Making Your Strategic Marketing Work

By Robert Steers Marketing March 24, 2011

Integrated Marketing — Click here to download the presentation

We recently completed a day long sales and marketing session with a Sydney IT Distributor. The session seemed to be very successful in showing medium sized IT businesses how their marketing can work, how it can be targetted, achieve results and give value for money. If you want to grab an outline of the presentation, you can click the image above. Here are some of the things we covered.

Why is “Marketing” so important?

“The Aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous”
Peter F. Drucker

Marketing isn’t just advertising and junk mail. It is about getting a targeted message to your potential customers.

16,000+ users of LinkedIn 15,000+ users of Facebook are Australian Sys Admins, IT Managers, Directors, CIOs
(cost to reach them is ~50c per click)
(not everyone reads BRW any more)
9000+ searches online for “Managed IT Services”
<1000 searches for “IT Systems Integrator”
< 73 for “IT Solution Provider”
(the customer uses different language to the provider)
On Amazon eBooks outsold traditional books last year.
Largest category = Tutorials 66,000 books

The marketing landscape has changed, there are ways to use a direct marketing approach to cost effectively reach a large number of people, in a very specific way.

Key B2B Marketing steps

Which markets are the most lucrative?
Who are your competitors? (across markets)
Who are is the key purchaser(s)/decision makers?
What do you know about them
How to engage their trust
What is your message
What problem are you solving for the customer
What complete solution can you offer them?
How to reach the target cost-effectively
How to repeat and reinforce the message
How to encourage them to take action

Working through the above steps will give you a clear idea of how you approach your marketing. The key two things here are engaging their trust and solving a problem for them.

B2B Targetting

Here are some low cost/low commitment ways to get good information about your target market.

Use Facebook and LinkedIn advertising platforms
- (to find the right targets, people, places)
Use Google Keyword Tool
- (to see how many searches there are and what the cost of marketing to them is)
Look for company lists, Dunn and Bradstreet, Listbank.com.au
- (to compare industry sizes)

Finding the right market and the right target is a long process. It depends on your own internal processes and your own profit margins. There are some tools out there you can use to find the right markets and the right target people.

Who and what do you know?

Customer profiling (name, age, sex, likes dislikes, family, footy team?)
What do they read, where do they read?
Where do they live, where do they work?
Alexa and Compete.com list websites people visit together.
Google has a demographic targeting tool.

Harvey McKay has a book called Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive. In it he talks about profiling the customer using 72 questions on your current customers.

What is your message

How does (how do you want) your prospect describe the product/service?
What does (what do you want) your image and your product conjure up in the prospect’s mind?
What “job” does your product do, and how does that benefit your clients directly?
Avoid technical language and “BizSpeak”
Use Google Keyword tool to find out what people are searching for.

Refining your message is the key to marketing. Using Google Keyword tool is an important part of that as it can help you see what other people are searching for, and what words will help you reach the most people.

B2B marketing process

Branding
Anchoring in emotion, creating personality
Building a profile in the market
Building an identity
Being top of mind
Differentiation
Case Studies = Industry Framework
Using T&Cs to differentiate
Using expertise/experience
Testimonials

B2B Marketing Process

Reinforcement/Repetition
Product/Service Placement
Call to action
Above the line – Advertising, visible marketing
Below the line – PR, Word of Mouth,

You have to focus on repetition and reinforcement. You need to make sure that your brand, and your product offerings, stay top of mind for the customer.

B2B Above the line

SEO
- Using the keywords you have identified
- H1, Title Tag, Description
- Links from authority pages
Building/participating in a community
- Forums, seminars, Q+A
Advertising
- Google, Facebook, LinkedIn
- Industry Mags (with caution/more than just an ad.)

B2B Above the line

Sponsorship
Local sports teams with a big following
(Gladesville Hornsby Football Association has 50 clubs x 30 teams x 15 parents = >22500 people)
Corporate events
Joint Marketing initiatives
Allied business partners (vertical and horizontal)
Using your customer
Testimonials (video or written)

B2B Above the line