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.

A national juice-drink manufacturer with whom we’ve worked is a good example. While the company puts a marketing budget against traditional consumer advertising—to create brand awareness, build image, and stimulate consumer interest within the drink’s defined demographic—the bulk of the brand’s budget is earmarked solely for marketing to supermarket chains. The reason is obvious—food retailers are 100% responsible for the manufacturer’s success, and the beverage-maker’s goal is to make selling the product as easy and as profitable for supermarket chains—his customer—as possible. In other words, even though the company is selling a consumer product, it’s essentially B2B marketing.

With this marketer, supporting a national sales staff calling on supermarket chains is a multi-tiered, year-round series of exhaustive promotion efforts designed to ensure that, regardless of the season, the beverage flies off the supermarket shelf.  Month-in and month-out, the manufacturer supplies stores nationwide with everything from colorful in-store signage, upbeat seasonal point-of-purchase displays, and popular “shelf talkers” (eye-level customer-involvement devices) to extensive couponing schemes, local “co-op” newspaper ads, and a biweekly newsletter aimed at store managers with ideas and instructions for staging their own holiday-themed local and community events tied-into the beverage. The manufacturer knows that if he provides the retailer with everything needed to move the product in an aggressive fashion, sales will be robust, and everybody wins.

But this kind of manufacturer/retailer symbiosis isn’t unique to product manufacturers—it applies to service companies too. At Master Strategy, where we specialize in B2B marketing strategy and B2B marketing communications, we have recently begun working with a creator of innovative training curricula for first-aid, first-response, and emergency-medicine professionals. While individual trainees are the ultimate audience for the company’s popular courses of instruction, the company’s actual customers are corporations, government agencies, and the thousands of accredited professional training centers nationwide who actually purchase the curricula.  As a result, this company’s sales and marketing energies are 100% directed, as they should be, toward convincing their direct customers to adopt their curricula and training courses, and then  supporting them with dedicated follow-up and customer service.

The point is a simple but sometimes forgotten one. If you’re a marketer of a product or service , whether to consumers or business-to-business, don’t dilute your marketing energies; remember that your primary responsibility is to market to your immediate customer—not your customer’s customer, or someone even further down the line.

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.

There are few things that bestow the prestige, credibility, and authority on a given subject than being the author of a book. More CEOs and other senior executives of small- and mid-sized firms that sell business-to-business are discovering this—and are authoring, editing, self-publishing, and then distributing worthwhile and genuinely informative non-fiction books in their area of business expertise.

What used to be called “vanity publishing” is now a respected and legitimate way for would-be business authors to “get their message out there”—and a powerful and impressive form of business promotion. But a B2B business exec considering writing such a book should ask him- or herself the following:

• Do I have something original and insightful to say about my business, or the industry or field I represent?

• Do I have genuinely interesting anecdotes to tell, and lessons to share, that others would enjoy reading and learning from?

• Do I have strong opinions about the future of my field that others would find compelling, controversial, or otherwise engaging?  Are the hurdles I’ve overcome typical of what others encounter?

• Is my overall message a positive and upbeat one? This is crucial if your book is going to serve as a long-form promotion piece for your company.

Self-published business books are seldom sold, but, rather, serve as substantive giveaways to clients and prospects, as holiday gifts to top customers, or as leave-behinds by sales staff. The cost is not insignificant, and includes time spent writing, the services of a ghost-writer or editor, graphic design, and printing. But the marketing cachet that authoring a book in your field provides can be worth the investment. At Master Strategy, where we specialize in B2B marketing strategies for service providers, we encourage our clients to consider a book as part of their marketing mix.

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.

To us, the best B2B marketing communication, whether it’s advertising, promotion, or brand positioning, expresses a genuine concern about a customer’s challenges, and a sincere desire to help. It’s a style of business that’s, well, the opposite of opportunistic, and rooted in the knowledge there’s no more effective way to serve a client or customer than allying yourself with him or her as a partner in problem-solving.

“Products” and “services” are essentially fixed ideas. Someone has thought through, in advance, what your problem might be and created a pre-packaged answer for it. By contrast, “solutions” involve listening, understanding, and an active partnership between vendor and customer to design and execute.

