In B2B, we like to think of marketing and sales working together.

Marketing plans the route, lays the pavement, and puts up the signs, while sales drives the bus to pick up the customers.

Marketing shapes and shares the story of how your business, brand, or product brings customer value. This comes through a marketing mix of product, price, place, and promotion.

Sales is the act of prospecting, nurturing, and closing the deal.

What is the difference between marketing strategy, marketing plan, and marketing tactics?

Marketing strategy is the overarching direction a company takes to grow in one or more market segments.

Marketing plans are time-boxed portions of strategy -- usually 6-months to 2 years -- with specific targets, KPIs, budget, and each step to be executed during the time period.

Marketing campaigns are connected ideas that arise from your marketing strategy that appeal to a specific subset of customers on a particular topic or sales motion. Campaigns are scheduled with in your marketing plan.

Marketing tactics are the tasks performed to execute a marketing plan.

Marketing assets are the individual pieces of material that are the building blocks of tactics -- such as a brochure, article, or graphic.

Positioning:

Positioning is the way you choose to present your product, service, or brand to an audience. It defines who your product is for, what it does, how it helps, and the reasons to believe your offering is trustworthy.

Once you understand your own value, we then take positioning a step further to figure out 'where you play' in the market compared to others.

For example: A Toyota Corolla and a Porsche Taycan are both small sedans, yet they are for positioned for very different audiences, price points, and customer needs.

What is a Marketing Mix ?

Marketing mix are the elements that make up your marketing strategy.

It includes:

Product: what you are selling and to whom

Price: the amount of money a customer will pay to receive your product or service

Place: what channels you will sell your product

Promotion: how you are distributing them message to buy your product

Marketing helps organizations raise awareness of their brand and/or product lines through a variety of channels with the goal of converting prospects into customers.

The sales funnel is a term that is used a lot in b2b marketing. It is a way to describe where a customer maybe in a purchasing decision. It is often described as ‘ToFu’ - top of the funnel, ‘MoFu’ - middle of the funnel, and ‘BoFu’ bottom of the funnel and ready to purchase.

Lead generation is a bit of a dated term, but it means moving a potential customer through the early phases of the buying cycle to being ready to ‘hand off’ to a sales representative. You may hear it as ‘marketing qualified lead’ or ‘sales qualified lead’ and the final is ‘sales accepted opportunity.’

Demand Generation is a more modern term which takes lead gen and focuses more on educating the buyer to ‘drive demand’ for a product or service. You may see this indicated as the ‘AIDA’ model or Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action - with action being a purchase.

Content-led selling is the latest ‘trend.’ Because buyers have virtually unlimited amounts of information at their fingertips, this strategy aims to create high quality, one-of-a-kind content such as thought leadership that separates your business from competitors.

Marketing has become more nuanced as technology evolves.

Marketing has become more specialized as ‘one-size-fits-all’ skillsets are nearly impossible to master.

Think of it like going to a doctor. If you have a cold or ear infection, you can go to your local urgent care or family doctor. But, if you need brain surgery, you likely want a brain surgeon and not a podiatrist performing your operation.

Same goes for marketing. For a lot of things a generalist will do. As your marketing get more complex, you need the right expert.

Common areas of specialization are:

Brand Marketing

Performance Marketing

Product Marketing

Digital Marketing

Public Relations & Communications

Email Marketing

Marketing Analytics

Social Media Marketing

Content Marketing

Proposal Writing

and, of course, you have your graphic designers, illustrators, video experts, photographers, search engine and paid media experts, etc.