The best companies who could use my marketing advice

B2B, Business, Customers, ideal customer, lead generation, Marketing, Riding the elephant, single target market

I keep talking about a lot on the way you should identify the market, how you should target a segment and niche it . I talk about the challenges that come up when targeting the B2B space for a complex sale and how you can go about addressing them.

While most of whatever I talk about is overall good marketing practice, this is specially useful to people who own, run or work for companies who are less than $50 million in revenue, sell mid to high value products in the B2B space.

If you sell low dollar value items, then maybe a few things – especially about mapping different people in the organisation or structuring a value proposition or identifying the ecosystem may not completely be of value to you.

If you have already crossed the revenue of $50 million then chances are that you already are doing things and putting up systems which have helped you reach such a large turnover.

Its the companies, who are reaching about half a million dollars and want to break into the million dollar league and build processes which bring regular leads, who can benefit most from what I write. These would be my Ideal Customers.

All the concepts whether its the Single Target Market or the “Riding the Elephant” can provide immense leverage to companies who want to grow dramatically.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Focus on Single Market & Media

B2B, Focus, lead generation, Marketing, single target market

Today I was watching a video on YouTube about productising a service offering, to make it scalable. This video is an interaction between Chris Do and Greg Hickman.

I keep talking about a Single Target Market for your offering and how you need to focus all your attention to being able to dominate that market before moving into a different market. Getting all your learning whether its about the social media platform you want to use or the message you want to convey for this one focused market.

At the beginning of the video Greg talks about focusing for one year, with one offering using one media if you want to scale up. He talks about a couple of other “ones” also.

But these stuck to me, because while I only emphasize the idea of one market, this gentleman is going a step further, to also ensure your focus on the media.

I fully agree to the idea of focus to achieve your objectives. Once you have tested the media which is getting you the most traction in the Single Target Market of your choice , then you should only keep using that medium and see how you can reduce the cost, increase the traffic and increase the conversions.

If you do this with focused attention for a year, you would have created a huge “top of the funnel” to keep you busy for a long time. In case of B2B this focus from your marketing team will ensure that your sales teams have leads coming their way.

I am going to explore this idea and will keep you posted.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Lead generation in B2B – 2

B2B, campaign, education, ideal customer, lead generation, Marketing, media, segmentation, single target market

While events were very expensive, and emails are free, companies would still be willing to spend the money on events, if getting the right audience was assured. Reason being, you get to interact with the prospects on a one-to-one basis. Due to which you can qualify better and you maybe able to close deals faster.

One medium which comes closest to doing a more targeted prospecting, I have found these days, is LinkedIn. Since you can choose the industry, the demographics etc. It can help you reach your ideal customer profile faster. In addition because it allows you to create different segments you can do testing quite fast to identify the best single target market to address.

I haven’t worked on Facebook for doing B2B prospecting, though I am told of a lot of B2B vendors are targeting their clients via Facebook.

With any social media platform, there’s one challenge that I warn my team or customers. You don’t own the information of the prospect. Which means anytime the social media changes its policies or algorithms, you can suffer.

When you have a visiting card of a person or an email id, until the person leaves that organization, you can communicate with her whenever you need to. You are not at the mercy of a third party. This is not completely true with social media, until the prospect share the information with you.

Therefore whenever you’re using a social media to generate leads, always find a way for the prospects to share their email via opt-ins. Once they raise their hand and allow you to share information with them, you get a chance to build a relationship.

Once you have the emails and physical addresses, you can continuously keep sharing valuable information with them and educate them about various things that you can help them with.

Marketing based on education helps build trust as well.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

How to solve the Challenges of a Single Target Market -2

B2B, Marketing, niche, single target market, Testing

Continuing from yesterday’s post , you have identified what you think is a good Market to enter. Now if you have been working in the overall market with your offerings and you chose the Single Target Market based on that knowledge, then you have a good place to start.

But if you’re coming out with a new product or service and you don’t have knowledge and you have chosen the market based on “armchair ” thinking, then you can be in for a big shock if you deploy all your resources for this.

In these situations, especially in the case of B2B where there are too many moving parts, you need to be testing with limited investments.

Its happened multiple times with me, that the market-product match which I had thought of, for my single target market, didn’t materialize or it took a much longer time to materialize .

These things happen because while you may have observed a niche in the market there’s no “market” in the niche. And this could happen, as an example, because that there’s already a solution to the problem which you are solving and its much easier to use / lower cost or any other reason.

You can only figure these things out if you’re testing. After feedback from each test you tweak a little and test again, till you start getting a response. That becomes your base from which you start.

This testing need to be on the product itself, it could be on the market, it could be on the people that you’re targeting in the company. After testing you may realise that the solution does not have a significance for the specified problem, but when re-purposed, it can be a best seller.

The faster you can do the iterations, the quicker you’re to pick up the market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!