Budgeting for Marketing Activities – 2

B2B, budget, Marketing, Marketing Stamina

In yesterday’s post I showcased a quick and dirty method to identify your budget for doing marketing activities. Once you have identified with your rough calculation the amount of marketing budget you need to ask for and the outcome you have to deliver, you now need to figure out how you will go about your campaigns

In B2B the lead time to get an order is quite large – large is a relative term – depending on the size of the deals that you are looking for. The second characteristic of the B2B market is that generally there is no impulse buying especially in the mid to large companies. The third characteristic is that there are multiple buyers involved in most B2B deals, so the inertia is larger and the decision cycle is complex.

What this means is that you have to have the marketing stamina to ensure that you are able to consistently get in front of the customer with your content so that when the need arises at the customer end, you are in front of them and they call you first.

The advantage with B2B customers is that they are what Dean Jackson would call as semi visible. Meaning you can get a list of companies for most combinations. However within the company its difficult to identify who are the people involved with what you sell and the dynamics within them. Where are the power centers that you need to be aware of.

Since it is easy to identify them, B2B customers are inundated with a whole lot of marketing material. the other challenge is that even if you know say the decision maker is a CFO, chances are that the research on a new vendor or product will be done by a junior who will be assigned the job. So you either run parallel campaigns for different levels, or you run the campaigns in such a way that the people can easily remember you and handover details to the person who is researching.

Due to this I used the term, Marketing Stamina. It takes time to build a momentum before which you can get some real enquiries.

Till next time then.

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!!!

Single Target Market – Who’s not your customer

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, Product Management, segmentation, single target market

I keep harping about the Single Target Market whenever you want to enter a new market. The Single Target Market helps you define your segmentation or niche very crisply, including the use case. Sometimes though its difficult to identify this easily because you believe your service is good for different people and you don’t want to miss any market.

When I am going no where with this discussion, I change track and ask the people, whom do you not want to do business with. So to use the analogy of the picture above you could start by eliminating the blue and orange soft toys.

So from a B2B perspective, we first identify which is the geography we would like to start with so that we immediately focus our energy on the most efficient geography, then we identify who would be the lousiest industries to work with – this could be because those industries don’t have the need or they don’t pay well or they haven’t reached the level of supporting infra for your product or service to work etc. This way we eliminate more than half of the universe that we could target.

So now we start moving forward. Out of the industries that we are left which are the top 2 in terms of spending in the area that we operate. You fish where the fish are, why make life difficult. With this you eliminate may be the remanning 30-40% of the market. What is left then is about 10-20 % of the market from where you started.

Now between these, which companies can you easily make an entry versus some extremely large companies where the hierarchies are so huge that you will never be able to make an entry. Then you would like to eliminate the companies who may not be able to afford what you have to offer.

So from the whole universe where you could market or sell your product or service you have now come down to less than 5% of the market that you started with.

From here it becomes a choice of selecting the kind of customer you want to do business with. Then you have to be relentless in your focus on these customers and have the marketing stamina for the next 2-3 years if you want to make any meaningful inroads.

This is a counter intuitive way to move forward but if we don’t narrow down our choices we will not be able to dominate the market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Force multiplier effect of Riding the Elephant

Affirmative action, life time value, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, Networking, Partners, relationships, Riding the elephant

While I keep writing about this concept, I am amazed myself by the amount of benefits that “riding the elephant” can have for you, if you nurture the elephant well. The elephant is very loyal and friendly creature if you take care of it and feed it with bananas. But if angered it also tends to go o a rampage and destroy things.

So if you nurture the elephant then while you can take 5 small steps, it can take one large one, so if you are riding it, you can cover a larger distance through the forest versus on foot. Also other wild animals won’t attack you when you riding the elephant.

Some of this is also true with hitching your bandwagon with a large partner (like an OEM) your market reach expands at an amazing speed. These large companies have massive growth agendas so they have big plans to execute and go out in the market. Once they start trusting you they will also take you along with them. You will need to do networking within these companies. Being large it is difficult to navigate through the matrix structure, but if you are determined, and take affirmative action you will be able to find your way. It may take time, so you need to have marketing stamina to last in the market.

As a small company you may not have the bandwidth to fund that kind of a growth, but with the help of the partner you can actually get the volume of business to fund your growth.

There’s once challenge though. Since the partner wants to grow rapidly they will expect you to comply with their demands in terms of the margins you make. These situations you have to manage delicately. What can help is knowing the life time value of a customer. So you know how you will make money from the customer in the long term.

If you know how to manage relationships, this is one of the best ways to grow your business.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!