Influencing the influencers. How stakeholder mapping drives better B2B marketing.
Is your B2B marketing strategy informed by robust stakeholder mapping? If it isn’t, you not only weaken its effectiveness, but you also risk undermining relationships with influential stakeholders – from customers to owners – who are often in a position to affect the future of the whole business. And given that, with the right approach and processes, stakeholder mapping is relatively easy, why wouldn’t you integrate it into your marketing?
Identifying stakeholders
For us, clarity always comes first. So let’s start with the basics for stakeholder mapping: who are stakeholders? It’s quite straightforward. A stakeholder is an individual, group or organisation with an interest in a company who can either affect or be affected by what the company does. Stakeholders are usually both internal and external.
Internal stakeholders’ interest in the company derives from a direct relationship, generally with a financial stake. Typically, they’re employees, owners or investors.
External stakeholders are outside of the company with no direct financial interest in its profit or loss. They usually include customers, suppliers, industry organisations, and key opinion leaders; and in some cases, governmental agencies and NGOs.
Defining stakeholder mapping
Stakeholder mapping provides a framework for uncovering and analysing a company’s stakeholder ecosystem. For B2B marketers, the point is that by understanding who your stakeholders are and how they can influence or be influenced by your marketing, you can engage and manage them more effectively to ensure their support.
The value of stakeholder mapping for B2B marketing strategies
Knowing who your key stakeholders are and what they value equips you with valuable insights to inform your strategic decision-making. You can be clearer in aligning your B2B marketing with business objectives and market demands, opening the door to gaining competitive advantage.
And by gaining a deeper understanding of the priorities and concerns of different stakeholders, you can strengthen your relationships with them. This is particularly important with regard to your most influential stakeholders, whose support can be key to the effectiveness of your marketing.
Stakeholder mapping also enables you to nurture these relationships by equipping you with the information you need to target your stakeholder communications. You can ensure that you deliver the right messages through the most appropriate channels to each stakeholder group. And you can allocate your communication resources efficiently by focusing on your high-priority stakeholders.
Further, you can uncover opportunities for strategic partnerships. Collaborating with relevant stakeholders brings co-marketing initiatives and joint ventures into play, providing new paths for driving growth.
Plus, comprehensive and incisive stakeholder mapping helps you to identify and manage both potential risks and opportunities associated with your stakeholders’ interactions. In particular, you can avoid conflicts that could hamper your marketing activities.
CBC blog link: Purpose-driven branding: show them what you stand for, not just what you sell
5 steps for successful stakeholder mapping
At CBC, we’ve found that following these 5 steps enables us to equip our clients with the stakeholder mapping they need to strengthen their B2B marketing:
Step 1 – Identification and categorisation of stakeholders
Clearly, the first step has to be to identify all your potential stakeholders – both external and internal. You need to ask yourself: who is either involved in or affected by our marketing activity? And, to make the process manageable, you need to categorise your stakeholders by clustering them into homogenous groups based on their roles, interests, influence and relationship with your business.
Step 2 – Power-Interest analysis of stakeholders
Next, you need to analyse your stakeholders’ influence, interest, needs and expectations. What do they care about? What is their level of interest in your marketing? What impact can they have?
A commonly-used framework for mapping levels of influence and interest is the Power-Interest matrix.
The Power-Interest matrix enables you to classify your stakeholders into 4 categories and prioritise your marketing efforts towards the stakeholders in each quadrant accordingly:
- High power, high interest (upper right quadrant)– likely to be key decision-makers who you need to fully engage with and manage closely
- High power, low interest (upper left quadrant) – could use influence negatively, so need to be kept satisfied
- Low power, high interest (lower right quadrant) – can often be helpful, so it’s important to keep them informed and on board
- Low power, low interest (lower left quadrant) – as stakeholders, need to be monitored, but are not a priority and require minimal management
Step 3 – Prioritise stakeholders to focus your marketing efforts
Your Power/Interest matrix makes it clear that it is the stakeholders located in the upper right ‘High power/High interest’ quadrant that you should prioritise and allocate most of your time and resources to.
However, it is equally important to go one step further and take a closer look at your most important stakeholder clusters and examine their current levels of interest and the levels you would ideally like them to have.
By doing this, you can detect potential gaps between the current and desired level of interest with each of your stakeholders, and use this insight to make informed decisions related to which marketing activities and assets that will be most effective to close the gaps.
CBC blog link: What is Account-Based Marketing?
Step 4 – Engage with your stakeholders
To focus on your priority stakeholders, you clearly need to engage with them. We recommend that you develop tailored engagement strategies for your different stakeholder clusters. This should include determining the most appropriate communication channels, messaging and frequency of contact for managing their expectations and delivering against their desires. And be ready to adjust your marketing strategy based on stakeholder feedback, as well as any changing dynamics within and across your stakeholder clusters.
Step 5 – Review and refine your stakeholder map
You should continuously monitor and regularly review your stakeholder map. Changes in your business environment and stakeholder influence/interest levels should be reflected by refining your stakeholder map, ensuring it remains relevant and effective.
Ready to strengthen your B2B marketing with stakeholder mapping?
From more informed strategic decision-making and better risk management, to customised communications that strengthen relationships and can lead to collaboration opportunities, stakeholder mapping is foundational for building robust B2B marketing strategies.
It’s not rocket science, but stakeholder mapping needs to be done right to ensure it supports your marketing effectively. If you’re new to the process, CBC can equip you with a clear path to establishing best practice, or if you’d like a professional assessment of your current stakeholder mapping effectiveness, we’d be delighted to share our expertise. Just give our Managing Partner Ralph Krøyer a call on +45 35 25 01 75 or drop him a line at rk@cbc.dk.
