According to Marketing-Schools.org, “it’s important for B2B marketers to understand their clients’ needs before implementing any marketing or advertising tactic. In consumer marketing, an effective advertisement can be blasted out over wide channels, and a percentage of consumers will be driven to buy the product. However, since B2B marketing is so much more specialized, marketers run the risk of alienating their specific prospective candidates if they do not pay close attention to their needs before tailoring their services to those needs.”
Target your market
We have learned through our own research and experience that B2B marketing is a serious and incredibly challenging endeavor, and knowing your audience is critical to competing and closing deals.
To be masters of the craft, marketers need to arm themselves with data intelligence, not hope. Shaping a pitch or basing targeting decisions on assumptions will leave a marketer vulnerable to being trumped by a more informed competitor.
Get to know your prospects and understand what is important to them. Targeting is an important activity, and it’s important to get it right. Energy spent pursuing the wrong audience is simply wasted.
Some tips for targeting include
- Leverage your own customer database – don’t discount the data you already own, such as your holiday card mailing list
- Cater to the individuals in your target accounts who make purchasing decisions
- Recognize that you are not all things to all buyers – strategy is to find the buyers who want what you offer
Get to know your prospects
We take an account-based marketing (ABM) approach. Our clients provide a set of target accounts and target titles and we perform a database-cleansing exercise via web research and through the human touch of calling into each account.
Persona creation helps you and everyone in your company focus on your ideal audience and what matters to them. Focusing on the buyer’s persona will help you get to know your prospects.
For example, what is their role? What are their responsibilities? What keeps them up at night? What are their goals at work? And then, ultimately, how can our organization help this persona?
Understanding personas helps sales teams target their messages to this audience.
Conducting interviews into your target accounts may be beyond the scope of your marketing organization. That’s where SimplyDIRECT research surveys come in.
Prepare for B2B marketing with research surveys
Through our ABM tactics, we enhance your target marketing efforts by deploying a timely and relevant survey specifically to the people you want to talk to.
This arms your sales team with a solid understanding of their prospects’ goals, needs, interests and even more importantly, furthers their lead-generation efforts.
As the saying goes, “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” You will create trust and earn respect when you present messaging that demonstrates you understand your prospects.
SimplyDIRECT’s research survey process offers marketers the ability to connect with prospective buyers via a completely voluntary, non-intrusive opt-in methodology. During this process respecting prospects and their time is of utmost importance.
We can help you uncover account intelligence and insights that are crucial for B2B marketing.
You can learn more about deploying your own research survey by clicking here.
Lisa Vitale is the President of SimplyDIRECT and her leadership positions the company at the forefront of the direct marketing industry.