When marketing a B2B service, I’ve seen companies take YEARS to get to a stage where they’re in front of the RIGHT market and producing tangible growth results. That’s way too long for any serious biz owner.
So, in this vid, we’re taking you backstage with a full tour of our methodology for going to market for a B2B service.
Live within 3 months. At a world-class level.
… with marketing that creates real growth results that actually appear on your P&L.
I’m uploading the first 15 mins here, and in the comments I’ll add a link to the full video – or the article if you prefer to skim read.
The reason it often takes so long to see results:
😨 They don’t have a tried and tested methodology
🥶 That means a lot of random trial-and-error tactics
At Visionary, our methodology for going to market for a B2B service – or reinventing a current B2B offer – brings it all to life without having to reinvent the wheel.
We don’t have any “special esoteric magic”.
It’s just that we’ve been refining the system with similar companies for years now.
So, we had one of our long-time Visionary partners, Scott Lee – the Founder of legendary design firm “The Unspoken Pitch” – facilitate a conversation with our Director, Sanjay Shah to talk through the methodology.
Be ready, we’re really deep-diving today…
(also including timestamps so you can skim watch):
(0:00) How the methodology is different to what you’ve experienced
(1:30) 1 – Visionary B2B Roadmapping Process
(4:38) 2 – Client Avatar
(8:20) 3a – Strategic video production
(10:19) 3b – Website pages that power the buyer’s journey
(11:33) 3c – B2B-specialised advertising
(14:07) 4 – Best-in-class CRM configuration & monthly insight reporting
(17:10) 5 – Thought Leadership content
(17:52) 6) 4-Month “Proof Of Value”
B2B Marketing Systems need to be so much more than just a simple ad that asks a viewer to book a call.
In most cases, that style of advertising stopped working a couple of years ago now.
So in this era you need to be a lot more strategic about the way you show your cold audience content and then take them through a buyer’s journey to becoming a lead, becoming a prospect for your sales team, becoming a customer, and then even to becoming a raving fan.
And that’s not easy.
So one of the ways that we do this at Visionary is through our 4 layer Theory.
Referencing the diagram, you can see at the top layer there, that’s a cold audience who doesn’t know who you are and then they go all the way down through that buyer’s Journey to the bottom where they’re a raving fans.
So let’s go through each layer in a lot more detail.
The phenomenon of “Dark Social” is well understood and leveraged by experienced B2B marketers. Such a fancy term… But what the hell is it?:
It’s the tangible business growth results that come from running strategic content marketing campaigns, using layers of retargeting to engage the audience.
More specifically – the term “Dark Social” refers to the growth results that are NOT visible by the standard automated marketing exports or “cost per lead” reports you might be used to.
Hence the term “DARK Social”.
But “Dark Social” results are often the most impactful in the business:
Higher value deals. Easier sales cycles. Larger customer values.
Sudden record months that aren’t directly correlated with “cost per lead” or clicks.
So… in this vid I’m teaching you the concept of “Dark Social” and, more importantly, how you can measure it.
Once you are able to measure it, your marketers can start optimising towards it (instead of unconsciously optimising away from it).
That means real growth that actually shows on your P&L.
Not just lots of “leads”, clicks and followers that look good on an automated report but go nowhere.
One of the most powerful tools in your online B2B sales system is your CRM. But with so many options available, the real challenge is choosing the right one and making it work for your business.
A well-implemented CRM does more than just store data. It helps you:
– Educate your prospects with the right content
– Inspire them with timely insights
– Nurture leads at every stage of the customer lifecycle
– Align sales and marketing for consistent growth
When used strategically, your CRM becomes the central engine of your online B2B sales system, driving better engagement, higher conversions, and long-term customer success.
If you’re building a scalable sales strategy, this video will help you understand how to make the most of tools like HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, or Zoho, and why leveraging them fully is a game-changer for B2B businesses.
If you’re selling high-ticket items online, a Thankyou video is a very important part of optimising your marketing funnels.
Whenever a lead from the internet signs into one of our marketing funnels to speak to our sales team at Visionary Digital Studios, they are directed to this ‘Thankyou Video’.
The video immediately tells the lead what to expect next, and dramatically increases the likelihood that they will actually attend the sales call.
But the Thankyou Video does so much more:
– It introduces your main salesperson and positions them as an authority
– It conveys the professionalism of your business, increasing sales conversion rates
– Finally, it reduces the sales cycle by directing the audience to more content, so they can educate themselves BEFORE speaking to your sales team.
