Thinking carefully about who to target with your marketing can increase your profits by cutting down on wastage.
When developing a marketing strategy for a business or brand that sells to another business, we often fall in to the trap of focusing on the faceless corporate business in our marketing, rather than the actual people who we need to get the attention of and inspire to buy from us. We then waste a great deal of our money and time marketing and selling to, basically, the wall.
Here’s my Six of the Best Tips to Target Smarter
- Interview customers. If you already have one or more customers on your books, take them out for lunch or for a coffee and find out more about the lines of communication and decision making in their organisation.
- If you haven’t got any customers yet, pick up the phone and start calling companies that you think may consider buying your product or service. Introduce yourself, tell the person who answers the phone that you’d like to send some information on your services to that company and ask them who they think the best person would be to send it to.
- Remember the person who answers the phone when you call HQ number can often be a an important ally to you or a blocker in terms of getting the information you need – make sure you make friends with them!
It’s a good idea to start by creating your brand’s “market map”. This can start very simply and get more complex as you add information on each link in the distribution and value chain that takes your brand from manufacture to end user.
Think about how the brand will be experienced by each decision maker along the line. Often, in the B2B space, brand assets are not used to the same effect as they are in consumer marketing. Remember that you are still dealing with humans, who have feelings and needs and wants, even if you are selling engineering components or food ingredients. There may be a different ratio of features : benefits in your communications to meet the need of your audience but we still need to find ways to stand out, be remembered and make the audience feel something (good!) about our brand.
If you would like help with your targeting or marketing strategy, you can email me at paula@ronanmarketing.ie or click here to schedule a free 15 minute introductory chat.
