Messaging – Answering the Questions of a prospect

B2B, education, education, Marketing, messaging, problem solving, Questions, segmentation, single target market

In yesterday’s post I spoke about the pain (fear of) and pleasure (gain of) and how you can use it to get your message to stick with a prospect.

I have written multiple times earlier on the idea of a Single Target Market and how you can niche a segment further based on usage. This comes in useful when you want to build your messaging.

As an example you niched your B2B market by industry, then you further niched it by revenue. Now if you niche it further based on whether you are targeting prospects who intend to buy your kind of product or service for the first time or are you targeting prospects for whom this is a replacement. Another could be a backup to the main product for insurance purposes.

Once you have chosen the usage, you can now get into the shoes of the prospect and think what could go on in their mind. If its a first time buyer – you could help that company with messaging entered around evaluating your kind of offering from an unbiased angle. On the other hand if its a replacement market that you are targeting, then you could talk of how the technology has changed and how by replacing the old technology they could get more benefits.

Based on the usage criteria, the team of people to whom you will send the message, will also change. For the replacement market in the industry, you may need to talk to the operations or maintenance folks, while if its for the first time usage you may need to talk to the project folks. Each of these folks has a different “view of life” and hence the problems that you address and the education that you have to do is different.

You need to know your end game and then work backwards such that you have a delighted customer. Its only when you delight a customer can you hope to get referrals and move further to dominate that market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Pain & Gain – the pivot for messaging

B2B, Fear, Human Brain, Marketing, messaging

Its general human psychology that people avoid pain (fear of) and go for the pleasure / gain. People remember the pain forever or almost forever while they discount the gain. You lose a dollar and your brain will remind you about it for a longtime, but if you earned / won 10 dollars, your brain will discount it by saying it was luck.

This is the same logic why people don’t have a Vitamin C tablet which costs a few cents everyday as a preventive measure but go out and spend thousands of dollars when they get hospitalised. The pain & fear makes them spend the large amounts but the idea of spending a few cents and “gain” the positive of good health.

When you do messaging – whatever kind – an advertisement, a video, a webinar or individual sales – you have to keep these two emotions and their relative importance in the brain , in mind, if you want to get your message to stick to your audience. So while the negative or the message of pain will get more attention, you put too much of negative and it becomes dreary.

In every audience there will be people who are reactive since they are in pain and get your message immediately. On the other end of the spectrum there are people who are proactive and want to ensure that they take care of things before anything can go wrong, they plan in advance. Then there’s a large section of the audience which is sitting in between these two ends. The challenge of your messaging is to take this mass of people to either side of the spectrum so that they buy what you are selling.

Generally its easiest to sell to a person who is in pain or recognises the pain, then the set of people who are proactive. Then you should aim for the audience in-between. In case of B2B if you are selling an ERP software, then the ones whose production is completely messed up on one side, while there’s dead inventory lying on the other side, would be the ideal set of people to target first. The next set of companies to target would be the ones who are thinking in terms of growth and want to ensure that they are ahead of the curve.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Persistence is a key aspect in B2B marketing – 3

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

I have written in the last two posts about the key importance of persistence in B2B marketing.

Now the advantage of B2B is that you can generally get a database of contacts. So if you have segmented the market well and you have a clearly defined Single Target Market, then you can go and buy it from multiple sources.

What’s important are 2 aspects viz. The age of the database- how old it is and second figuring out if the designation and function is matching.

A lot of times designations can be deceptive in terms of the power equations within the organization.

Generally larger the organization, lower is the level of the people who will be entrusted with the responsibility for doing the research and identifying vendors, creating comparison sheets etc.

So not only do you identify the the key decision makers and send messages, you also need to identify the functional people who could be responsible for doing the evaluation. You will need to influence multiple people.

So your first step would be to verify the accuracy of the database because more than 50% of your success will be determined by the quality of your database. Incidentally this would be true whether you are looking at B2B or consumer markets.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Persistence is a critical aspect in B2B marketing – 2

B2B, Customers, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, persistence, Triggers

In yesterday’s post I had mentioned Dean Jackson’s philosophy on 100/1000 leads – where 50% of them will change the incumbent in the next 3 years. The only challenge is that we don’t know which ones will. Its a game of patience int he B2B space.

Changing an incumbent need not be the exact category of what you sell. The “incumbent” in the B2B space is about how the customer presently gets the job done.

If presently someone licks a stamp on their tongue before sticking it on the envelope, then this is the incumbent , if someone is trying to sell a franking machine. Now until the person whose tongue is used to lick the stamp quits for a better job ( a trigger) or someone in the company realises that keeping this person only for the “licking” is an expensive option (another trigger) your messages for the franking product or services will not work.

However whenever a trigger takes place with respect to the incumbent, if you are present in front of the customer, then you become the first person they will call.

So you need to have the persistence and marketing stamina , to ensure that you are in front of the stakeholders on a regular basis. In case of B2B this is one way you build your brand. The other aspect is to make your messages “instigating” the dissonance. Slowly hammering away at possible problem areas.

Tomorrow we will look at another aspect of this persistence story.

Till then.

Carpe Diem!!!