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The Ninth B2B Marketing Step

August 14, 2015 //
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In the eighth B2B marketing step we reached the summit of the 15 steps and crafted our marketing strategy. It’s downhill from here, from steps 9 through to 15. There’s still a lot of work to do, but it should feel easier. It should feel like you’re gaining speed as you move downhill, rather than breathing heavily as you climb uphill.

The ninth B2B marketing step is deciding your marketing mix. You know your strategy, so now you need to figure out the combination of which marketing elements will get you there. These are the tools of your trade.

There is potentially one blog post for each of these marketing mix elements – and perhaps we’ll revisit this area in more detail another time – but for now I’m going to list the main elements you need to consider. This list of 10 is not meant to be exhaustive or all-inclusive – there are myriad possible elements – but hopefully I’ve captured the main ones.

  • Public relations. Are you going to use an agency or do it yourself?
  • Influencers. What analysts, influencers or mavens in the space will you leverage?
  • Traditional advertising. Will you pay for space in TV, radio, newspapers, or publications specific to your space?
  • Events. What conferences will you attend, exhibit at, speak at, to build awareness and pipeline?
  • Seminars/webinars. Will you organise your own events or perhaps partner with others to do the same?
  • Email marketing. How will you use email to create demand, nurture demand and create opportunities for your sales and partner sales teams?
  • Direct marketing. What physical items will you send to the places where your prospects work to attract them to you?
  • Digital marketing/social media. What presences, portals, platforms and plans (sorry, the urge to alliterate was irresistible) will you curate to let people find you when they’re at all stages of the buying process – especially the beginning – and / or who are currently invisible to you?
  • Online advertising. What search engine optimisation will you do, and what paid search, banner ads or sponsored opportunities will you adopt to convert browsers into prospects?
  • Collateral. What websites, micro-sites, web pages, landing pages, brochures, ebooks, white papers, data sheets, slide decks, videos, will you produce to reward your customers for their attention, in whatever stage of the buying process they are, and educate them as to how you can solve their business problems?

OK, you’ve got your blend of marketing elements you want to use. Time now to figure out the specific programme of activities that makes up your execution plan.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Eighth B2B Marketing Step

August 7, 2015 //
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The eighth B2B marketing step is the middle step of what I see as a 15-step process. You should view it as the summit of a mountain. You’ve done the hard work, climbing up the previous 7 steps, doing your research and closing by positioning your company, products or services to your chosen segment. After the eighth step you’ve got the last 7 steps down the hill, with the end in sight.

The eighth step is where you craft your strategy. At this point it’s worth revisiting step 1 of the process and confirming that you’re still trying to do what you originally set out to do, that there’s been no change. It’s by no means unusual for scope or goals to change mid-process, and it’s a good time to sense-check and adjust course if necessary.

Secondly, it’s time to set some targets for the strategy. What kind of sales over the coming reporting periods – typically the rest of the financial year, and the next financial year, split into quarters – are you looking to achieve? What is realistic and achievable? What will be deemed successful? What will be worth the investment?

Then you need to work back and establish what kind of marketing numbers do you need to hit your sales target. How many sales-qualified opportunities, how much pipeline – which I would define as the total of your qualified opportunities as anything less developed shouldn’t really be clogging up the pipe – how many leads, how much traffic, clicks and leads do you need?

Finally, what specific behaviours or tasks do you need to do by when to generate these marketing numbers? Examples might be to finish the research by a certain date, get the plan signed off by a certain date, start executing the plan by a certain date. If you don’t get these leading indicators done in time, you’ll not hit the lagging indicators, the all-important numbers.

Armed with your targets, you can now craft a high level strategy for how you will accomplish the goals or targets of the project. Strategy is all about the how; how you’re going to get there. The what – the activities that make up your strategy – come later. There are a number of buckets you need to cover.

Brand and brand awareness – how will you raise and maintain your profile as leaders in your chosen category? What public relations will you do? What analyst relations will you develop? Which other influencers in the space do you need to be known to?

Business development – how will you promote and generate demand for your product or service? What content will you create, curate and disseminate? How will you disseminate it? How will you attract people to engage in dialogue with you, in person or digitally?

Route to market – how will you go to market? Will you use mail, email, or call centres? Will you have field sales people? Will you sell direct or will you sell through partners? If you’re selling through partners, what types of partners will you use and how will those commercial relationships work?

Product – what components will be in your product or service? Will it be a solution, combining technology or engineering and professional services? How will you package the product or service?

Pricing – what will be your pricing model? What discounts or incentives will you offer? What commercial – and legal – terms and conditions will you wrap around your offering?

Customers – how will you retain your existing customers? How will you upsell your new offering to existing customers? What’s your customer advocacy strategy, ie how will you use your customers to inform your product and service development and endorse your offering to new prospects?

