Lead generation in B2B – 2

B2B, campaign, education, ideal customer, lead generation, Marketing, media, segmentation, single target market

While events were very expensive, and emails are free, companies would still be willing to spend the money on events, if getting the right audience was assured. Reason being, you get to interact with the prospects on a one-to-one basis. Due to which you can qualify better and you maybe able to close deals faster.

One medium which comes closest to doing a more targeted prospecting, I have found these days, is LinkedIn. Since you can choose the industry, the demographics etc. It can help you reach your ideal customer profile faster. In addition because it allows you to create different segments you can do testing quite fast to identify the best single target market to address.

I haven’t worked on Facebook for doing B2B prospecting, though I am told of a lot of B2B vendors are targeting their clients via Facebook.

With any social media platform, there’s one challenge that I warn my team or customers. You don’t own the information of the prospect. Which means anytime the social media changes its policies or algorithms, you can suffer.

When you have a visiting card of a person or an email id, until the person leaves that organization, you can communicate with her whenever you need to. You are not at the mercy of a third party. This is not completely true with social media, until the prospect share the information with you.

Therefore whenever you’re using a social media to generate leads, always find a way for the prospects to share their email via opt-ins. Once they raise their hand and allow you to share information with them, you get a chance to build a relationship.

Once you have the emails and physical addresses, you can continuously keep sharing valuable information with them and educate them about various things that you can help them with.

Marketing based on education helps build trust as well.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

How to solve the Challenges of a Single Target Market -2

B2B, Marketing, niche, single target market, Testing

Continuing from yesterday’s post , you have identified what you think is a good Market to enter. Now if you have been working in the overall market with your offerings and you chose the Single Target Market based on that knowledge, then you have a good place to start.

But if you’re coming out with a new product or service and you don’t have knowledge and you have chosen the market based on “armchair ” thinking, then you can be in for a big shock if you deploy all your resources for this.

In these situations, especially in the case of B2B where there are too many moving parts, you need to be testing with limited investments.

Its happened multiple times with me, that the market-product match which I had thought of, for my single target market, didn’t materialize or it took a much longer time to materialize .

These things happen because while you may have observed a niche in the market there’s no “market” in the niche. And this could happen, as an example, because that there’s already a solution to the problem which you are solving and its much easier to use / lower cost or any other reason.

You can only figure these things out if you’re testing. After feedback from each test you tweak a little and test again, till you start getting a response. That becomes your base from which you start.

This testing need to be on the product itself, it could be on the market, it could be on the people that you’re targeting in the company. After testing you may realise that the solution does not have a significance for the specified problem, but when re-purposed, it can be a best seller.

The faster you can do the iterations, the quicker you’re to pick up the market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

How to solve the Challenges of identifying a Single Target Market

Customer Delight, Marketing, niche, single target market

Whenever I talk to my team or other business folks, one major resistance that I get from all of them is on this issue of selecting a niche or single target market.

Everyone thinks that their product or service can solve so many different problems for so many people so why limit. It basically comes out to be about whether you want to be a small fish in a large pond or a big fish in a small pond.

And it takes so much of my energy to convince them, that all I am asking them is to prioritize the market entry into different markets. Once you enter one niche, you have to dominate it, take the learnings from that and then move ahead.

People still find it difficult. So I share with them this process, which is inspired by Dean Jackson and his concepts of the Eight Profit Activators.

Step 1 : Isolate all the geographical markets you have the bandwidth to operate in. These could be national , international etc. You can put this in the columns from from B to whatever in one row of your spreadsheet

Step 2: Isolate all the use cases for each of these geographical locations that your product or service can do. You can put this in column A of your spreadsheet.

The moment they start filling (not ticking, which is a copy and paste process) this two by two matrix with their ability to serve the market and get delighted customers, they start backing off.

They may still end up with about 5 or 6 niches , in which they think they can certainly delight customers. Then I ask them to look at which would give the highest probability of profit from the same effort. Since they also realize that time is limited for everyone, after this step most automatically identify a Single Target Market.

Hope the above helps you in identifying your niche and helps you dominate the market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Budgeting for Marketing Activities – 5

Assumptions, B2B, budget, campaign, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, media, single target market

In the last 4 posts we started with nothing but a napkin and created a rough budget that you can spend every month so that you can hit your target of 10 leads.

While most people you talk to will say Maths is tough, here it’s the reverse. Making 5he budget using math is the easy part. But even if you spend $1600/- on Google or Facebook every month (to understandwhere this has come from, read the 4th part of the post on this topic) , you won’t get leads and you may end the year with no orders but $25000/- gone.

The reason for that , whether you’re using LinkedIn or Google or print ads, these are all only media at the end of the day. Someone has to respond to your ads. If no one responds to the ads then you don’t get the leads.

So you have to test for two things here – if the media is right and if the message is right. My assumption is that you have defined your single target market earlier. If not, then that will be the first step.

Not everyone is comfortable, or using the same media. Some people maybe more comfortable with LinkedIn and not okay with Facebook. In some cases the media you are wanting to use, may not have the ability to target the people who are in your Single Target Market.

Next you have to test your ads to see what gets people to click or respond to an advertisement. You have to change them until you start seeing a response. Then you need to make changes keeping the one that’s getting you a response as the benchmark, or what is called as the “control ” in copyrighting circles.

In marketing there’s no such thing as failure, its all about experiments. So you keep testing various hypothesis till you are able to figure out the best combination of media and message for your market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!