Marketing Stamina – Revisited

B2B, life time value, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence

On the 28th of October last year I had put up a post on this topic. If you are interested, you can have a look at it here .

The reason I felt a need to revisit this topic, came up because, I was analysing the average time it takes to get traction for a new product or service in the B2B market. If you are in the technology market space I would highly recommend you read the book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. It will give you a more detailed context to what I am talking.

However coming back to the B2B market – the key issue that needs to handled is corporate inertia. In most cases the people in these companies are fighting so many battles, that they don’t want to touch anything that’s not broken. Also because there’s so many approvals involved, they don’t want to risk the product / solution Not Working in their environment. Especially in case of technology solutions, most companies prefer to work with “n-1” technology because it’s stable and working. They don’t want one more fire in their hand.

The other thing which plays a role in my opinion, is that the customer wants to see your resilience. They don’t trust anyone approaching them new, for the same points as I listed above and in most cases they are already covered with an existing vendor who is providing decently good service. So until and unless the incumbent screws up some time soon, they won’t look at you.

So does it mean that you can’t get into business for the B2B segment.

You absolutely can, if you can plan for the long term. You ensure that you have enough persistence and finances to last you for a long duration. While I learnt the term marketing stamina from Dean Graziosi, I learnt the application of this idea through Dean Jackson. His thought process is like this – if you know the turnover rate of any market – say 5% – 10% of the people will change to a new vendor every year – and you have a focussed list of 1000 prospects then over the next 5 years at least 250 – 500 prospects.

Now depending on what you sell and what is the Life Time Value of a client, you will need to have the staying power to last through the 5 years with consistently reaching out to these customers. If you don’t plan for this, you will be in for a rude shock and you will do things out of desperation, which is never a good thing.

Till next time then ….build your marketing stamina before getting into a new market.

Carpe Diem!!!

What’s the JOB that you want your campaign to do

campaign, ideal customer, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, media

A few months back I had written a post on the Clayton Christensen experiment on What’s the job of a McDonald’s milkshake. That’s a very pertinent question for everything that you do in marketing. If you’d like, you can go on YouTube and search for the video, on this experiment.

Every email you make, every campaign you run, every media that you choose should have a very clearly defined job description. If you mess up over here all your decisions will be muddled and you won’t get your results.

I was discussing yesterday with a media company on the relative merits of YouTube, Instagram etc. One thing which came out during the discussion was that people choose Instagram over YouTube for running campaigns because they can generate followers faster.

Which got me thinking. Is the objective of choosing a platform only to increase followers which then led me to the base question again of what’s the job you want your video campaign or any other marketing activity to do.

Blindly creating followers should not be the job. The job in my opinion, if I was the advisor to a company would be to say – create followers of a specific kind with certain characteristics defined, which should eventually get converted leads and subsequently business.

If your campaigns on Instagram can achieve this objective, then its the right medium, if not , you need to figure out a different medium. That comes back to my favorite term, Testing. So even though all your planning suggests a given medium, based on the clearly defined job, only testing should clearly confirm it.

Let the market decide during the test about what is the right thing. Once you get your test results then go the whole hog to get business.

Most social media platforms will have a lot audience including yours. The next stage of your testing should include how you can get your ideal customer at the lowest possible price. The economics will decide your staying power . At the end of the day your marketing stamina will decide the winner in the long run.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Budgeting for Marketing Activities – 4

B2B, budget, campaign, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, media

In the last 3 posts we started with a “back of the envelope” calculations for getting a marketing budget. Then we looked at the complexity of the B2B market with not knowing who is the actual decision maker in these customers. We also spoke of having the marketing stamina to last you for a long time because generally B2B buying is not impulsive.

Now let’s look at what options you have for getting in front of the customers from an economics standpoint. In the post yesterday, I touched on a few of these points.

When selecting the media to reach out to the 1000 prospects, whether you want to use Linkedin or Google Ads or plain print pamphlets or events or banner ads, you have to figure out the economics which will generate the traffic to get you your 10 orders.

If you have been in business for a few years, you would have data on the number of leads needed to get an order. Suppose this number is 10, for keeping the simplicity in our calculations, then you are looking to generate a minimum of 100 leads.

Since we have assumed a lead time of 3 months for an order, we raise this target to 125 leads through the year or 100 leads in 9 months. Therefore if your budget is $25000/- for the year, you can happily spend $200 (25000/125) to get a lead and you have to spend this over a one year period. Which means on a per month basis you can spend about $16/- per lead or overall $1600/- per month on whatever mix of media you want to use.

Now every advertisement you create or every event you do will not be a success. So you have to also account for that process.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Budgeting for Marketing Activities – 3

B2B, budget, campaign, Marketing, Marketing Stamina

In the last 2 posts I have written about how you can estimate a rough budget and then what you need to figure out in the B2B market. In yesterday’s post I again emphasized on the concept of Marketing Stamina.

Today we will look at how you work out the economics of your marketing.

So we know we have $25000 with us, we also know that the lead time to convert an enquiry into an order could be about 3 months (longer if it’s a high value purchase). What we don’t know is that who among your prospects is going to raise their hand to ask you for your product or service.

If we start with a pack of say 1000 company names then you the inevitability principle 500 of them will change their vendor in the next 3-5 years. You only don’t know which 500 of them will and when in the next 5 years. They obviously won’t all happen in the last quarter of the 5th year also.

So we have to figure out a way to be in front of these 1000 prospects continuously. The media you choose can vary – print, PPC, LinkedIn etc. Depending on the demographic profile and the cost of reaching that profile on a regular basis.

What you have to keep in mind that your budget has to last you through the year such that you can get at the least 10 customers.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!