Knowing Your Audience
As I sat in the large meeting room with hundreds of fellow marketers at the Marketing Sherpa’s B2B Demand Generation Summit here in Boston, I was not only energized by the brainpower in the room, but also with the willingness to share experiences of success and failure. After all, a lot of us are trying to reach the same, sometimes elusive, B2B technology audience.
I found myself nodding in agreement when the moderator listed the top 5 challenges we face:
- The growing committee of decision makers involved in the research and buying process. Head nod – I’d written a blog posting on the subject several months ago.
- The right content at the right time. Head nod – we’ve discussed many times both internally and with clients the value of testing offers at various points in the process. For example, is a prospect really ready for an in person assessment when they’re only at the awareness phase in the decision making process – probably not.
- Building and testing landing pages. Head nod – yes the samples of landing page looked so familiar. Yet without the commitment to testing up front how will we know we couldn’t be doing a better job?
- Being everywhere. Marketers think they’ve found their target audience but in reality that’s because they’re everywhere. Head nod – our audience is everywhere. They’re online, they’re reading magazines, blogs, emails, and mobile devices so our budgets need to work harder and harder to reach them.
- Handing off the right leads. Head nod - the sales team will appreciate fewer more qualified leads than being bombarded with leads that are no where near ready to speak to a sales rep.
They were preaching to the choir…So why is it that beyond the walls of this summit and within the walls of our client offices does it often feel like these challenges are ignored?
I don’t think they’re ignored. Rather we as marketers need to keep our first target audience in mind – our clients. In fact they are facing these same five challenges every day.
As we’re in the throes of 2008 planning we have a great opportunity to address the challenges our clients face as we develop our strategies and recommendations. We need to keep the following in mind:
- The growing committee involved in the marcom planning. We need to understand who and why each person is involved in the planning process so we can tailor our presentation to each of their needs.
- The planning process is just that a process. We need to do our research to understand what’s changing in our client’s business and the competitive marketplace, etc. We can’t rest on our laurels. We need to provide research and examples to help demonstrate why our recommendation makes sense.
- Test from the beginning - not as an afterthought. Tie each recommendation to learning objectives and strategies to accomplish these.
- Be everywhere. We need to better understand all of our client’s communication touch points with their customers, prospects, partners, etc. What activities do they do on their own without us? We need to see the complete picture so we understand our targets user experience with our brand.
- Hand off/present the best ideas. Many clients find it overwhelming to implement a slew of new thinking. But a few well thought out ideas make it much easier to champion and implement. Pace other new ideas and POVs and proactively present throughout the year.
Hopefully next year we’ll learn about more successful case studies at the 5th annual B2B Demand Generation summit. In fact one particular client and I are looking forward to presenting a joint presentation next year. Stay tuned.
