B2B marketing often gets tunnel vision by just focusing on its individual activities. From the demand generation pushes, whether those are email blasts, newsletters or articles, to marketing communications efforts with social media, press releases, trade show booths and more, a B2B marketing team can have many activities cooking on the fire at once.
Yet, just because a marketing team is undertaking many activities does not mean these efforts will be valuable. In fact, a lot of waste can be generated in marketing, through time, effort and output.
Messaging can lose consistency. Demand generation investments can reach-out to the wrong audiences. The differentiation may be lost in the mix of things.
B2B marketing is not about the individual activities. It is about the bigger picture, and more importantly, the overarching goals each activity and campaign is working to achieve.
The Mereo PCA Framework Ensures B2B Marketing is Valuable
Time and again at Mereo we witness talented B2B marketing teams working with valuable solutions that just are not meeting the mark. Sales pipelines are not there, up-to the extent marketing should be contributing. Sales people are not well enabled. Leadership’s goals are not being met.
While there can be many reasons for this, including a lack of a Power Profile™ or messaging vision from solution marketing, often when we dig deeper, we find the root cause to be that they are focusing on the marketing activity- and campaign-level while failing to step back and look at the greater picture.
To combat these issues, we created the Program/Campaign/Activity (PCA) Framework at Mereo. This framework allows B2B marketing teams to see what and where their activities and campaigns are contributing.
- Programs: These are the overarching themes the company is striving for. This is the leadership vision, the objectives and goals. Ideally these themes are grounded in a combination of the marketplace challenges their buyers are encountering and the differentiators their solution offers.
- Campaigns: These comprise multiple activities that align with a theme or multiple themes at once. Think thought leadership, demand generation, speaking opportunities that are package together with a greater combined meaning. For example, the pre-event, on-site event and post-event marketing activities and sales prospecting activities orchestrated into a cohesive campaign.
- Activities: Activities are the individual items within a campaign.
Campaigns and activities roll up to the programs. Campaigns are a nesting of activities, while campaigns can run across multiple programs.
PCA Framework in Action
A past Mereo client was doing well with its activities and campaigns. We will sponsor this webinar, they told us. We are running this email blitz. We are posting these white papers.
Yet, the company had not defined its overarching programs for which the activities and campaigns would be contributing. Through a series of working sessions with leadership, the programs were defined. And many of the programs have continued to guide the company’s marketing efforts going on 18 months now, with refinements made along the way when appropriate. The outcome has been a steady uplift in market awareness and a pipeline lift that has driven quarter-after-quarter growth (especially in subscription revenue – the focus for the company).
If your B2B marketing team is stuck in the activity and campaign rut, contact us to learn how to develop, implement and integrate the PCA Framework into your company.