b2b messaging

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!!!

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!!!

Persistence is a critical aspect in B2B marketing

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, persistence

As a marketers we generally like to send out a message and expect to get a response. Very few times you will get some response, but in most cases it takes a long long time.

Earlier I used to hear numbers like 7 to 12 contacts before a contact will respond. So people used to talk about running multi touch campaigns between email, voicemail and cold calling. However especially after Covid struck and a lot of people were working from home, the primary means of connecting has been email or to a certain extent Linkedin.

While I don’t have statistics on how many touch points you need to have before a response is received I got some research done on different geographies for response to emails. On an average its taking more than 20 email messages to be sent (these are cold emails) on different service lines before a given service line attracted a response.

Now this is a critical aspect if you are getting into the B2B space. As I have mentioned multiple times earlier in different posts, B2B buying is not impulsive so even if the message is interesting, you may not get a response. The second aspect to be kept in mind is that identifying the right person in the hierarchy who can act on the message. Designations can be deceptive.

So you need to have marketing stamina to be in the game for the long haul. As Dean Jackson says – look at it as a 3-5 year project. Out of a bunch of 100/1000 leads at least 50% will change their incumbent vendors. You only don’t know which ones will. Tomorrow we will look at another aspect of this.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!