message

B2B messaging

differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management, Sales, segmentation

I believe marketing is Marketing irrespective of what you sell. I keep telling my team, irrespective of what we are selling, we are selling to people.

Which means the psychology of influencing remains the same, whether you sell chips, or you sell dresses, or you sell technology services.

What I have found a little different is the medium of communication or the method of getting the message across for different markets.

By far the best way and also the most effective method in B2B especially for technology companies is email.

However the challenge is that because it is virtually free, it also gets abused. Therefore companies put filters on their email systems which block any mail which even remotely looks like spam or labels the mail as Marketing Mail if its seen as being sent in bulk.

If your mail passes the spam filter and does not get labeled as a marketing mail, then you only get a fraction of a second to attract attention, when someone sees your mail on their hand-held, before they move to the next mail.

This makes the challenge exciting and frustrating.

As Dean Jackson says, you need to look at the email as a conversation you have while standing in the line at Starbucks. You cannot be in a preaching mode when you write the mail. It has to be for that one person to whom it is addressed.

In future posts I will give examples of major learnings I have had sending hundreds of thousands of emails while prospecting for technology companies.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Creating a message for your niche-Part II

differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management, Sales, segmentation

As I had mentioned yesterday, creating the messages which could resonate with your market is by far one of the toughest things.

Rest of the things like identifying the demographic, identifying the Influencers, identifying the places where people congregate are all possible through various means. You can buy data, you can buy advertising space etc.

But after that creating multiple messages for that audience to test what will stick is a major effort.

That’s the reason why people who write copy get paid so massively.

One tool I have found useful, and I tell my team to use extensively is to write the autobiography of the person whom we are targeting. What is the day in the life of that person, what are her possible challenges, what are the issues she has to face everyday.

Once you start getting into the shoes of the person, automatically a lot of questions start getting thrown up, which can be modified for the medium you are using to send the message.

Another tool which I found very useful for building the messaging is one of Perry Marshall’s Swiss Army knife techniques. He likes to identify this person as above and wants you to also think in terms of the best friends of this person, the worst enemies and so on. Using this also you can quickly generate ideas, which will then need to again be modified for the respective medium you are using to send the message.

Even today I have to keep trying various options for messaging and then once, one message clicks how to improve it. If you have a creative bent of mind and like to do a lot of research its a good job to do.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!