LI Search filter, B2B marketing, LinkedIn Marketing,

Build your B2B audience on LinkedIn

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Here’s a case study with a difference – it’s repeatable, copy-able and also very do-able. By you.

You’re a B2B organisation and seeking an audience for your products and services. I’m assuming you are interested in content marketing as one part of your marketing strategy – you wouldn’t be reading this article if you weren’t. And if you discovered it through online search, you’ll realise the power of search engine optimisation for B2B marketing.

Either way, welcome. Let’s get started.

Find your B2B audience

I helped several clients build an opted-in email marketing audience of thousands using LinkedIn as the start point. After building an audience and communicating (two-way) with them many became paying clients.

So what’s the step by step process to getting this going?

  1. Define your ideal customer persona
  2. Find individuals within LinkedIn who meet the criteria
  3. Test your messaging by manually connecting with them
  4. Refine messaging (if needed)
  5. Find LinkedIn Groups who serve this audience
  6. Join the group(s)
  7. Once in the group, you can direct message any member of the group without being a connection (you don’t have to pay LI for in-mail).
  8. Start your prospect acquisition campaign methodology using the messaging from 2 – 4 above.
  9. Migrate your audience off LI to a platform you control as soon as possible.

LI Search filter, B2B marketing, LinkedIn Marketing,

How did this work?

For my first client we built an audience of >800 contacts, assembled an amazing ‘voice of customer’ research database and were able to validate the brand’s go to market strategy as well as identify a core group of global influencers to work with.

For my second client, we tested a range of groups, refined the audience selection criteria and worked on two core messaging texts. The voice of customer research delivered key phrases which copywriters incorporated into campaigns. During this we discovered a missing block of content currently unfulfilled by any other brand – BONZA – a key positioning decision which led to creating in-person and virtual community building on Meetup which hadn’t been in the original plan.

The third used Sales Navigator – LinkedIn’s paid sales tool – to deepen the research phase into a much more targeted set of prospect accounts. This enabled us not to use the Groups tactic described above, and to change the focus of the first filter. This worked because the brand was mature and had a very tight minimum viable audience already defined.

Messaging is key

When you’re ready to work on these tactics, understand that finding the audience is really the easy part. Getting your message noticed, replied to and acted upon is where the ‘magic’ happens.

Having a skilled B2B copywriter on your team is essential –  invite me for a scoping discussion here.

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Marketing Strategy

B2B Marketing for Beginners

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Marketing is a challenging field. When designing their marketing plan, marketers must balance the need for creativity, financial constraints, and channel selections. 

Your audience, however, will ultimately determine how successful your marketing will be. Your promos and adverts will probably go unnoticed if you are not correctly targeting your buyer persona. If you’re not marketing at all, why bother? 

But the distinction between target audiences for corporations and consumers varies the greatest. While some businesses cater to single customers, others do so for businesses and groups.

Compared to marketing to individual customers, marketing to businesses is significantly different. B2B marketing, a whole distinct approach to marketing, was created for this reason.

B2B Marketing: What Is It?

Business-to-business marketing, or B2B marketing, is exactly what it sounds like. It involves promoting your good or service to another company. However, it’s crucial to remember that even if you are providing a good or service to other companies, you are dealing with a person who runs that company. Therefore, it is appropriate to think of B2B marketing as focusing on the people who make decisions about purchases for their company.

Steps to B2B Marketing

Marketing is audience-dependent. Even though B2B and B2C marketing are different, there are differences among B2B marketing materials. 

This section will discuss numerous B2B marketing techniques you may use to target a particular business audience. Make sure you comprehend the B2B buyer’s journey before we continue. Keep in mind how each phase may influence your marketing tactics and how you put them into practice. 

You should follow a few stages while developing your B2B marketing strategies before moving on to implementation.

Conduct a Study of the Competitors

Conduct a competitive analysis to examine the market and discover what other companies are marketing to your target market. When examining competitors, keep an eye out for the following: 

  • Competitor product offers 
  • Competitor pay-per-click strategy and outcomes
  • Competitor marketing materials and social media presence 

By understanding these factors, you can identify your competitors’ SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Establish Your Brand’s Positioning First

You must be completely aware of your brand positioning to develop a successful plan. This assertion captures the who, what, when, and how of your brand identity or how consumers see your company. 

You’ll be prepared for the following phase once you create a brand positioning statement that your staff and potential customers can support. 

Determine Who Your Target Market Is

Find the people truly in need of the goods or services your business offers. You may utilize that knowledge to develop customer personas and comprehend the purchasing process, which is a helpful tool for any marketing.

Research Potential Marketing Channels

Your competition study will show you the various marketing channels your rivals successfully employ and the ones they haven’t used.

You can diversify your B2B marketing portfolio and connect with the firms you need to once the earlier steps in developing your B2B marketing strategy have been finished. Investigate channels, methods, and technologies to maximize your leads and customer funnel based on your customer segmentation and competitive analyses. 

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software demo, trial software, try before buy software, b2b marketing mix

Do you demo software?

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At first glance this may seem a somewhat naïve question – why wouldn’t you want to see how software works before buying?

