Strategic Marketing Steps for B2B Companies to Ensure Success in 2025

As 2024 is quickly coming to an end, reality has begun to set in. The success (or failure) of all your marketing efforts is pretty much cast in stone. While end-of-year sales will continue to play out, all your strategies and efforts are already baked in. Will you be entering 2025 on a positive note, having achieved record sales? Are you looking over your shoulder because the results you had hoped for never materialized?

We have found the last two months of every year the perfect time to reflect on the performance, analyze the results, and implement programs that will set you up for success in 2025. Every December, there are two types of people: The first group is those who take the month off to celebrate, unwind, and enjoy the festivities. They ride out the last month telling themselves that everyone slows down in December and nothing really gets done until week two of the new year.

The other group recognizes the opportunity that December presents. While everyone else is letting up on the gas and starting to coast, they put their efforts in hyper-drive to capitalize on any last-minute wins and to set themselves up for success in 2025.

Prevailing means that every second and every opportunity counts. We have found that the moves made in the last month will differentiate our clients from their competitors. We double down in December and take great pride in the fact that while others are coasting through the end of the year, we are ensuring that our clients eke out any last-minute wins and be 2025 like they were shot out of a cannon.

While every action we engage for every client is unique and market-driven, we undertake a few universal activities as part of our year-end checkup and optimization program.

Hopefully, these ideas inspire you to spend less time just staring at the crackling fire and more time stoking the flames of success.

Analysis of Current Marketing KPIs

I hesitated to start out with such an obvious suggestion, not because it is not critically important but because you should be doing this in real time throughout the year. However, As 2025 approaches, it is the perfect time to reexamine all the assumptions, tests, and results that have occurred over the past 12 months. A comprehensive review can reveal not only the strengths of existing strategies but also expose weaknesses that require rectification.

Prevail Marketing tracks 400 key performance indicators (KPIs) for every client each month. While this may seem excessive, it is not. We NEVER guess what is working or what can be improved. We are often asked what metrics you track every month. The reality is that every client has a unique set of metrics that are tracked every month. However, here is an example of the most basic reporting template we use as the foundation for creating your unique reporting structure.

We have incorporated the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to find connections and insights that are often so nuanced that they can be overlooked by a human analyst.

Interviews of Stakeholders

Here is a little inside tip. It doesn't matter what the metrics say about your performance if the key stakeholders hold a different opinion. We take the time every quarter to re-engage all the client stakeholders to get their perspective on our performance. However, each December, we take the time to present a formal engagement report and get each stakeholder's view of how they perceive our program and the results we achieved. Direct feedback from clients can be invaluable in pinpointing what aspects of marketing efforts have succeeded or failed. While you will be sharing insights that the stakeholders may not have been aware of, the real value here is to listen. Learn what the client sees as the successes, learn the areas for improvement, and discuss a plan as we move forward.

Refine Your Targeted Buyer Personas and Segmentation

Prevail Marketing has one of the most comprehensive programs for creating who your targeted buyer personas should be. The program involves comprehensive interviews with internal stakeholders, industry experts, new clients, and lost opportunities. Every quarter, we interview several new clients and lost opportunities to ensure we have the most relevant information to act upon.

Every December, we take a step back and challenge all of our assumptions regarding the targeted buyer personas. Do they still represent the ideal client profile? Have they been placed in the right segmentation funnels? Has there been any changes to where they go for information, education, or entertainment? We strive to understand the personas in a more nuanced manner.

We re-interview some new clients and lost opportunities to understand if the dynamics have changed. Based on these interviews, we will update our Buyer Persona Report, Buyers' Sentiment Report, and Buyers' Journey Report. These will automatically result in changes to our segmentation and nurturing campaigns.

Align Marketing and Sales Efforts

We have previously discussed the need for marketing and sales to become co-dependent working partners. This is obviously an ongoing process where marketing and sales meet weekly to discuss the quality of the leads and how marketing implements growth enablement to help sales achieve results.

However, we renew our efforts each year to help our clients find the ideal alignment. While we always try to push the needle forward, we have found that when the year is nearing a close, often, the two sides are more open to this discussion as each needs to take accountability for what they did and what they achieved in the prior year. In the ideal situation, marketing and sales, in fact, the entire company is 100% focused only on those activities that will result in sales or client retention. We have discussed this process in a previous blog entitled From Smarketing to Growth Hacking - How Aligned Are You?