If you’re selling high-ticket items online, the “Thankyou Video” is a very important part of optimising your advertising process. See more examples here:
Most businesses are producing content. But 90%+ of them see no real-world measurable business results like revenue, lifetime value or qualified pipeline. That forces their marketers to use “marketer mental acrobatics” to justify all the activity and effort. And that results in even more confusion.
So, in this vid, we’re giving you some insights on how to think about content marketing. We cover:
🟣 Your content has to give PROFOUND levels of insight, inspiration and information that really moves the needle for the target market you serve.
🟣 Content marketing is a long-term game. So if you don’t have a real way to measure the impact your content is having on REAL business results (revenue, lifetime value, qualified pipeline), it’s a huge invisible time-suck. That’s a real opportunity cost and a compounding problem when your competitors have experienced marketing teams.
🟣 If your content is ChatGPT rubbish, or simple “tips”, you’re just adding to the ignorable noise. You’ll need to get your SMEs involved so they can give real-world advice.
🟣 High Quality content is time-consuming to create. So you must be a master-repurposer to get enough value from each piece
🟣 Most smaller B2B companies will need to use strategic ad spend to amplify the impact of their content and beat larger competitors who dominate the market with larger budgets
🟣 Everyone says they are a “thought leader”. It’s trendy. But the $$$ results produced by your content show you the truth
🟣 Look… you have to really care about the people you serve to educate them effectively. Trying to automate this way too much or getting an unskilled junior to just put “anything” up on the newsfeed is moving your business backwards. Social audiences are very skilled at picking up “content for the sake of it” and ignoring it.
Good content marketing creates measurable results like:
Customer retention improvements
Customer happiness increases
Sales effort decreases
Prospects specifically mention your content
Word of mouth increases
Lucrative partnerships appear
If you’re not experiencing it, it’s a sign your content marketing hasn’t got the right strategy or depth behind it.
Here’s a great example of a Live-Action Case Study in the B2B SaaS industry. This content is used to move the long B2B sales cycle forward. A few things to notice as you watch:
🔵 The video has been produced in a way that allows it to be split into 4 standalone content pieces. That allows 1 shoot to become a campaign full of content. It also ensures that, in an advertising campaign, the whole message gets consumed over time.
🔵 The cast comes across very authentic. That’s because we didn’t force them to read off a teleprompter. But we also didn’t put them on the spot on the shoot day. We interviewed them in advance, then prepared notes for them to refer to. That way – after the magic of our editors – they are authentic and clear on camera, but the narrative also stays on track, highly relevant for the viewer.
🔵 The storytelling is clear and specific, positioning Bricsys above the competition. When this case study is sent along with a proposal, Bricsys are clearly in the box seat.
🔵 The first 5 seconds is the most important part of the video. Notice how we go straight into describing the situation, which the right audience can relate to. So many case studies lose a shocking proportion of the audience by doing an introduction at the start: “I’m X, I work for X, we do X, my role is X” – all messages that have no relevance for the audience.
🔵 Also notice that great set design, lighting and creative direction ensures that each cast member is “glowing” on screen – confident, clear and credible.
See plenty more examples here:
https://visionarydigitalstudios.com/b…
STRATEGIC B2B SOCIAL CONTENT
Next B2B social media.
So the B2B sales cycle, it’s often three or more months, sometimes even years, and there’s a lot of different stakeholders from the prospect side in that decision making process.
So during that sales cycle, you want to make sure that every stakeholder from the prospect side is being educated by your content on their social media newsfeed.
Often a buying team is mandated to evaluate at least two other proposals, so you want to make sure that content is a lot more deep, specific, and insightful than your competitors.
For your B2B Social Media, we’ll relaunch the videos we created in Step One periodically so that your audience is seeing your people and your brand frequently.
We will launch the pages that we’ve created on your website in step four as social posts, so that your audience is regularly redirected to your website.
And for your social content, will make it really specific and really relevant by leveraging those insights in your Client Avatar.
Most B2B companies, probably your competitors, make the mistake of only really talking about themselves on their social media feed.
Yours will be the one that stands out and talks very specifically about your customer and their pain points and their desires.
Sales cycles in B2B, they’re anywhere from 3 or 12 months or more, sometimes years.
So during that process, it’s so important that your prospects are being educated by your content, by your videos, by your thought leadership.
So on that initial sales call, your sales team would have explained your products and services, and they would have explained buying options.
So when it comes to your content, during layer 3, you want to be focused on testimonials and case studies from other clients, benefits of your service and even unique features that your competitors can’t compete with.