One strategy that has been used successfully by businesses desirous of meeting the needs of their customers is to define who their customers should be.
In this post, we will discuss seven (7) effective strategies that marketing, sales, and business development professionals can utilize to boost growth and expand their businesses.
Many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have very similar needs. To reach new customers, increase current relationships, keep existing customers, and reduce operational costs. And also to improve business productivity, among others.
One of the strategies such businesses could use to address the numerous needs of their prospects is adopting a targeted approach to their marketing efforts.
You also have to define what strategies you need to use to address the needs of these customers. And where you can find these customers. And more importantly, where are they located? And this is where target marketing comes in.
Target markets are defined segments of a market it is the strategic focus of businesses or a marketing plan. They represent the prospect's base for specific products, solutions, and offerings.
Sales teams and entrepreneurs, therefore, need to know their target markets. You can get there by asking yourself, "Who is the ideal fit for my offering? What are their interests and priorities?" Answering these questions can help you prioritise the deals you're most likely to win. But how can you understand the ins and outs of your target market? We will take a closer look at a target market, go over how to conduct a target market analysis, see some helpful examples, review target market segmentation, and investigate how sales teams can leverage target markets. But before that let’s look at who the buyer is.
What is a B2B Buyer Persona? Let’s start with the definition. A Buyer Persona is a description of a person who is your ideal customer with all behavioural, demographic, and psychographic characteristics. In other words, a buyer persona mirrors who your perfect buyers are, from age, location, likes and dislikes, goals, and wishes to challenge and motivations. The common misconception is that Buyer Persona and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) are the same. However, there is a big difference between them. In short, ICP represents the company profile, and Buyer Persona only focuses on the person’s profile.
Knowing and understanding their needs is a great step toward providing solutions for these businesses. You need to understand the business’ economic forces, the markets surrounding them, and their unique set of needs required for the companies to survive. You also need to provide practical marketing and sales strategies and tactics to increase revenue growth, increase margins and decrease costs.
|
B2B |
B2C |
|
Relationship Driven |
Value-Driven |
|
Maximise the value of the relationship. |
Maximise the value of the transaction |
|
Small focused market. |
Extensive customer base |
|
Multi-step buying processing single. |
Single-step buying process, shorter sales process |
|
Brand identity created on a personal relationship brand. |
The creation of brand identity is achieved through consistent repetition and powerful imagery. |
|
Educational awareness-building activities. |
Promotional and in-store marketing initiatives |
value emotionses of B2B Print Business
https://www.shutterfly.com/ https://www.vista.com/
When working in the B2B space, the most effective marketing, sales and campaign tools are the Internet and social media. These could help you to leverage customer management. Facebook page, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, and LinkedIn which is great to increase customer referrals, and Whats App for mobile texting and messaging.
Social Media channels can help you reach customers, grow your traffic, convert leads and grow ROI
The B2B markets have more complicated decision-making processes than the B2C. It has more than one person in the decision-making process. Very often, the need to procure print items could come from the user department, sometimes marketing, training, or procurement. You may have to call the right person at the right level. At the core level, the CEO is in charge. In such situations, you need to rely on your business acumen to open a discussion.
You could also segment the market into vertical and horizontal markets.
With the Horizontal strategy, look at businesses and corporations that sell their products to training departments, marketing departments, and human resources departments, small & medium-sized businesses, local businesses’ chief marketing officers, etc
https://www.mimeo.com/ for example produces and delivers training materials across most horizontal markets.
You could also take a vertical look at where a particular group of businesses or enterprises where similar products or services are developed and marketed using similar products and services sold. These include insurance, real estate, banking, heavy manufacturing, retail transportation hospitals etc.
Sell your products and services to:
Vertical also has similar products and services which you can sell to:
Insurance, Real Estate, Banking, Heavy Manufacturing, Retail, Transportation, Hospitals, Government, Hotels etc.
Very often, in the B2B set-up, there is a hierarchical structure with the CEO at the apex, below is the core level executive and procurement in that order. The CEO is the final decision maker even though in some cases purchasing initiates the procurement. Talking to the CEO is important. This is where you can provide insights and a lot of business strengths to resolve pains, challenges, and goals and increase ROI.
Once you have identified your target prospects, it’s time to reach out to them and establish initial contact. This can be done through various channels, such as email, social media, or phone calls. This step aims to introduce yourself and your company and provide some initial information about your product or service. It’s important to be friendly and professional in your communication
To personalise your outreach, you’ll need to nail down buyer personas. Define who the decision-makers are at the organisations you are ideally trying to sell to.
When In doubt, most experts recommend starting with an email.
Call
You can use an email as a reason to call a prospect. And refer to this first email to show you're one step further in the relationship.
It lets you educate your prospect on the product's value proposition, and connect it with the prospect's situation. The prospect needs to understand the value proposition first. It needs to be very strong, and very clear. No one will take a random call about a product they've never heard of. If it's not 100% crystal clear they have a huge, pre-defined need for it.