Competitive – how will your end-to-end offering – your marketing, product or service, delivery and after-sale services – be different from and better than the competitors? How will you protect your advantage in this area?

Bit of a long post this one, because it’s a pivotal step. When it comes to crafting strategy, there are a lot of pillars to get right so that they support the building as well as possible.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Seventh B2B Marketing Step

August 5, 2015 //
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Congratulations. You’ve climbed this far, up 6 steps of the 15-step B2B marketing process. You’ve reached seventh heaven, you’re nearly half way there.

The seventh step is positioning. This revolves around how you position your company, products and services to your chosen segment or segments. This positioning is verbal, requiring the careful crafting of the right message to resonate most strongly with your prospects, strong enough to cause them to take action.

There are probably a bunch of messages you want to cram into your positioning, and it’s sometimes really hard to discount any of them. It’s natural to want to cover all the bases.

It’s not about you, however. It’s about your prospect audience, and how they view what you say. You have to put yourself in their shoes and figure out what is most important to them. A useful structure to follow is this:

[Your product or service] helps companies solve the challenge of [whatever business challenge you’re helping them fix] by [how your solution does it], which, unlike other solutions, delivers [whatever key benefits your product or service delivers] because it [say why the prospect should see your product or service as different].

The great thing about a positioning statement is that you get to de-position the competition as well, thereby promoting the fact that you can uniquely help your prospect solve their problem or capitalise on their opportunity.

When you have to come up with a short, pithy tagline to go alongside your company, product or service then you have to extend this approach and distil your positioning into only one message of a few words. In the beginning of a relationship, companies will only remember the scantest detail on what you do, so they might as well remember the most important thing, the think that will make a difference, right?

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Sixth B2B Marketing Step

August 3, 2015 //
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In our previous post on the 15-step B2B marketing process, we saw how crucial it was to segment your addressable market.

Now you have to select and target the segment or segments you will go after first, and identify some of the companies in that target segment.

To give your marketing process or strategy the best possible chance, you want to build on the excellent analysis you’ve done so far and go after the juiciest segment, the segment that you think is your best shot. This approach is exemplified in the approach recommended for products that represent discontinuous innovation and disrupt the way that market has previously been served. The excellent Crossing the Chasm book by Geoffrey Moore talks about establishing a ‘beach head’ and owning that segment before expanding to other segments.

Regardless of your company size, my strong recommendation is that, in addition to targeting a specific segment you also shortlist and maintain a list of specific companies within that segment that you want to do business with. If getting 5 of your ‘hot list’ prospect customers on board would make a great year for your business, then draw up a list of 50-100 of them to give yourself a decent chance of hitting your goal.

When you’re marketing to the whole segment, then, your outbound efforts will also provide ‘air cover’ for you to supplement with direct, one-to-one conversations with the companies on your hot list.

So, you’ve decided which segment you’re targeting. How are you going to tell that segment about what you have and why they should pay atttention? That’s the next step in our 15-step B2B marketing process.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Fifth B2B Marketing Step

July 31, 2015 //
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In our fourth B2B marketing step we profiled our addressable market. Now we have a detailed picture of the market we’re trying to market and sell to. This is good. If we don’t understand the market and where it needs our help, then we can’t help.

The fifth B2B marketing step is segmenting our addressable market. That’s right, we’re going to further divide our market. Imagine that your market is a pizza and you’re going to slice it up. These slices are market segments, except that the process of deciding how you slice up your market is not that straightforward. It’s also crucial.

Many companies segment their market by the obvious factors like geography, size and so on. They’re perfectly valid, but they may not be the best ways to divide the market into alike groups. You could segment by attitude to risk, openness to your type of solution, cultural bias, stage of maturity, type of business problems, type of buying process for your solution; the list is as long as you want to make it. The trick is to to segment according to what is most compelling for your offering and by extension your marketing.

Imagine that you can only segment your market in 2 ways, and each way is an axis on a graph. The x axis is your first segmentation ‘knife’ , the y axis your second. Then you have to plot the companies or company types on the graph according to where they fall on each axis. Then you have to decide which cluster of companies or company types you are going to target. When you see your market visually laid out like this, according to the segmentation axes you have picked, then you understand how important it is that you segment in the right way.

Get your segmentation right and your next two steps are easier and more accurate.

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The Fourth B2B Marketing Step

July 29, 2015 //
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In the third step of our B2B marketing process we eliminated the customer groups we weren’t interest in pursuing so that we could concentrate on our addressable market. Now we need to understand more about that market.

The fourth B2B Marketing step is to profile your addressable market. Fortunately for us, we might have done some of this work already when we researched the whole market in our second step.

Now comes more homework. You need to find out and record the important things about the addressable market that can help you shape your offering to it. Here are some of the things it would be good to know:

– the obvious stuff, like location, industry, size, how the market operates

– any legal or regulatory aspects to the market that govern how it works

– pressure and drivers on the market. What are its players trying to do and where do they feel pain?

