a complex space. Unlike business-to-consumer environments, B2B businesses usually feature complex buying processes involving multiple decision-makers, high value transactions and long sales cycles. Successful B2B marketing demands a unique blend of art and science to find, and engage, the right people to market to inside a business.
As your company grows, you might swing back and forth on the decision to manage marketing in-house or through an agency. It’s a big decision involving a lot of research, time and, ultimately, money.
If you’re unclear about the benefits a B2B marketing agency can bring your business, read on to explore the value we’ve been delivering to clients for more than 30 years.
1. Deep B2B-specific expertise and insights
A good B2B marketing agency works on B2B campaigns with a range of clients every single day. Specialist agencies appreciate the complex relationships between vendors, distributors, suppliers and customers and how the ecosystem needs to work for success. That adds up to a lot of accumulated experience and insights to what works, and what doesn’t, to share with your business.
A strong B2B marketing agency will give you a team of professionals skilled at making impactful marketing recommendations tailored to meet your specific needs. The best agencies also offer strategic advice from senior consultants to analyse your challenges and goals and design your marketing plans for success.
B2B marketing agencies are also highly tuned to industry shifts and emerging trends and move quickly to ensure ongoing compliance and campaign results. Examples include alignment to new privacy guidelines or re-allocating ad spend when social network algorithms change. Staying up to date with cutting edge marketing trends, techniques and opportunities is straightforward for a B2B marketing agency. This means your business has on-demand access to relevant expertise and insights.
2. Fresh perspectives on your goals, campaigns and tactics
A B2B marketing agency should bring fresh perspectives to your marketing plans and experience helping businesses create successful marketing campaigns. Skilled B2B agency marketers have worked on many marketing campaigns and can quickly spot common mistakes or opportunities for improvements. Working with a skilled partner can bring fresh creativity and ideas to creating a new campaign.
3. Fast productivity
As B2B businesses grow, they find themselves teetering on the edge of needing to hire marketing resources without being quite ready, or able, to invest the necessary time or money to the function. These companies often bridge the gap to marketing by allocating marketing work across the existing team, even though the team may not have marketing expertise. The results? Weak, poorly executed marketing activities, distracted teams and wasted company time and money.
The wealth of experience inside B2B marketing agencies mean time to productivity is fast. Once the agency understands the brief, they’ll use their knowledge and move quickly to design the best campaign to meet your goals. You know exactly where your money is going, the team can return to their day job and time frees up for everyone.
4. Cost-effective
Hiring in-house marketing managers is time consuming and expensive. Costs include the base salary plus the overheads of superannuation, annual days off, sick leave, insurances, office space, technology access and more. Partnering with the right B2B marketing agency to help grow your business is almost always more cost-effective than hiring in-house resources.
5. Results and accountability
A good B2B marketing agency has the expertise and time to extract maximum impact from every execution, which means results for your business. Part of the process of engaging an agency involves agreeing metrics that define success. As your campaigns move into market, the agency is accountable for delivering those metrics. If the results don’t arrive as planned, the agency team will be expected to explain what went wrong and their plan to fix it. If things get really bad, there is always the option to fire the agency and hire a replacement.
6. Flexible skills
As your business matures its likely you’ll need more, or different, B2B marketing services to continue growing. Partnering with a B2B marketing agency lets you easily and quickly add whatever skills you need, including SEO, content marketing, PPC ads, marketing automation, media planning, website support and design, as and when you need them.
7. The right tools
Over the last few years, new marketing tools and applications have exploded into the market. From marketing automation to social networking and lead generation platforms, a B2B marketing agency has expert insight to the tools which are most effective for reaching, and engaging, a B2B audience.
For growing B2B businesses, leveraging the right marketing agency expertise means your budget will go further to creating cutting edge marketing campaigns. As a full-service integrated marketing agency, we build and manage ‘always on’ marketing and lead generation programs so you can scale. Find out more about our services here.
