Answer Me This: Two Questions For the B-to-B PR/Marketing Team

By design, marketing and PR teams are charged with increasing brand awareness and supporting business development efforts, while ultimately helping to ramp up sales of a company’s products or services.

These business-critical duties involve programs such as messaging, online marketing, media relations, direct marketing, creative collateral and content development, social media marketing, research and many other programs.

No matter the program, each B-to-B PR and marketing team member should have at least a basic understanding of two critical pieces of information:

• the company’s ideal prospect/ideal customer
• the unique value proposition the company delivers to the ideal customer

Question 1: Who is the Company’s Ideal Customer?

A basic understanding of a company’s ideal customer helps the PR and marketing team connect with the most optimal market segments.  The insight serves as the entire foundation of the PR, marketing and lead generation program. The exercise helps to identify the people and businesses that will benefit your organization the most. 

A range of methods help create a targeted customer profile. Techniques suggested by MarketingSherpa involve a deep dive into current customers to identify the five optimal customers, and the five “worst” customers for profiles of each to understand demographics and characteristics. Other market research efforts, from simple surveys to extremely in-depth market intelligence, provide a distinct picture of where the target market lies. Cultivating a customer mindset makes all the difference to each team member, from the team who develops and maintains the company’s website, to the staff in the booth at tradeshows.

The bottom line is that having some insight into an ideal customer profile helps the team be more effective in awareness building, lead generation and marketing.  After all, marketing programs should resonate with the prospect most likely to buy. 

Question 2: What’s the Company’s Unique Value Proposition?

The second, equally compelling question to ask each PR and marketing team member, is to clearly communicate what the company does, and the unique benefits the products/services deliver over the competition.  A value proposition speaks directly to your target audience and it tells them exactly why they should purchase your products and services.

This means every PR and marketing team member must be able to quickly articulate the concrete results a customer will get from the company’s products or services. Again, MarketingSherpa provides useful insight into the issue.  The point here is that every PR and marketing team member should have at least some insight into why the prospect should buy from the company, the specific value the product or service provides, via wording the ideal customer can easily understand.

Central to Success

It's been my experience that acquiring basic insight into these two areas proves central to the success of any organization, including nonprofits.   

Again, there are numerous resources out there, including MarketingProfs, that help discover the answers to these two questions.

For the B-to-B company, what other questions need to be explored to deliver positive business outcomes?

Content Remains King: 5 Tips to Reign Supreme

Many moons ago, the media mogul Sumner Redstone coined the phrase "content is king." 

Redstone uttered this now-famous phrase because with the proliferation of broadcasting, movies and other media outlets, he knew content was more important than distribution mechanisms. There would always exist channels of distribution (albeit in varied forms), but content was always going to be necessary.

Still True Today

Redstone's proclamation “Content is King”  was never more true than in today's online marketing world.

In business to business marketing, relevant content of value to prospects feeds Internet marketing, blog posts, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, direct marketing, public relations, and other online channels.

Proof Positive

Here’s proof that content remains king: According to Marketing Sherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report-SEO Edition, “content creation works the best, but takes the most work.”

Another data point:  A recent study by TechValidate shows content marketing is a central tactic in the modern B2B marketers’ toolkit for generating demand. 90% of respondents reported a significant slice of their marketing budget is devoted to producing content.

Tips to Reign Supreme

If effective content fuels business to business marketing, and helps with SEO, web traffic, lead generation and other key metrics, what’s the best way to consistently churn out compelling website copy, blog posts, guest blog posts, whitepapers, press releases and more?

Here are 5 tips to “reign supreme” with your marketing content:

1) Let the customer speak:    Develop marketing content that answers the question “what’s in it for the prospect?”   Avoid “we we” text, and content that talks only about the company. Keep front and center the needs, wants, and problems of prospects for content that offers specific value.  Take a close look at your products/services, discover what motivates the customer and prospect, and write about that.

Read further as to the importance of discovering what to write about, not dictating.

2) Match the content to the audience:   Folks who have just discovered your product or service likely do not want lengthy and detailed technical white papers.  They are simply looking for high-level information to orient themselves to your offering.  Be sure content addresses those folks early in the sales cycle.  Likewise, develop and offer more detailed content for those later in the cycle, who seek specifications and other details to see if your product or service is a good fit. 

It’s all about being strategic in content delivery, addressed in a previous post.

3) Recycle and repurpose:  My colleagues and I at Market Strategies and PR claim to be the “greenest marketers around” in that we recycle content in a myriad of ways. A customer case study or analyst research paper is transformed into a press release, a blog post, a Tweet, a direct marketing offer, and web copy.  Be resourceful, seek out nuggets of information and recycle it to fuel their content machine.

4) Be concise:  A recent blog post addressed this same issue. 

People don't read.  They scan. 

In the spirit of brevity, I'll keep this tip short. Remember that with marketing content, “less is more.”  And by all means, avoid buzzwords and marketing speak!

5) Tell a story:  Stories are easy to remember.  Instead of an assortment of facts, technical specs or other dry content, help your prospects gain value by telling a compelling story. A story provides a lesson. Business storytelling is no different. The trick is to take the time to create a meaningful story of value.   


(PRWeb post about generating compelling press releases puts it this way: "As content creators, we are storytellers." )


Go Forth - May Your Content Reigneth Supreme!