Customer Retention

It often amazes me how little of a client's marketing efforts are directed toward ensuring existing clients are happy. If your client is happy with the product or service you provide at the end of the year, they may be enticed to upgrade their program or sign a renewal contract.

We often raise this issue at the year-end review because most clients hire us for demand and lead generation and do not engage us to foster good relations with existing clients. If you don't have a proactive program to educate and retain clients, the marketing/sales successes may simply be replacing those who have already left.

Client retention is as much marketing's responsibility as that of customer support. We try to introduce the client to the practices that can reduce churn and improve customer relations. We have had a detailed discussion of these steps in the following articles:

• Customer Churn: The Struggle Is Real

• The Client Retention Lifecycle: Departmental Roles

• Client Retention - The Marketing Department's Role

• Customer Retention - Product Development and Sales Dept.

• Client Retention - Operations, Support, and C-Suite Roles

Relationship Building

Prevail Marketing strongly advocates that ALL marketing programs need to have at least one component designed to leverage the time, energy, talent, reputation, and reach that others in your industry have developed. This is often done through partner programs, referral programs, or influencer marketing.

In your year-end activities, you need to connect with all these partners to energize your relationship. This is more than a quick call to see how they are doing; it is an honest discussion as to what is working for them, what isn't, and how you can better serve them so they can deliver results for you.

Discuss ways that you can better support their efforts. If you have not yet implemented a campaign-in-a-box program, this is a good time to discuss it and ensure that these programs are delivering all that they can.

Search Engine Optimization

If you are not continuously optimizing for search engine performance, you probably are not enjoying the end-of-year numbers. Leads generated from organic traffic convert at the highest rates and are the most cost-effective source of revenue. Our clients enjoy continuous improvement in all search engine optimization (SEO) facets, including on-page, technical, and performance SEO.

If you do not have a continuous improvement program, your year-end activities must include a complete review and implementation of best practices. We encourage you to set up a program to generate backlinks and an internal linking program.

Evolve Your Demand Generation Playbook

Once you update your buyer persona reports and review the performance metrics, it is time to update your marketing playbook. To begin this process, we do a thorough review and analysis of the following:

• Content Strategy: Focus on finding more engaging content and hyper-personalization.

• Creative Differentiation: How can we use innovative formats like augmented reality and virtual reality to better connect with the targeted personas?

• Multichannel Approach: Every prospect needs 7 to 15 touchpoints before they will start to consider your brand as a solution. We examine our multichannel approach to ensure a consistent customer journey across all touchpoints.

• Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI is the future for personalization and lead generation. We examine ALL of our activities and run them through 5 different AI models to see what recommendations or improvements can be made. These are then evaluated through A/B testing protocols.

• Social Media Presence: Part of this multichannel approach is to ensure the client's social media presence is fully optimized. digital channels to reach your audience effectively.

• Email Marketing Programs: While this should not be relegated to a once-a-year review, it is critical that you analyze and improve your email marketing performance. Whether it is an internal email to generate sales, a co-branded email, a transactional email, or a nurturing campaign, all of these should be carefully scrutinized to ensure that they are fully optimized and delivering actual results.

• Marketing Mix and Strategy: From all of those, we craft a detailed marketing mix and strategy that aligns with each of the targeted buyer personas. These are not 60,000-foot concepts but actual programs that delineate each and every aspect of the future marketing campaigns for the next 6 months. To avoid having pie-in-the-sky concepts that are designed simply to impress, we share exactly the number of market-qualified leads (MQLS), sales-qualified leads (SQLS), and customers we believe should be obtained by each campaign.

  All of this information is shared with the client on a Marketing Campaign Template so they can understand what to expect in the next six months. Of course, the later months may change as we gather more analytics.

Conclusion

The end-of-year recap should never be the first time most of the items in this article are considered. Unfortunately, serious consideration only happens after the goals and projections made by sales are missed. We encourage you to adopt a continuous improvement process where ALL of the "year-end" activities are done weekly or monthly.

However, if this has not been done, remember the ONLY way 2025 will provide better results is by upping your game, improving your strategies, and implementing best practices. We encourage you to contact us if you want your 2025 results to be the envy of your industry.