As a B2B marketer, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I really know what my customers’ or clients’ biggest, or most pressing, problems are? Have I ever even asked? Or have those challenges perhaps changed since the last time I inquired?

• Do I walk into a meeting with my customer or client with his problems in mind—or my own agenda?

• Are the products or services I offer directly responsive to, and/or clearly shaped by, my customer’s most urgent issues? Or am I imposing products or services on him that he doesn’t need?

• Most important, am I using the word “solution” in my B2B marketing efforts to describe something that, in truth, isn’t anything of the kind?

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.

On the second side are the minimalists, who favor the short-and-punchy approach: grab ‘em with a headline, keep descriptions brief and to-the-point, reduce the sell to four or five crucial bullet-points, and call it a day. Individuals in this camp view words as strictly old-school, and are of the belief that few potential customers have the attention spans anymore to wade through paragraphs of descriptive B2B marketing “sell,” even if it’s chock full of information that directly addresses their concerns.

On the third side are the champions of search engine optimization, or SEO. Search engines robots are the number one audience for these writers who are admittedly obsessed with Google. They know that Google loves words, rewards fresh content, and the more fresh content loaded with marketing keywords, the better.

The fact is that all three of these points of view are right. At Master Strategy, we know that the art of successful B2B marketing communications is in finding the balance between them. There’s a time and a place in B2B marketing communications for both long and short copy, content targeted to humans and content targeted to search engine robots—but we also know that figuring it out can be counterintuitive.  In print direct-mail, for instance, even though common sense might suggest that no business person has time anymore to read a long letter, testing repeatedly shows that longer copy “pulls” better, even with B2B marketing offers.

Similarly, though conventional wisdom in this age of the  Internet and 140-character Tweets might suggest otherwise, the most highly trafficked websites and blogs are frequently the most copy-heavy ones:  web pages laden with columns of text that put “War and Peace” to shame. People don’t read online, the old canard says—but don’t believe it.

By the same token, ours is a visual, not a verbal, age, and there’s no denying that attention spans are lessening, verbal literacy is on the decline, and an increasingly multicultural business and consumer audience almost guarantees that speakers of English as a second language will be a significant part of your potential customer base—throwing into question the effectiveness of lengthy copy and pointing up the value of both brevity and the strategic use of visuals over paragraphs of text.

The whipsaw effect here is that Google cannot “read” images for SEO purposes—so a gorgeous website home page loaded with captivating images but lacking relevant, heavy, keyword-filled text is quite likely to remain a needle in the Internet haystack vs. a search magnet for your target audiences.

Can a strategic two-line message-posting on a Facebook wall have as much B2B marketing impact as a three-page direct-mail letter? Can a 20-second YouTube viral video rival a stately 25-page PowerPoint presentation in communication value? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The key is to engage readers at the point of first contact and give them rapid flexibility to grasp the high points or drill down for details.

At Master Strategy, long experience has not only educated us about the benefits and shortcomings of different styles of copy and matching messages to media. It has given us a keen sense, as a B2B marketing agency specializing in service providers, of when—and why—longer or shorter messaging is better for a given communication challenge.

This is learning and experience we’re pleased to put to work for our clients.

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.

Many smaller and mid-sized companies mistakenly equate marketing with advertising, or the idea of “getting our name out there.” When they think of gaining new business, they jump to the ill-conceived conclusion that their highest priority should be ensuring that “everyone” knows who they are: that they need to find ways to get what are, for all practical purposes, total strangers in the marketplace to begin doing business with them.

This approach does not make sense and is not really possible, because these smaller and mid-sized companies (1) do not have the budgets to successfully mass-market; (2) often sell products/services that are not suitable for a mass market, but rather are for a highly targeted subset thereof; and (3) it is more profitable and far easier to sell more (or something additional) to an existing client than it is to reach out to the “total stranger.”

Starting at the center.

Master Strategy’s concentric-circles premise is that, initially, the founders started the company by coalescing around a core business idea—a way of bringing value to the marketplace, and defining some set of products/services that people will pay for. The founders are the constituency closest to the “center” of the business, and the ones most invested in the success of its mission. The next ring is the board; then senior management; then staff. These are the groups of people who, in sequential order, have the most at stake, and are (or should be) the strongest and best advocates for the success of the company.

