10 Things You Must Know About B2B Marketing
By: Bryan Johnson, President of Tango Marketing

You already know that Business to Business (B2B) marketing is decidedly different from Business to Consumer (B2C) marketing—companies don't buy business software on a whim—businesses only spend money to solve problems.

How can you be sure your marketing efforts have the desired result? In this article, I’ve assembled my list of Ten Things You Must Know About B2B Marketing. By understanding the concepts here, and applying them to your marketing campaigns, your chances of success will increase substantially.

1. Know Your Prospects
Businesses only spend money to solve problems. If you are not offering a solution to a business problem your prospect is experiencing—your message will not resonate.

What problems might your prospects be experiencing that you can solve? Research into the industry you’re targeting will help you hone your message and speak directly to your audience’s pain.

2. Be Persistent
Persistence is key to effective marketing, and surprisingly, an area where many businesses fall short.

Each of your marketing messages has perhaps a 1-2 second window to present your solution to their problem. In order to gain any mind share, you need to deliver multiple messages to build that impression. Deliver communications to your prospects on a regular basis every four to six weeks.

3. It’s All About Timing
Your marketing message must land on a prospect’s desk when they are actively seeking a solution to a business problem.

The sheer number of marketing messages that prospects are hit with means that no bandwidth or memory retention is allotted to potential answers if there’s not a pressing problem to solve.

You of course don’t have control of when your prospects’ business problems might crop up, but realizing that timing is key encourages you to be persistent in your efforts.

4. Be Problem Solvers
Businesses don’t buy software for the features; they buy software to solve business problems. So, don’t sell your software’s features; sell the solutions you can provide using your software.

Your marketing messages should show your audience that you understand the problems they may be experiencing and that you know how to solve those problems. Refer to your experience and expertise as this kind of problem-solver.

5. Brand With Consistency
Large corporations learned this long ago—it pays to adopt consistent branding. Your marketing collateral should have a consistent look and feel and should always include your Sage Software partner logo.

Don’t worry about coming up with a series of different ads or postcards—concentrate instead on one or two really good ones. No one will remember the last one you sent, anyway.

6. Strong “Call To Action”
A strong call to action is imperative. A simple call to action such as, “Let me know if you need anything” won’t reward you with any results. Come up with something compelling that addresses the business pain you can solve. Perhaps something like, “Ready to rein in runaway inventory costs? Download our free white paper at www.abcd/whitepaper.com.”

Consider hosting an educational workshop on a topic of interest or offering a white paper covering a related topic. Don’t have a white paper? Sage Software has several available from the partner marketing Web site. If you don’t find what you’re looking for there, hire a professional copy writer to develop one for you.

7. Make it Easy
Once the prospect thinks that you might have a solution, give them an easy way to respond. You don’t want your prospects to have to work hard to contact you.

Provide a Web landing page with a short address or include a reply card (postage paid) in your business letter mailings.

8. Follow Through
Once you get a lead, pursue it promptly, don’t let it languish.

The appropriate response time for a Web lead is one day. Take too long and the prospect will wonder, “What will it be like when I need support, if this is how long it takes when I want to buy!”.

9. Circle Back
If you don’t get an immediate response from your marketing efforts, don’t drop those names from your prospect list.

Just because a prospect doesn’t need your solutions today, doesn’t mean they won’t need them tomorrow. Keep them on your list and circle back periodically.

10. Don’t Give Up
Marketing is about being persistent. You’re in it for the long term.

If you don’t see immediate results, don’t despair, but do consider shaking things up a bit. You could, for example, split your prospect call or mailing list into two groups, varying the call to action between the two. Be certain to track your responses so you’ll know which campaign yields the best results.

Think you don’t have time for persistent marketing? Hire a marketing communication assistant to help you fulfill on your marketing calendar.

Test Your Campaigns
These ten concepts should be applied to all of your marketing activities. Before you send that postcard, make that cold call, or place that ad, see how well your campaign relates back to these concepts. A perfect “10” will help yield winning results.

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