Our Approach
While acknowledging that there's no one-size-fits-all for any startup, there are some general patterns for what works best for B2B startups that are looking to land enterprise customers and it almost always starts with referral marketing.
Organic, paid and referral all have their place in a robust marketing strategy. With that said, our experience at Spinnio is that B2B startups almost always under invest in referral marketing, despite this strategy being the source of the majority of their highest-paying clients.
Lead Generation
Lead generation within marketing can generally be broken into three buckets
Referral
Campaigns, such as webinars, podcasts, speaking engagements, and dinner events, that are designed to drive word-of-mouth engagement among company executives and key prospects.
Paid
Campaigns, such as Google Ads, Social Ads, Video Ads, and Email Marketing, where you target specific keywords, contacts, or companies. Organic marketing involves leveraging strategies like SEO, content creation, and social media engagement to attract your audience naturally, without paid ads.
Earned (SEO)
Campaigns, such as SEO, Social Media, and PR, that are generally a spray-and-pray, where you hope that by targeting your marketing content effectively, search engines and social algorithms will reward you by sending targeted leads your way.
Benefits & Disadvantages
Referral
Benefits: Mimics the way that most C-suite executives learn about new ideas, which is through their peers. The key to a good referral marketing campaign is to take organizational strengths and make sure that the organization's thought leadership provides ample opportunity to stay top-of-mind. Disadvantage: Can be time-consuming to pull off a great thought leadership campaign.
Paid
Benefits: Much more predictable with a huge industry designed to help you optimize your campaigns. Plus, as you spend more money, the paid campaign platforms have every incentive to show you how to be more profitable so you’ll spend more money. Disadvantage: Main disadvantage is that there is very little lasting impact from paid campaigns. Unlike organic campaigns, once you stop paying for leads, they’ll quickly dry up.
Organic
Benefits: Once it’s up-and-running effectively, you can often get long-term results that only increase with time. Disadvantages: The main disadvantages of an organic campaign are that they often take months, or even years, until they’re ROI positive, you’re at the mercy of big-tech algorithms and it’s extremely hard to target enterprise c-suite users with organic campaigns since these users are more likely to rely on their peers than google searches to learn about new opportunities.
Referral Marketing Strategy
The key component of most B2B referral marketing campaigns is leveraging the expertise of key executives to create content that can be shared with and by their community.
By positioning your executives as thought leaders, you not only enhance your brand’s credibility but also encourage authentic engagement within their networks. This strategic approach fosters trust and amplifies your reach, ultimately driving more referrals and generating valuable leads for your business.
