B2B marketing is something I see confusing a lot of marketers and advertisers…and I am not sure why, even if I have some ideas.
For many of us, we were raised in the environment where all marketing and advertising operated in the manner similar to how we might consider business to consumer marketing to act now.
Which is:
You run an ad or advertising piece with a bit of brand awareness and attention driven to the product or service, roll out a good call to action: rinse and repeat.
Impressions count!
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work in many of the more complex sales that take place in B2B marketing.
In fact, the only thing that these two methods really share in common is the need to focus on creating an emotional reaction within your buyer.
So how do we go about maximizing our B2B efforts?
Here are a few keys:
1. Understand that the value you are creating is unique:
Everything in marketing should begin with a conversation about value.
This is important in any form of marketing, but more importantly in B2B marketing because it is easy to fall into the features and benefits poor marketing effort trap.
So start out your B2B efforts by focusing heavily on the value you are creating and quantifying how working with you is going to change their business for the better.
2. Realize that you can’t spray and pray with your message:
This means that you can’t just hope that you will get enough impressions that you will be successful.
There are quite a few reasons for this.
First, you may be influencing people that have no hope of saying yes to your offering.
Second, you may not be hitting the real pain points in a business.
Third, many of these kinds of plans are expensive and have low rates of return.
So you need to actually spend time focusing your attention on a specific set of buyers or buyer profile.
Focus is essential.
3. Understand that you have a lot of tools to reach your potential buyers:
As I write this, I have been talking with a lot of sports sales executives about ways to better reach their potential buyers.
And, for them one of the big challenges is the willingness to move away from a model that has been too heavily reliant on cold calling in favor of other efforts that have a better return on investment.
The key for many B2B marketers is that you actually have a tremendous number of tools available to you, if you will only use them.
Some options that you might consider are:
- Events
- Referrals
- Speaking
- Writing
- Gifts
There are tons of books on the idea of reaching your market more effectively, one of my favorites is How to Get a Meeting With Anyone by Stu Heineke. Which talks about using “contact marketing” to reach anyone you want.