Since most companies do not have massive name recognition or limitless marketing budgets, this core group of individuals must actively take the lead in promoting the company in the marketplace if it is to succeed. Continuing outward, the next ring is current customers; they are far more likely to purchase from you again, and to refer others to you as compared to non-customers; however, we’ve seen countless companies skip right over them when seeking more and new sources of business.

When expanding beyond the ring of current customers to the realm of pure prospects, depending on what a business is selling there may be other ways to analyze the market and determine logical groups of stakeholders in the subsequent target rings—versus spending money just “putting your name out there.” For example, it could be companies in a very particular industry, or according to geography, or by number of employees or locations, or other characteristics and criteria that distinguish a firm in ways that make it more likely to need what a service provider offers.

The point here is that any company has a finite amount of resources (time, money, materials) to invest in the effort to build customer relationships and gain new customers, and therefore must strategize how to spend B2B marketing resources so as to generate the highest return possible. Master Strategy’s concentric circles philosophy provides a logical model for determining which are the priority market segments and in what sequence they should be pursued.

Bottom line? A mass-marketing strategy is typically inappropriate and beyond the budget of smaller and mid-sized companies. By contrast, an effective B2B marketing strategy uses a concentric-circles approach that allows smaller firms to leverage strengths that large competitors lack—namely the ability to focus attention on individual clients and prospects and build deep relationships where it’s easiest to do so.

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.

Media proliferation. The sheer number and volume of messages being delivered to both consumers and businesses serve to make each individual message less effective.  We’re way beyond “clutter” at this point.  Breaking through the noise, even marketing to a niche B2B audience, is daunting.

Endless choice. The array of options among products and services seems an infinite and ever-expanding one, making each sale more challenging, and the notion of brand or product loyalty, even in the B2B arena, an arguably outdated one.

The triumph of technology. Technology is a no longer just a tool—today technology rules all media, and all communication.  Complex technology is, increasingly, also the foundation of most new B2B products and services—making the marketing of such products and services correspondingly complex.

 The current business climate. In an era of retrenchment, normally challenging B2B business development becomes more difficult, yet all the more urgent.

Hurdles to understanding. We are in an era in which, for the first time, we are marketing business products and services to an audience for whom the understanding of such products and services—precisely because of their complexity—cannot be assumed. More than ever, B2B marketing is all about education.

The end of need. Especially in a time of economic downturns, the notion of a successful business “needing” to buy a product or service is sometimes questionable. How do you market B2B products and services that your target audience considers not must-have but “optional”?

Boredom, sophistication, cynicism. Is there a consumer or business target who doesn’t approach marketing information with a skeptical eye?

In Master Strategy’s experience, the single most effective way to break through all these barriers is with B2B marketing communication that’s designed to engage prospects intellectually and engender a positive working relationship based on confidence and trust. Well-executed, high-engagement communication is successful precisely because it demands involvement, serves as education, and inspires buy-in. It’s what we do best.

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.

The result is that the customer walks away with a pretty fair understanding of the product or service—yet remains unconvinced that the marketer is truly engaged with his or her business and its specific hurdles and needs.

Remember that when you’re engaged in B2B marketing of services, a customer needs to be sold not merely on what you’re offering, but on doing business with you—and having confidence in your ability to grasp and address his or her circumstances. Your ad copy, presentations, and marketing materials should spend as much time acknowledging your customers’ challenges as touting your own product or service.

As a B2B marketer, never presume to “intuitively” understand your business customer’s challenges. There’s nothing more ineffective than B2B marketing messages that strike the potential customer as naive, superficially researched, or uninformed about his or her field.  At Master Strategy we’ve learned that B2B marketing strategies and B2B marketing communications must be backed up by research—ideally, by conversations, interviews, and focus groups with your customers’ customers.

We recently marketed a product targeted to a niche audience consisting of managers of residential rental-apartment complexes. We purposely created the marketing materials only after several evenings of exhaustive round-table discussions with a panel of apartment-complex managers who shared their feelings with us, and described their day-to-day, in-the-trenches challenges in detail.

