While marketing to businesses can vary widely based on your product or service and the businesses you should target, there are some fundamentals of marketing to businesses to consider.
10 Steps for B2B Marketing Success
1) Know your best targets: Marketing starts by knowing your audience. In B2B marketing that starts with knowing what businesses are best for your product or service. Key data characteristics like industry, lines of service, office size, employee counts and annual revenues can help you narrow your focus and maximize your success.
2) Know the decision-makers and gate-keepers: Behind every business is the people that make the decisions and the gate-keepers that guard them. Marketing to businesses means reaching the decision-makers and knowing how to navigate their gate-keepers. Use Salesgenie’s Contact Directory to find decision-makers and easily add gate-keepers and new decision-makers to keep your information current.
3) Know customer needs and their purchase journey to offer targeted benefits and to focus your message on results and savings: You know the types of businesses. You know the individuals within them to target. Now it’s time to hone that message. What business needs does your product or service fix? What decisions do your customers make in their journey to buying your product or service? Focus your marketing messaging on targeted benefits that mean better results or more savings for your prospects. Use Salesgenie’s Summary tool and Tags to help segment your audience.
4) Target your messaging: Just as every business and its management is unique, so should your messaging targeting them. Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Whenever possible, use Salesgenie’s deep data on businesses to personalize and customize your marketing approach.
5) Always play offense – Acquisition Marketing: Customer churn is inevitable and oftentimes the customer journey to purchasing your product or service can run weeks, months or even years. Use Salesgenie’s cloning and neighbor functions to find similar or nearby businesses to keep your prospect list fresh and the top of your sales funnel full.
6) Always play defense – Retention Marketing: It takes a lot more effort to find a new customers, so always stay in touch with your existing customer base. You can retain your customer base and grow sales with the businesses already used to buying from you. Defend that base against the marketing efforts of your competitors. Upload your Customer Data to use Salesgenie’s marketing tools -- especially the email marketing platform -- which is available at no additional charge for emails that you provide.
7) Use a planned multi-channel approach: Because a prospect’s time and attention is divided across so many different screens and channels, use a multi-channel marketing approach to make sure your message breaks through the clutter. Plan the messaging by the channel while coordinating delivery times. A prospect that sees online advertising, then receives direct mail, followed by an email and phone call, is a prospect that will be much warmer to your marketing message than they would be just using any one of those methods alone. Salesgenie combines all of them into one, easy-to-use sales and marketing platform.
8) Five is usually the minimum: It’s an old marketing adage, but on average, a prospect or customer needs to see your marketing message at least 5 times before it starts sinking in.
9) Ask and listen: Ask for feedback on your marketing – both your messaging and approach. Listen to what customers and prospects tell you about what worked and what didn’t. You shouldn’t try to improve your marketing in a vacuum.
10) Measure and adjust: Always try to measure your marketing and use that data to adjust future marketing campaigns. This is critical for long-term success and to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of your efforts. Salesgenie’s tracking tools can help you segment and further refine your marketing efforts.