If you work in B2B marketing for software brands, you will know how few people actually demo software. So is offering a demo still a valid part of the marketing mix?

This article was prompted by a survey I did which asked the question illustrated below. Did you request a demo from sales. And it made me realise that I had not done that for some time.

software demo, trial software, try before buy software, b2b marketing mix

A survey asking about demos for software

Should marketers stop doing demos?

The quick answer is… it depends.

Your customer journey determines where and how a demonstration of the functionality of the software is appropriate. And if you haven’t reviewed your customer journey recently, I recommend doing this.

Customers change – behaviours alter and marketers need to stay up to date with current trends.

What replaces a demo?

Lots of B2B Marketing collateral is designed to answer questions and showcase software features. Prospective customers may find that they get all the answers they need from your videos, or blog posts. Have you found any recent customers who bought without a demo? Go and interview them about why and how their purchase decision was made.

Listeners to the State of Demand Gen podcast will be no stranger to the concept that forcing customers into a “pipeline” whose course is determined by the brand, rather than the prospect, is a surefire killer of sales leads.

The thesis that you let the prospect push themselves along their discovery pathway at a speed that is appropriate for them, is the best way to close more business. This thesis does depend on you having a strong brand presence in the target audience’s “line of sight”. And for that to happen, your brand needs to have already been active in marketing both above-the-line and below-the-line for some time in all the channels which could be relevant to your audience.

This isn’t an impossibility to achieve within a few months but as we all know, SEO rewards incumbent brands more than newcomers and so sometimes innovative (and manual) approaches are needed to start brand building with a new audience. Contact me for a case study of brand building for a startup.

Talk to me

No, I’m not breaking the rule of letting the customer set the pace by pushing for you to get in touch with me! When you are ready you’ll reach out.

In the meantime, consider the following aspects of B2B software marketing – and if you aren’t fully confident you have got them covered, or know how to produce, manage and measure them, then maybe pick up the phone to me.

  • Brand positioning – who is this software for?
  • Why it’s different from competitors
  • Benefits of using the software
  • Type of customer who uses or needs the software
  • Answers to all the frequently asked questions
  • Examples of happy customers
  • A range of ways to get in touch with the company
  • Social media outreach to places customers hang out
  • Dark social ways to share information with your friends about the software
  • A diverse range of above the line brand building campaigns
  • A diverse range of below the line direct marketing campaigns
  • Ambassadors, influencers and happy customers who talk about using the software

And why did I find writing that list so cathartic? I’m doing a training course on B2B marketing for SMEs and this will form the core of what I’ll be teaching. Sign up for Small Business Marketing 2022 – Foundations and Best Practice if you want to join in September.

 

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Xerocon

Balancing Direct & OTL marketing

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This is a write-up of the B2B Marketing Disrupted event 31st March 2022 hosted by the New Zealand Marketing Association.

The second Marketing Disrupted featured both Account Based Marketing and Breakthrough Brands – the balance of the direct and above the line which all B2B marketers know is a true juggling act – but still within our job description!

Account Based Marketing from scratch

Andrea Clatworthy from Fujitsu UK set out a deep dive case study into how she started an ABM programme. Her honest insights into the realities of changing a longstanding business model were refreshing.

Her definition of ABM is right people, right message, right time and Fujitsu also uses the 3 Rs – Relationships, Reputation and Revenue to further refine the scope of the programme.

This is a strategic approach with sales and marketing working together to open doors and increase engagement with stakeholders in specific identified accounts, with a view to increase Relationships improve Reputation and ultimately generate Revenue.

The triangle of ABM in Fujitsu is based on a top layer of One-to-One ABM using key accounts each with an individually customised account plan. Below this is the One-to-Few layer which is a mix of new and existing accounts, clustered by similarity with modest personalisation in the marketing mix. And at the bottom of the triangle is One-to-Many with a focus on new accounts, broad programmes with light personalisation using technology to enable scale.

The first 18 months were critical to the success of Andrea’s transition – she started with the sales account plan which uses a robust 6-step process which everyone now follows. Back-up resources in a portal with how-to guides, policies and guidelines was a key part of the success. Andrea also outlined how to secure buy-in and her 12 week ABM launch plan slide is worth a careful read.

Building a meaningful brand

Deconstructing what lies behind a well-known brand gives marketers insights – seeing the process which led to the outcome can help you work out how to implement it in your own firm.

James Kyd of Xero ran through 6 traits of breakthrough brands. Each trait has a behaviour allied with it. I found this very useful because it allows you to see if your marketing activities are delivering the behaviours you desire. 

Accountants are a key audience for James, he selected them because they’re a growth driver for Xero software sign ups. His over-riding campaign plan tells stories about accountants. And these get told from the outside-in (case study videos) and also inside-out from within the accounting community (surprise gifts).  

The 6 traits are:- Build from a cult following, Commodity as a status symbol, The rise of the B-corp, Un-capitalism, Open source generosity and Remodelling the category.