This kind of footwork is the essence of truly effective, high-engagement B2B marketing communications—and avoiding what we at Master Strategy, a B2B marketing agency specializing in service providers, deride as “it’s-all-about-me” marketing.

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.

As a B2B marketing agency specializing in service providers, we at Master Strategy have observed more than once how senior staff at a B2B company can be so close to a product or service—so ego-invested in its success, so thoroughly familiar with its fine points, so well-versed in its history and development—that they are in fact too close to sell it effectively. It’s both an irony and a paradox.

And it’s precisely the situation in which the wisdom of bringing in outsourced marketing services and consulting is clearest.

Whether it’s for help in B2B branding, market positioning, creative services, or the development and execution of B2B marketing campaigns, the B2B marketing specialists at Master Strategy:

• come fresh to the product or service, freer of bias and preconceived notions about a product’s or service’s appeal;
• often can provide suggestions for whole new avenues of both messaging and target audience that in-house marketing staff wouldn’t necessarily think of;
• are aware of trends in both B2B marketing and in your particular industry or business category that you might not be aware of;
• are unshackled by the prejudices and “conventional wisdom” to which those who’ve worked in a particular industry for years often tied.
• can give you ready access to new B2B marketing tools and technologies to successfully and cost-effectively execute your B2B marketing strategies.

When launching a new B2B product or service, or re-introducing a current product to a new or larger audience, don’t risk “going it alone.”  Professional marketing consulting pays for itself a dozen times over in fresh ideas, outside-the-box ideas, and outreach to as-yet-untapped new audiences

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.

As specialists in B2B marketing of services, time and again, we see marketers actually spending too much time worrying about what the competition is doing– as compared to listening to their own customers and learning how to serve them better. As a result, the tone of their B2B marketing becomes reactive rather than proactive, and, out of insecurity about and fear of the competition, these marketers end up responding more to their competitors’ moves than to their potential customers’ needs. This is a race no one wins.

At Master Strategy, we strongly feel that:

• It’s a part of the due-diligence process to educate yourself about your competitors—but it’s unwise to give greater weight in marketing policy decisions or messaging to what the competition is doing vs. what your own customers are telling you.
• To do so is not only to give your competitor control over your marketing, it puts you on the defensive—and that’s always a bad place to be, in business or in life.
• A marketer with confidence in the genuine value or his or her product or service isn’t constantly looking over his or her shoulder, comparing the company’s offerings to the competitor’s version.
• Head-to-head comparisons can be useful, but it’s always bad form to denigrate your competitor’s product or service in marketing materials. Better to take the high road. Tell your audience why your product is good—not why the competitor’s product is bad.
• In any field, too much awareness of what the competition is doing leads to imitation and sameness, and stifles innovation. If your product or service is unique, your marketing message, tone, and visual style should be too—rather than a pale imitation of your competitor’s.

When conducting B2B market research, prioritize listening to your own customers on a regular basis. Then use competitive intelligence to balance the picture.

Try analyzing your B2B strategy options in four quadrants—representing the four possible ways to grow a company:

• In the upper left quadrant is simply to do higher volume—i.e., sell more of your core product/service line to current customers.
• The upper right quadrant represents selling the same products/services but in new markets.
• The lower left quadrant signifies selling new/additional products/services to current customers.
• And the lower right quadrant is all about selling new products/services to new markets—i.e., to launch a new entrepreneurial venture out of your current company.

When many companies do strategic planning, they start mixing and matching these ideas, or skip immediately to the entrepreneurial venture—the most expensive and riskiest strategy to pursue—before they really explore working the first three quadrants in sequence. As a result, the enterprise may grow larger, but not more profitable.

At MASTER STRATEGY, we frequently act as strategic planning facilitators for our clients. We always recommend that they consider ways to build customer relationships by cross-selling more services before exploring new services, new markets, and new customers. Based on our 20 years of experience providing outsourced marketing services to our clients, we know that the cross-selling strategy is far more economical and easy to implement in terms of the time, effort, and resources required. And the better your company becomes at cross-selling, the higher the value of every new customer you gain.