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?

Reminder: Discover, Don’t Dictate

A tip of the B-to-B Blog hat to the folks at www.marketingexperiments.com.

Those wise folks recently published a blog post which reminded marketers to “Discover, Don’t Dictate” and it struck a chord.

The post is entitled "Customer Value: 4 Tips for Crafting Segmented Value Propositions". In a nutshell, the author reminds the b-to-b marketer to take the time to research and examine what exactly are the top appeals (or value propositions) each market segment has for a product or service. This discovery process helps fuel all marketing messaging.

What Motivates the Prospect?

It’s critical when developing marketing communications, or any business-to-business communications, to take a market-centric approach to what’s relevant, appealing to each prospect segment, and finding their pain-points.  

Before a website is written, before a direct email is created, before a product brochure is printed, it is critical to take the time to discover and truly ascertain what a product or service truly means to prospects.

All About You - or All About Your Customer?

Instead of stressing all about the product, via all that “we we” text, as described in a previous B-to-B Blog post, the focus should instead be on the tried and true “What’s in it for me” approach to marketing content. 

Those key messages, value propositions, will then have a better chance of motivating the prospect.

The “Discover, Don’t Dictate” blog post makes some great points:

•    Multiple groups/audience segments care about different aspects of a product or service – does the marketing message take this into account?
• It is of tremendous value to be consistent in conducting detective work to uncover what aspects are truly relevant and appealing.  Don’t just conduct a market research project once, then make the assumption the findings stay the same over the years.
• One of the most powerful way to discover the market perception is to survey current customers.  It’s powerful stuff to figure out what features/benefits resonate with current customers, what makes them convinced to stay with you, sign up with you, buy from you, etc.
• Another high-impact way to “discover” the market need is to survey non-customers.  Go to relevant trade shows, networking events and other appropriate gatherings to conduct an informal survey.  Have attendees heard of your product or service? How do they react to your offerings and general industry offerings?

A Powerful Reminder

As mentioned above, this topic has been covered in this blog and other places, but these reminders are always quite helpful.  

It is easy to dictate what we as marketers might assume/think motivates a prospect.  It is more compelling and effective to discover that information directly from prospects, and use that knowledge to create high-impact marketing communications.  

The Marketing Two-Step

Here’s another blog post about marketing and dancing.

Gaining Insight
One of the advantages of contract consulting is the opportunity to team with business-to-business companies in a variety of industries -- learning about each company’s challenges.  This provides valuable perspective and insight into common marketing challenges most organizations face in the marketplace. 

While most of my background is in manufacturing and technology, a significant number of projects and clients come from the professional services and non-profit/educational sector.  

Common Goals
Despite the type of business, many of the marketing issues these organizations face are the same. 

At the most fundamental, most organizations want to:

• expand market awareness.
• seek out prospects likely to buy.
• entice prospects to make a purchase decision.

In pursuit of that goal, decades of experience have revealed that the following two-step process is key, despite the company type.  Think if it as a “Marketing Two-Step”.

The Marketing Two-Step

Step 1: Who’s Your Prospect and What Do They Want?   

Most organizations have not taken the time to develop a solid understanding of who the company is trying to attract, and what motivates them.

It’s all very well and good to make assumptions about the marketplace but that approach can be quite ineffective.  The marketing two-step begins with a commitment to allocate resources to get inside the heads of prospects. Instead of designing and creating marketing campaigns, ads, lead generation programs or other marketing programs based on the internal team’s existing understanding of what they think their buyers want, the first step is to ascertain resonating messages, tone and features of campaigns that appeal to what ideal buyers want – not what we think they want. 

This can be accomplished by teaming with reputable marketing research groups, conducting market surveys or focus groups, or even surveying recent wins to determine the most compelling buying decisions of recent closed sales.

Step 2) Set Clear Goals and Targets.    

The two-step also includes a process to team with sales, finance, and other internal team members to calculate the number of leads needed to achieve revenue goals. Then here's the kicker, communicate that goal to the entire sales/marketing team. 

What’s the company’s revenue goal?  Tie that annual goal to leads and sales. How many inbound prospects turn into qualified leads?  How many qualified leads from marketing turn into sales?  What’s the average revenue from a closed sale?  An aggressive program depends on these figures. This target needs to be front and center.

Elegance Despite Difficulty

This marketing two-step sounds deceptively simple, but it is in fact extremely difficult to achieve.  (Fred Astaire sure made those routines look easy! He even makes dancing with a coat rack look elegant!) 

Like any dance choreography, this key step has to come first to “set up” the rest of the dance.

The trick is to make it part of the routine, do it as elegantly as you can, and go about the step with gusto.