"so what?" marketing

Make sure you’re equal then make yourself different. So goes one marketing mantra which has stuck with me over the years. Make yourself different so that you can be remembered, so you stand out from the crowd, so – when it comes to that buying decision – you’re not only on the short-list, but you’re the one the rest want to equal and better. That is marketing’s job – to get you on the list and hopefully to the top of it.

Take your bucket of prospects and slice it into 3.
Slice 1 is going to do something, they will buy something eventually. How can marketing help? It can contribute to the deal by providing the case for accelerating the rate of the project and of course making sure you’re on the list.
Slice 2 might do nothing at all, just never will.
And slice 3? That’s the challenge and the fun. These are the ones that need teasing, nurturing, persuading. They may need to know they’re not alone, that they’re doing the right thing and that the benefits will out. They need to have confidence that the project is the right thing, before they even start to wonder who is the best placed vendor to help them. Help these people and you’ll be top of the pile when they do come round to making a decision.

Some might think that it’s just a matter of time for suspects and prospects to flow through the funnel. Marketing knows different.

You know your business better than anyone else. Yet you keep getting calls from agencies pushing their services, selling events, seminars and advertising, some of which can be quite tempting. It can’t do any harm, it will get your name ‘out there’ and you’ve got some money allocated to business development activities.
So, how about tackling marketing in a constructive way? You’re more likely to get a better return on any activity if you just step back and work out what fits and whether it ‘s a good idea, right now.

My first suggestion for any company embarking on any promotional activity, is to map out its universe. You can do it with a white board or a set of post-it notes and a big wall, but the aim is to draw up an image of the world according to your company and its (prospective) customers. You can then see where worlds overlap and where the gaps are…

Who are your customers, what do they read, where are they, which influencers do they look to, where do they look for information, where do these influencers look for information, – how can you get in front of them? Understanding who you need to get to and how to get to them can help you sort the wheat from the chaff. This exercise just might help you clarify which of the many promotional offers might work for you – and which might look impressive but are really just waste of your hard earned money. Oh, and don’t forget the magic words: So What?

“We’ve got to get on Twitter!”. Really? Experience of communications that work, say that the message should lead a campaign, not the medium. Once you’ve got something useful to say to a (targeted) prospective audience, then research and decide which media – and it’s usually a combination – are appropriate to spread the word. Different media do different jobs in the lifecycle of the communications. I think of Twitter as a notice board. Maybe it’s the modern day equivalent of hiring a plane to pull a banner across the skies – that’s probably as memorable as a tweet will be. It does a certain job, but there’s no point in spending hours, or even minutes, every day tweeting, if you’ve got nothing to say or what you do have to say isn’t going to hit the people you want. So, message first then media. A bit of focus saves alot of time and more importantly, gets results.

Who (the hell) are you?
Why should I care?
Why should I believe you?

Those are the three key questions going through the mind of a prospect, assuming they even register your communication at all. Multiply that by a factor of all the simultaneous communications that a prospect is subjected, relevant and irrelevant to their current interest and that’s alot for any message to cut through. Our prospect probably isn’t even conscious that he or she is questioning these things: they’re just ignoring a pop-up or a banner, deleting an email, possibly rebuffing the intrusion of an unsolicited phone call, but the key to success required meaningful answers to those three questions, even if they’re asked at a subliminal level.

So, what moves a successful communication beyond that three question defence? It’s not straightforward, that’s for sure but is a result of your mix of brand (what your company means to that prospect), messages and the media you choose to use. It’s often down to, not what you say about your business, but what your customers say. And you need to address a lifecycle of messages too – the same thing won’t be appropriate to all prospects at the same point in time, but will be more relevant when they’re at the same point in their buying lifecycle. Consider whether they’re just considering buying into your market or whether they know what they want, they just have to decide who to buy it from.

Complicated stuff and not something to answer on the back of a postcard but it can help you appreciate some of the subtleties that effective B2B marketing requires.