It's true that the B2B marketing process was a bit too business-like over the last decade or so. That has changed very rapidly over the past few years. Awareness of this arguably came from the B2C world and their attention to more personalized marketing with customers. Now B2B companies are needing to shift their approach to keep up with the times.
In B2B, there isn't any reason the same personalized approaches can't occur as in the B2C realm. This is maybe why you're now thinking of developing a stronger B2B marketing team.
The question is, how do you put together a top B2B marketing team that can cover all bases in looking out for your company and the customers you serve? Those areas you need to cover are much wider than you think when you realize how vast the online world is. You'll have to tap SEO talent, those who write well, web design experts, plus several other categories you may not initially consider.
Let's look at each part of your new B2B marketing team and what role they'll play in making your B2B business more powerful to prospective buyers.
Finding Your Leader
While the word "leader" is singular, don't necessarily discount using more than one leader to direct your marketing team. No matter who the person is, you definitely need a coach who can guide each member of your team to their goals.
For this job, it's preferable to have someone who can take on multiple roles so they understand each department. Someone with a good emotional intelligence and a strategic mind helps communicate ideas and integrates everyone so they're on the same page.
The reason we use the word "coach" above is that the leader has to coach some of the marketing team through basic training. Someone with enough mental tenacity to do this successfully obviously isn't easy to find. Nevertheless, make it your top priority first before assembling the rest of your marketing team.
SEO Experts
There isn't any question SEO still confounds some people, and you shouldn't have your marketing team go at it without an in-house expert. With that, make sure the SEO expert you hire has some experience in search engine searching techniques to find trends and other metrics.
When your SEO guru knows how to search properly, they can find a lot of valuable information about what your competitors do and what you can add or remove. Insightful search ability is an essential element of SEO you may otherwise overlook.
During your SEO expert hiring process, it's better to find someone who's had years of experience rather than an upstart.
Content Creators
Marketing content is the real meat of your B2B marketing campaign. Because the focus on it is so essential, you need to hire someone to focus on it exclusively. It's truly best this way since having everyone contributing can lead to lack of cohesion, especially if they work separately from others.
What you need is a content creator with superior writing ability (hiring someone who's studied journalism is beneficial) so the writing of copy on your website or other content has perfect grammar, and also adheres to whatever rules the SEO expert has laid out for keywords.
Don't hesitate to place this content creator in the role of editor-in-chief so they can manage any extra content coming from other sources. Consider some other outlying skills for this role, like speed ability, and good analytical acumen.
The Web Master and Analytics Expert
These two titles should probably be separated, though they frequently work together. Having a web designer who can integrate marketing into content is a deft way to get your marketing team working in unison. The best hire here is someone who has web development and design expertise to envelop both techniques.
With analytics, you need someone who can read complex data and be able to communicate it well to you and others. This isn't easy either, which means you may have to test how well a data analyst can translate metrics to you in an easy to understand format.
One Stop Shop: Hire An Agency
It’s important to note that while you can hire all of the above individuals separately and put them on your payroll, it’s not always the most cost-effective solution. One way to get all of the benefits of the above team members under one umbrella is to hire an agency to help you with your B2B marketing efforts.
Not only will they have already gone through the vetting and hiring process of their team of experts, which will save you a massive amount of time and resources, but they can likely cover more bases than even the dream team outlined above can handle, such as ongoing website maintenance and top-to-bottom design and development.
Either way you decide to go about it, enlisting a team of experts will help you take the right approach to your B2B marketing, which can help your business grow beyond what you can expect from the old, tired ways of reaching potential customers.
