Marketing

Single Target Market – getting down to the person in B2B

B2B, Business, Customers, ideal customer, Marketing, single target market

When you are looking at the B2B space, you have to keep one thing in mind always – you are dealing with multiple people not one person. In the consumer space you could look at the consumer and maybe the influencers like the wife / husband or children who can influence, but generally it’s a small set of one or one plus.

In the case of B2B sales however its always by default Many Buyer Persons getting involved even though at the company level this may be your Ideal Customer Profile.. Its very very rare to identify a single person who can take all the decisions. This however may happen if the buying value is very low.

Now if there are going to encounter multiple people that you have to influence towards your product or service then your first exercise should be to identify all the people involved. So before you talk to thousand clients in the single target market – you first need to analyse just one customer and how will the process move.

Recently in one of the cases that my team was fighting we got blindsided by the procurement team of the customer. We did all the evaluation exercises , the technical team was coordinating with us and we were supposedly rated the best. But suddenly we got to know that the order was handed over to someone else.

Our challenge was that we had not analysed the hidden agendas that were getting played out. This happens a lot when you are in the B2B space. Its called getting zigged when you should have zagged.

Once you have analysed the niche and got down to the usage, you then need to start mapping who all could be involved in the decision making in ONE customer. Once you have analysed what happens with ONE, then you can replicate the process across the whole segment that you have identified. You may still get zigged, but if you have put the identification in your process, then the chances of being zigged will get reduced.

Till next time then…..to your success in the market.

Carpe Diem!!!

Consistency in your marketing

B2B, Consistency, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, single target market

I keep talking of the single target market, the messaging , the related supporting “infrastructure ” . Marketing books talk about the 4Ps and various other different ways to structure your marketing.

What gets missed out is the consistency to ensure that we follow what we plan. A lot of times, some new urgency comes up and what was planned gets put on the back burner to attend to the urgency.

One of the ways you create a brand is by ensuring that your customers see you on a consistent basis and remember you when they have to take a decision for that kind of a product. Everyone knows Coke, so why advertise. But the Coca-Cola company wants you to first think and ask for a Coke when you’re thirsty. That’s consistency.

Even in B2B , where decisions are generally not impulsive you have to ensure that you are consistently messaging your audience. You have to be patient with B2B because you don’t know when a requirement comes up and they reach out to you because you have been consistently following up.

That’s why the concept of Marketing Stamina becomes even more important. You have to plan with a 3 year window and keep focused to ensure that you are always “in the game”

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Zeigarnik effect – Mystery books

Human Brain, Marketing, Worry

Are you enthralled with mystery books. I have been reading them ever since I can remember , initially it was Enid Blyton, then Hercule Point, then Allistar Macllean. Till now I if I get to read a mystery thriller – I just can’t keep the book down till I have finished it. Same is the case with movies or web series which are mystery oriented. If I identify a good series then I will finish all the episodes in one sitting.

I have written about the Zeigarnik effect earlier also. I will not go into the details about this here. However if you are interested, there are more than 500 articles that you can search giving details about this Lithuanian lady and her research. Like any scientific theory there are also people who don’t agree with this theory. I am however not interested in getting into that debate.

For me, whenever there’s an unfinished task, I have this nagging / worry feeling that I need to finish it and it keeps coming back into the foreground ever so often. For all these years I used to think its a personality trait with me alone, but then I happened to get hold of this theory and I realised I am not the only unique person who has this trait.

Today however I was reading the book Pre-Suasion, yes that’s not an error. That’s the exact name of the book by author Robert Cialdini. He had earlier written the blockbuster book Influence. If you are in marketing then you need to have this book in your easy to access reference guides.

Robert writes very exhaustively and his books are very dense with enough proof to back his theories.

While reading Pre-Suasion, Robert gives the reason why I have the tendency to read a mystery book in one go. Once again, this is not a trait unique to me, its because of the Zeigarnik effect. Our brain like to get closure on things. Till it gets closure, its in active mode to get the item closed. So until I understand how the mystery gets solved, I am not able to be at peace.

That’s the reason why the people who make multiple seasons of web series always put a hook right at the end, so that when they come out with the next season, there’s an audience waiting to watch it.

Imagine the usage of what I thought as a personality trait is also being used in the entertainment world.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Don’t blame the message…..check your market first

B2B, campaign, ideal customer, Marketing, messaging, single target market

I recently had two failures on a set of email campaigns that we ran for our B2B audience. As usual the first input I got from he sales team and their managers was “not a single response”. I was tied up in some other activities before I could analyse the issues. So last week I sat down with my team and asked them to come on Zoom so that I could see exactly what’s going on.

Whenever you talk about campaign failures – the first place that I like to check is the database (Also called the audience or in abrader term the market) in case of B2B prospects.

So if you try to sell carpet cleaning, you should be sure that the audience you are talking to has deployed carpets in their homes. Otherwise you can do the best advertising, messaging, offers but you won’t get an enquiry.

in my understanding when you have to do a post mortem of an advertising or email campaign failure, first start with the database because more than 50% of the times, that is the primary cause.

To come back to my story, I started going account by account for one campaign and realised that we were sending mails to the said designations of people, but the size of the companies was way higher than what I had mentioned in the Ideal Customer Profile. Somewhere there was a mis-communication between the manager and the database resource and we had this issue.

In the second case, the broad industry, revenue etc. were all matching. We didn’t have the break down of the sub industries. Before starting the campaigns, I had asked the research guy to give a sub-industry breakup also so that we are sure of the audience to whom we are sending. Since sales guys have their own time pressures, they decided to overrule me and the campaigns were sent out. Again “not a single response”. So during this session I decided to go to each company in the database and I asked the sales guy to show me the company details on Linkedin. Soon it was apparent that the sub-industries in which our service is not applicable were predominant in the database.

Whenever you want to analyse the failure of a campaign start with the Market/database first – you may not need to go any further after that.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!