A key position for Xero is to advocate on behalf of accountants – doing the things they individually cannot. An annual state of the industry research study is not only good for PR it helps accounting firms to benchmark themselves. The other big pillar of the activation is the Xerocon conference and event. James says this will be back as an in-person event this year. It will continue to celebrate the passion accountants bring to their work and to create memorable experiences for participants. These are two ways Xero connects in person with  its customers.

And isn’t it nice that a brand still does in-person events? 

 

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NZ Tech logo

NZ Tech is our new export story

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Many of you know I work with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. I’ve been doing B2B marketing digital implementation coaching projects with businesses who export.

I am delighted to find that Technology is now a sizeable export sector for the NZ economy. The razzamatazz launch was last week, but the reality is in front of me daily.

Local investment

Startups are getting funded – overseas money and home-grown angel groups are active, growing and increasing in sophistication.

early stage company, startup investing, innovation leader, NZ innovation

Both these numbers speak to the aggregate – I see the specifics in my clients. Innovation continues as firms prove the concept locally and quickly look overseas for expansion. I think lockdown and covid has accelerated this trend – many don’t wait for the full MVP  at home nowadays.

Sustainability matters alongside growth

Investors do care about the medium term future – who wants an investment to fall off because of climate change? The ‘clean, green NZ’ banner may not be as universal, but we are still incorporating those principles into the businesses which get launched from a New Zealand base. New Zealand, sustainable competitiveness, capital investment growth

 

In summary, I’m delighted that these stats are proving what I see on the ground. If you are exporting, or an overseas reader of this blog – take a look at what NZ tech firms can offer your business. You never know, we could end up working together!

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SEO copywriting, keyword check

Website copy testing for SEO

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I hired a copywriter to do the website home page – but how will I know if what they wrote WORKS?

Great question – I got this from a customer who did not hire me… but had the savvy to ask the right question. It looks nice but is the website home page copy doing its job? Bringing inbound traffic, showing up in SEO, right keywords and key phrases.

Testing web copy

After the copy has been published on your website leave it in place for a week so that the search engine spiders can crawl the site and index it fully.
Then do a test to see how you are performing.

Natural Search Copywriting

I will show you how to find out if what they wrote is showing up in natural search with the right keywords.
[Getting Google to show your website when someone searches online is a sign of GREAT copywriting.]
Go to this website, put in your URL and look at the results.  This client has 17 keywords and 0 visitor traffic. (It’s a new website so I’m not concerned about traffic volumes right now).
  1. Are these the right keywords for [your business]?
  2. Check the visitor traffic from New Zealand (it defaults to USA)
  3. What keywords are you showing up for? Do they look sort-of right?
  4. Check the search difficulty (right hand column) the lower the number the easier it is for you to compete for it

What next?

Your copywriters job is complete if the keywords match your business products and services – the type of search phrases you would expect someone to use when looking for a business like yours.

Now hand over to the marketing team – they will work out how to get website visitor numbers UP, how to start conversations with prospective customers and how to get customers to return and buy from you over and over again. [Inbound marketing; outbound marketing; loyalty repeat customer marketing; testimonials.]

Website traffic and Key word count

SEO copywriting, keyword check

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Hello sign

B2B email spam laws

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A refresher for on the rules around sending email (and SMS) to prospects.

New Zealand privacy and email marketing

With regard to the NZ Privacy Act 2017 and updated 2020.

Top level obligations

  • Be transparent. Don’t hide anything.
  • Make sure you have consent.
  • Always give people the opportunity to opt-out or unsubscribe.

Deemed consent is what most B2B marketing would be using for email marketing.

[Quote from article linked above]

However, the area of ‘deemed’ consent is still an area open to interpretation in New Zealand. What was Keith’s advice on this?

“In New Zealand, if you deem your service or product is relevant to the person whose data you’ve collected (or whose contact information is publicly available), then you have permission to send them communications as long as this is covered in your Privacy Policy.” However Keith pointed out that this is actually a requirement of the UEM Act, not the Privacy Act.

BUT you first need a strong privacy policy on your business website.

Here’s a sample NZ privacy policy (and one from Australia).

USA and Canada and GDPR (Europe)

These jurisdictions have different rules – but many of the underlying principles are similar.

Hope that’s useful for everyone.

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customer persona templates

Marketing personas lack one big thing

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Working with a client who needs to develop customer personas, I did some research and found a load of good articles on how to write a customer persona [links all at the bottom of this page].

So far so good.

but on closer reading it’s clear they are all copying each other.

Content Marketing needs quality control

As I read the articles – many by reputable brands like Buffer, Hubspot, Sprout Social – it was clear that when searching for illustrations they had all culled the same images off Google. Over and over.

The authority of the article was not in doubt. They write clearly and the instruction was good quality for beginner marketers who have never created a customer persona before.

More and more blogs and experts are recommending writing fewer articles and making them longer as well as more niche.

The medium evolves [as I shared this week about Instagram videos] and staying alert to new trends is important for B2B Marketers.

But surely brands could actually show some content images which they had created?

The articles looked “bitty” as a result as the templated personas were all laid out differently and were of varying image quality, never mind what the persona description actually was. I thought they were light in quality.

customer persona templates

templated personas copied and reproduced

 

 

How to Create B2B Customer Personas

Some articles for you to read

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