Alright, so you're not the next iPhone. You're not the next sports car. In fact, you're not even in the consumer world—you sell to other businesses, and you need B2B marketing strategies to reach them.
What do you do when your product lacks the sex appeal of a shiny new gadget or car?
Well, consider this: Just because it's B2B doesn't mean it's not sexy. In fact, some of the best B2B marketing strategies work because they target the people who think your product is attractive.
“Even a B2B product can be sexy to somebody," says Hiten Shah, co-founder of website optimizer Quick Sprout. (He's also founded multiple startups and writes a blog about entrepreneurship called Product Habits.)
At his analytics software company Kissmetrics, “we made analytics sexy to people who care about what our analytics products do."
Discover Who Finds Your B2B Product Sexy
So how do you create hot B2B marketing strategies?
First, figure out who you're selling to, says marketing consultant Kate Talbot.
—Hiten Shah, co-founder, Quick Sprout
“Know your decision makers," Talbot says. "Explain why your tool will help their bottom line. If you're in-house at the potential customer's company, you are getting pitched all the time on B2B tools. There's constant noise, so you really need to stand out."
Talbot once worked on a product that was a “software-defined perimeter solution in the cybersecurity market."
But Talbot eventually nailed who she was supposed to sell the product to. In this case, the target customer was the CIO at a Fortune 1000 company. But she could also target all of the other executives because cybersecurity is important across multiple departments within a large company.
Talbot found out what hashtags were trending and popular among thought leaders in the space, and developed a Twitter strategy targeting customers chosen in conjunction with the sales team.
In the end, the company won strong discoverability and engagement, earning retweets, likes and responses to emails from sales.
Deploy Targeted Content
Once you find your target customer, it's time to find effective ways to reach them. Say you're a health care consulting firm. There might be a new piece of regulation that affects HR professionals who have to handle benefits and compliance.
You could develop blog posts, articles, webinars or even newsletters that address these changes, says Brad Kostka, senior vice president at marketing firm Roop & Co. He's a fan of content marketing strategies—that is, creating helpful, useful content on a regular basis that builds rapport and friendship with the target customer.
“Be on the forefront of bringing them those ideas or solutions," Kostka says. “Make them aware of those changes, make them aware of things they should be concerned about related to some of those changes. Then you're positioning [your] firm as a thought leader and a helpful resource."
Track Your B2B Buying Cycle
Next, B2B marketing strategies must also take into account the long buying cycle of these types of products and services.
Kostka recommends using Google Analytics or other packages to track what search terms are bringing traffic to your site. This is important because the long buying cycle means prospective customers are doing a lot more research online, he says.
“What marketers have to do is be able to do is stay in front of that. Create marketing content for every kind of stage in that cycle," Kostka says.
In developing your B2B marketing strategies, be sure to also keep the concepts simple.
“B2B folks tend to make things too complicated because their products tend to be seemingly complicated. The elegance of figuring out these things is not just creating the product value proposition, but making your marketing dead simple," Shah says.
You're Still Selling To People
In fact, while you want to think of your customer—say she's a chief technical officer—as someone who understands the nuts and bolts of your product, you must also think of her as as human.
“With the big B2B companies like Salesforce and IBM with Watson focusing on engaging users in a fun way, I see the shift to just selling P2P—people to people," Talbot says. "At the end of the day, even if you are a CTO or a junior analyst, we all are humans and want to laugh and be engaged with content."
You might start with social media tools like gifs, memes, funny holiday videos, even games at trade shows to capture potential customers' attention.
But as they move down your sales funnel, consider turning your focus to education. Think white papers, webinars, one-on-one calls with your sales people, awards from industry publications and publishing thought leadership pieces on LinkedIn.
“People are people. People just want to be entertained. Even though it's unsexy, that doesn't mean the content can't be sexy," Talbot says. “You want to tell a story or narrative about why a customer would benefit from your product as opposed to straight talking about the product."
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