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How To Build Your B2B Marketing Machine

In this playbook, we’ll show you how to implement three distinct strategies that promise to bring your vision of free PR and impressive bylines to life while driving tangible marketing results in the process.

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Step 1

Lead With Your expertise

Step 2

Build Your Lead Machine

Step 3

Level Up Your Tech Stack

Step 1

Lead With Your Expertise

Building thought leadership starts with saying something interesting.

How to Do B2B Thought Leadership Right

To be an effective online thought leader, you need to:

Find Your Niche

Take a series of original, novel, and thought-provoking stances on a topic you know a lot about.

Build Momentum

Consistently publish those perspectives in the form of articles, podcasts, videos, newsletters, native social posts, and other digital media and content.

Spread The Word

Actively promote your content to trade press and national publications, as well as across your own social platforms and through focused email outreach to ensure it reaches the right audiences.

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Potential Obstacles (and Keys) to Success

What’s Next

It’s time to launch your first thought leadership campaign! Here’s what you do:

1

Identify Your Niche

Conduct in-depth market research on who you’re trying to reach and what they care about. Build a list of people you would love to read your content and find commonalities between them.

2

Pick Your Angle

Develop an original perspective by leveraging first-party data, customer surveys, or even surveys of prospects from your audience list.

3

Start Writing

Elevate an executive or Subject Matter Expert as a truth teller and must-read in your space. Craft your first piece and let the ideas flow from there.

4

Build Up Your Library

Bylines beget bylines: Build a body of work you’re proud of and leverage those pieces in pitches to more prominent publications.

Launch Your First Thought Leadership Campaing With Thunderfoot

Launch Your First Thought Leadership Campaing With Thunderfoot

Launch Your First Thought Leadership Campaing With Thunderfoot

Launch Your First Thought Leadership Campaing With Thunderfoot

Become a Client

Step 2

Build Your Lead Machine

Turn thought leadership into leads.

A library of authoritative thought leadership content is great, but it won't drive measurable ROI if it's not aligned to a full-funnel lead generation and nurture strategy. Read on for more specific details around how to engage your audience at every stage of the marketing funnel.

Awareness

Turn interviews, surveys, and data visualizations into the focal point of articles for external placement, the company blog, and content-driven ad campaigns.

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Consideration

Leverage articles, case studies, and comparison/buyer’s guides in newsletters, retargeting ads, and nurture campaigns.

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Conversion

Create persuasive sales enablement materials, personalized follow-up templates, demo videos, and pitch decks to turn qualified leads into customers.

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Awareness-Driven Tactics

1

Build the professional brands of your subject matter experts and executives via external placements.

2

Blog actively to build credibility and drive new organic search rankings.

3

Launch LinkedIn and Facebook feed ads to introduce your brand to a wider, relevant audience.

4

Leverage trade press inventory to surface branded content for readers.

5

Post regularly to your brand’s social channels.

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Consideration-Driven Tactics

1

Develop longform reports, guides, and other premium content in line with core messaging themes and guidelines.

2

Package thought leadership content in a series of newsletters that keep the your company top-of-mind for target prospects.

3

Launch targeted nurture campaigns that serve mid-funnel content to industry professionals who have previously engaged with your brand.

4

Build remarketing and lookalike audiences based on who engages with our LinkedIn and Facebook ads and visits your website.

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Conversion-Driven Tactics

1

Continually optimize conversion units, automated follow-up campaigns, and other bottom-of-funnel marketing activities.

2

Leverage retargeting and analytics capabilities to identify who is ready to buy.

3

Make direct pitches to these decision-makers via LinkedIn InMail and 1-to-1 sales follow-ups.

4

Create persuasive sales collateral to help close the deal!

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The Thought Leadership Lead Machine

When your organization commits to thought leadership, you can accomplish all of the following:

Continuously learn from what resonates and drives results

Identify high-intent audiences that convert

Leverage your leads as seed lists for lookalike audiences for future campaigns

The end result is a beautifully symbiotic relationship between your content, marketing campaigns, and internal “ideas factory”.

Build Your Lead Machine With Thunderfoot

Build Your Lead Machine With Thunderfoot

Build Your Lead Machine With Thunderfoot

Build Your Lead Machine With Thunderfoot

Become a Client

Step 3

Level Up Your Sales & Marketing Tech Stack

Your content will only engage people if you show them where to find it.

The Setup

To fully capitalize on all of the leads your new marketing machine will drive, make sure you have the tools in place to scale outreach, measure the value of your content, continuously improve results, and communicate wins to leadership. You can pursue an infinite number of paths, but a best-in-class tech stack should look something like this:

What’s Your Martech’s Job?

If you’ve set your marketing tech stack up correctly, it should accomplish the following:

Track the Life of Every Lead

The CRM tracks every single lead’s engagement across all channels (e.g. social, web, text, email) inside a convenient timeline. It’s worth noting that the time and effort needed to implement the CRM correctly and realize its full value is substantial and should be handled by someone in a specialist role.

Automate Follow-on Engagement

It’s not realistic or even good practice to manually follow up with every person who ever engages with your marketing. The right tool provides a robust enough framework to automatically reach out to every lead in a way that feels tailored and authentic.

Effectively Categorize Opportunities

Track each lead’s engagement with your content and campaigns across channels to identify those contacts who are most likely to convert into sales-qualified opportunities.

What’s Your Job?

Once you have the right systems in place and have launched your first campaigns, you’re officially off to the races! But your work is far from done; in fact, your team needs to be ready to play the sport of marketing harder than ever — day in and day out.

Act on Lead Scores

Surface leads who repeatedly engage with your content and visit your website for more targeted, 1-to-1 outreach based on the content that has interested them. Depending on the size and structure of your org, your marketing team could share a daily or weekly “hot leads” sheet with sales.

USE Your CRM as the Source of Truth

Get buy-in from your entire organization to monitor, understand, and actively engage with the company’s CRM and performance dashboards on a regular basis. Stop arguing about opinions and start analyzing data.

Commit to Continuous Improvement

By tracking your KPIs in real-time dashboards, you can get into the business of identifying trends, setting tangible goals, improving underperforming campaigns, and doubling down on what works. Develop a “marketing bible” of tests and their results to avoid constantly reinventing the wheel and paying to learn the same lesson twice.

Level Up Your Tech Stack With Thunderfoot

Level Up Your Tech Stack With Thunderfoot

Level Up Your Tech Stack With Thunderfoot

Level Up Your Tech Stack With Thunderfoot

Become a Client

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How Thunderfoot Can Help

A Proven Team with a Record of Success

We do the hard, human work required to drive results for our clients.

At Thunderfoot, we help expertise-led companies and organizations build thought leadership and launch successful marketing programs by deploying our team of digital experts and creatives to execute on the four strategies outlined in this playbook.

We’ve learned a lot from working with these brands and we’d love to talk with you about your project to see what past experience we can leverage to accomplish your goals.

UNDP
Deloitte
airbnb
Medallia
UNDP
healthline
digitas-health
solarwinds
Nasdaq
publicis-health SEI
Columbia-university

Talk With The Team

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