Who, exactly, is your customer?!
Are you marketing to your customer (good)—or your customer’s customer (not good)?
If you’re a B2C or B2B product or service provider, a small irony is that, in some cases, the ultimate users of your products or services aren’t, strictly speaking, your customers. In the grand scheme of things—the overall chain of distribution—your direct customers are not the ultimate end-users. It’s a smart marketer who remembers this, and keeps the needs of his or her direct customers—and only secondarily those of the eventual consumers or end-users—top-of-mind.
Creating Instant Authority: The Corporately Published Book for B2B Marketers
A small- or mid-size B2B business can demonstrate industry expertise through self-publishing.
The revolution in, and ease of, “desktop publishing” (even that phrase now sounds quaint), as well as the ready availability of print-on-demand technologies, not to mention the explosion in e-book readers and tablet computers with book-reading apps, has provided a useful new venue for B2B self-promotion: the corporately published book.
B2B Marketers: Are You Selling Products, Services…or Solutions?
“Solutions” are a business cliché for B2B marketers. But if they’re real, they’re invaluable.
Some B2B marketers spend a great many marketing dollars each year trying to laboriously convince someone, sometimes with little or no evidence, that a particular product or service will somehow enhance, enrich, or improve their life or business. In our view at Master Strategy, people distrust (and should!) such pitches. In general, people don’t like to be “sold”—and we’ve always been doubtful about whether such marketing works in the end.
Words, Words, Words: Ideal Content Length in B2B Marketing
Description is everything in presenting your product or service. But how much content is too much in an impatient, online age?
One of the most intriguing, three-way debates in B2B marketing communications these days—whether we’re talking print advertising, collateral materials, websites, social media, e-mail blasts, direct-mail, or video scripts—is copy length.
On one side of the triangle are the wordsmiths and “explainers,” who believe that more is better. They feel that products and services demand complete and involved presentation in words; that detailed descriptions of a product’s or service’s features and benefits are not only desirable but essential to B2B marketing success; and, most important, they trust that potential customers will have the patience and the interest level to read and digest long-form messaging.
B2B Marketing from the Inside Out
A “concentric circles” approach to marketing can be the smart way to go for companies that sell services business-to-business.
At Master Strategy, we’ve learned that companies that sell services business-to-business (B2B)—for example, closely-held professional services firms, financial services and technical services providers—can grow profitably by marketing from the inside out—i.e., building outward from the business’s core strengths. This concentric-circles strategy means that the commitment to new business development starts with the founders, board, senior management and staff…then expands outward to current customers…and only then is extended to new prospects and markets.
B2B Marketing: It’s different now.
Sometimes we need reminding of the ways in which trends of all kinds have made the landscape for B2B marketing different from what it once was.
You needn’t be a sociologist to have a growing awareness of the ways in which trends in media, population, and business behavior have changed in the last few decades, rendering the landscape for B2B marketers a complicated one.
In case you need a refresher, here’s a partial list of the hurdles that Master Strategy, a B2B marketing agency specializing in service providers, is helping our clients to surmount—through creative, high-engagement B2B marketing strategies; intelligent targeting and messaging; innovative internal marketing communications that enlist everyone on the in-house team; and by the intelligent use of outsourced marketing services.
It’s Not About You: B2B Marketing Strategies to Build Customer Relationships
Successful B2B marketing of a product or service involves presenting it clearly and compellingly. But even more important is showing the customer you understand his or her business as well as you do your own.
One tactical error we see marketers repeatedly make is becoming so focused on their product or service that they actually—and ironically—forget about the potential customer. That is, they understandably get so wrapped up in describing their exciting offering—its features and benefits, why it’s breakthrough, what differentiates it from other, similar products and services, etc.—that they neglect in their marketing materials to acknowledge the potential customer’s own needs and challenges.
Why Successful B2B Marketing Needs an Outsider’s Perspective
Those in your firm who supposedly know your product or service best can sometimes communicate it least. An outsider’s point of view is key to message development—and to successful B2B marketing of services in general.
It takes a rare CEO, COO, or Director of Marketing to acknowledge that he or she might not be the best person to be the chief author of messages, campaign concepts, and B2B marketing strategy in general to launch new services or promote new products B2B. But time and again when working with clients, we observe the phenomenon that those who are closest to a product or service offering can turn out to be the least skilled in communicating its value to the target audience.
Dog Eat Dog: B2B Market Research Keeps the Competition in Perspective
If you sell services business to business (B2B), of course it’s important to know what your competitors are doing in the marketplace. But an obsession with your competition can be crippling—creatively and otherwise. Tips on keeping the competition in perspective.
It’s almost impossible for B2B marketers not to spend time comparing themselves to the competition. It’s an increasingly tough marketplace out there, and launching or promoting a product or service in ignorance of what competitors are doing—and what they’re charging—is foolhardy.
Need a B2B Marketing Strategy to Grow Profitably? Think in Four Quadrants.
If your company sells services business-to-business (B2B), there are a number of marketing strategies that will help you to grow. But not all of these B2B marketing strategies will enable you to grow profitably. Although the top line of your income statement might increase, at the end of the month or year, the bottom line might actually shrink.