How to Think About Strategy in B2B Marketing: B2B Marketing Micro-Lesson

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far, we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more.

All right, so today we're going to talk about strategy. What strategy means in marketing can sometimes be confusing. So I'm going to break down how we define it here at exit 5. So first off, I think it's important to call out the difference between a plan and a strategy because often, you know, we'll mix up those terms or use them interchangeably. I know, I'm super guilty of it, but a plan is the overarching thing that you'll follow to get to your goal. And the strategy lives within the plan. And the plan itself usually consists of three things. And you can think about this like a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid is the goal, beneath the goal is the strategy. And beneath the strategy are the tactics. So starting back at the top, the goal is where you want to get to. So an example might be we want to increase website conversions by 20%. That's an example of a goal. The tactics, which is at the bottom of the pyramid, are the specific things that you'll do to get there. For example, we're going to improve all of our book a demo forms on the website. But the strategy is the underlying principle that guides how you'll approach the tactics. It's not what you'll do, but how you'll do it. It's a set of principles that keep a team aligned and focused. So in the example that I just used on website, the strategy might be we'll employ experts to make site upgrades for us, optimize existing content, and constantly run tests across the site. Remember the strategy. What I just mentioned informs the tactics, the things you'll do. So if a tactic that I came up with after listing out that strategy was to add a new blog post to the website every week to improve conversions, that actually wouldn't be in line with the strategy. Even though that might help us get to the goal of improving conversions, that's not in line with the strategy, because the strategy, like I just mentioned, is to improve existing content, which implies that it's not about adding new content. Whereas a tactic like, you know, improving all of the book of demo forms on a site, that would make sense because we're improving the existing site content. Or if the tactic that I came up with was for the marketing team to make a site change and analyze it every week to see if it worked, that would also be out of line, because the strategy, as I said first, was to employ experts like a freelancer consultant to do the work for us. Right. So you can see how strategy informs the tactics and how the wrong tactics actually go against the strategy. So it's important for those two things to be aligned. Now, an example of a strategy statement that we use all the time here at Exit 5 is curation, not creation. Meaning our goal is not to be the creators of great content, but to curate the best experts in the industry and give them a platform to share their point of view. So all the tactics that we come up with when planning involve us curating B2B marketing expertise and not creating it within the Exit 5 team. Or else you would just hear myself, Danielle and Dave, the only ones on the podcast. Whereas that's not the case. We bring in experts to talk about stuff. So strategy overall is the guiding principle to your plan. It guides your actions and almost acts as a guardrail in terms of what not to do. Okay, cool. I hope this helps you think about planning and strategy for 2025, if you like this, I don't know, make a post about it on LinkedIn or something. Send me a DM, let me know that you like these. Quite a few of you who've already let me know, so I'm wondering how the rest of you think as well. All right, peace out.

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