– the typical buyers in this market. Job roles, personas, other people of influence

– the decision-making process in general. Simple or complex, short or long, few hurdles and people involved or many?

– the cultural aspects to the market. Is it a good cultural fit for you to sell to? Do you think and work similarly to it?

You can find out much of the standard stuff from publications like annual reports and resources like the web or social media, but the more esoteric information can really only be gleaned over time by networking, personal experience and asking around. The better you can profile your addressable market, the better you can segment it and decide where to go first.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Third B2B Marketing Step

July 27, 2015 //
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In our 15-step B2B Marketing process, we first covered defining what you’re trying to do, before researching your market. In the third step we start to home in on our target audience, over a series of steps.

You’re not going to be targeting the entire market; it’s too big. You should resist the urge to appear to be all things to all people. The third step, therefore, is to define your addressable market. To do this you call out not only the areas you’re going to address, but also the ones you’re not.

Areas you’re not to purse might be defined by region, vertical, size of company, size of deal, attitude to buying your products and services, and so on. Being strong and not going after business you’ve decided not to pursue is as important as is your focus on the areas you are going to pursue, and it’s important you stay true to this and don’t be tempted by stuff you know is either a poor fit or a tough sale.

For example, if you provide outsourced management services to a certain vertical, you might want to discount those companies who have an in-house manager for those services, or those companies who do not have a culture or a practice of outsourcing services, preferring to do it themselves.

Once you have stripped away the chaff from your market and eliminated the areas you’re not going to pursue, you’re left with the wheat – your addressable market. From then, it’s useful to try and calculate the size of your addressable market, so that you can start to think in realistic terms about what market share is achievable for you over the coming periods.

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The Second B2B Marketing Step

July 24, 2015 //
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In our first B2B marketing step, I discussed how you start by defining what it is you’re trying to do. Once you’ve done that, the homework starts, and lots of it.

The second stage is research. You need to research your market throughly, since you can’t successfully market to it unless you understand it. If you’re taking a focussed approach and targeting a small number of large companies, then you’ll need to find out as much as you can about those specific companies. For now, we’ll confine ourselves to researching the market.

There are many dimensions to this. Here are some to think about:

– What is the industry? Can you define it? How does it operate?

– How many players are in it? How do they group or segment?

– How big is the market? Is it growing, flat-lining or shrinking?

– What legal or regulatory pressures are on the companies in this market?

– What power does this industry have and what pressures and margins is it subject to? Michael Porter’s famous Five Forces Model is a doozy for this.

– Is this a progressive or a traditional industry? What kind of things will it respond to?

– What are companies in this market trying to do? What are their drivers?

– What is stopping them getting there without your help? What are their challenges?

– Who are the typical buyers in these companies?

– What are the buyer ‘personas’? What kind of people are they? How do they like to become aware of stuff and research problems and alternative solutions?

– Do companies typically have budgets put aside for your kind of solution in this market? What other destinations for their budgets are you competing against?

– How do these companies usually make decisions on your stuff? Are they simple and quick or complex and drawn-out?

– What other job roles influence the decision?

– What’s the competitive situation for your solution in this market? Is it well established and saturated with competition, or emerging with few players to rival you?

Phew! Thats’s a long list, and not exhaustive, but the more detailed the picture of your market, the better your marketing in the subsequent steps. A word of caution: a lot of companies don’t bother doing this step…

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The First B2B Marketing Step

July 22, 2015 //
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I recently introduced the idea of a 15-step B2B marketing process. It sounds like a lot of steps, doesn’t it? That’s because, as your grandma used to say, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, or in this case, in 15 well-considered steps.

How to start any process? Well, the best place is the beginning.

The first step is to define what it is you’re trying to do. You can only define what you’re trying to do once you’ve identified either that you have a problem that needs addressing or an opportunity that you want to take advantage of.

The more accurately you can define what you’re trying to do, the easier it is to take the next steps, and the easier to stay focused through all the steps. If your definition is vague, woolly or hedges its bets, the chances are your marketing process will not deliver what you’re looking for, because – let’s face it – you don’t actually know what you’re looking for.

A good definition has the 5 W’s in it – who, what, when, where, why. The process or strategy in the subsequent steps covers the all-important how.

 

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

B2B Marketing is a 15-Step Process

July 20, 2015 //
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Is it possible to come up with a guiding process to cover B2B marketing strategy, one that works every time and can be adapted to each situation?

I think so, which is why I’m starting a series of posts, with each post dedicated to each step in what I have defined as a 15-step process for marketing success.

Sometimes we all find ourselves asking the question: ‘OK, so can we cut through all this? Can you tell me what I need to do, in what order? Have you got a process I can follow, step-by-step?’

Hopefully this series will answer that question.

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