An effective marketing campaign needs to be carefully planned and executed in order to have meaningful results. Marketing should be aimed at retaining old customers and generating new business in different segments.

There are various components that you should factor into your B2B campaign in order to make it successful. These include:

• 
  Define your target market
  

There is a lot of market segmentation and consumer behavior research that can guide you on how to approach product development and market segmentation.

Identify which part of the market will help you achieve your business targets fastest and focus your marketing efforts to that segment.

• 
  Understand your customers
  

Understanding your buyers is a crucial element of developing a good marketing campaign. Focused group discussions are intended for exactly this purpose.

During FGDs, unique needs and wants will begin to emerge. It therefore follows that if you design your campaign to address these needs, your product or service will sell more.

Some of the questions you might ask are:

• Do the clients have an existing problem that you can solve?
• Are they able to influence buying in their place of work?
• Do they get stuck when deciding to buy?
• What would make their purchasing decision easier?

The answers to these questions will provide insight into the consumer journey and make you understand the factors that influence a decision to purchase. This will allow you to tailor your marketing campaigns with messages designed to influence every part of the purchasing journey.

• 
  Outline what you want to achieve
  

Your marketing should be designed towards generating interest in the product and increasing sales.

Work with smaller goals. If you want to move 2000 units of your product in a quarter for instance, break it down into weekly goals and review results at the end of each week. This allows you to correct course early enough. It also allows you to act on immediate customer feedback.

Do not hesitate to adjust your conversion goals to include new elements. If an element of a campaign proves irrelevant, do away with it and focus on the ones that are helping you to achieve your goals.

For instance, if email proves more useful than text messages, focus your efforts on expanding your mailing list.

• 
  Mind how you handle your content
  

After you develop your content, you should do the following:

• 
  Prioritize 
  

Run one or two key activities. This will drum in the message without overwhelming and confusing the customer.

• 
  Avoid duplications
  

Too many messages can tend to be repetitious. Combine some of them and do away with the less important ones.

• 
  Re-run your great campaigns
  

If a campaign resonates with your target clients, it is a winner for your business. Run and re-run it for as long as possible.

• 
  Open your lines of feedback
  

You should

make it possible for target customers

to reach out to you and comment about your products.

Most marketing efforts fail because enough effort was not put into getting customer feedback after sales.

Use all communication mediums available to you such as social media platforms, email and phone. You can also arrange to hold additional FGDs in order to engage in deeper discussions about product and service improvement.