You would think that marketing would be very straightforward. Get a hold of a quality product, show it to someone who needs it, and voila, you have a sale.
It doesn’t always work that way, however.
Need alone is not enough to motivate someone to buy. There are other complicating factors that can affect an individual’s desire to either purchase something or save their money until a different opportunity to buy something else comes along.
In order to succeed in marketing, you need to gain a firm grasp on those complicating factors and use your understanding of them to your advantage.
The next time you’re in the process of coming up with your next B2B lead gen campaign, take the time to consider the different types of companies and individuals out there. Doing so will give you a better chance of closing more sales.
This article will highlight the different variables that can affect a specific customer’s likelihood of responding to your marketing efforts.
Motivation
This article from Dummies notes that there are seven different buyer motivations. You can find people who buy impulsively, those who do so because they want a little pick-me-up, and others may make what’s known as a vanity purchase.
For businesses, the motivations behind purchases are more straightforward.
If a business is running out of some raw materials, they will place an order for additional supplies. Businesses may also purchase new equipment or technology that can improve their operations and make them more profitable.
It should come as no surprise that businesses are motivated mainly by maintaining their profits and it’s up to you to take a cue from that when you’re putting together your marketing plan. You don’t need B2B intent data providers to tell you what is driving another company to buy because you already know very well that they are pursuing profitability.
As long as you can show them that what you’re offering can be good for their bottom line, your chances of closing a sale will increase.
Receptiveness to Different Marketing Methods
Every now and then, you may spot someone at the mall trying to sell something by being aggressive. They approach customers walking by, put the products right in front of them, and hope that doing so will eventually lead to a sale.
While many may appreciate their enthusiasm for selling, not everyone will be receptive to that kind of approach. You have to be mindful of how you are marketing your offerings because potential customers may be turned off simply by what you’re doing.
Using email marketing will probably allow you to reach a lot of businesses, but that kind of approach may not be enough to encourage some to make a purchase. You may need to come up with a different way to excite your potential customers and show them that you are offering something good.
Paying attention to how businesses react to your marketing methods will clue you into how you can more effectively approach them in the future.
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Ability to Authorize Purchases
One thing that is easy to forget in B2B marketing is that you’re not always selling directly to the person who can authorize purchases.
Just because you’ve sent an email to a company, doesn’t necessarily mean that their CEO is the one reading it. More often than not, there’s a lower-level employee who’s in charge of reading those emails and extracting the substance from them.
Understanding that, you will have to change up your marketing efforts to come up with a more desirable result. What you want to do specifically is to create something that is not just appealing to the lower-level employee, but also something that they are likely to deem worthy of bringing to the attention of someone with greater authority in the company.
You’re not just marketing to one person in the company anymore here. This is why low-effort emails and ads frowned upon so much in the online advertising community.
Getting into an employee’s inbox is not your only goal. Your offering has to be valuable enough to warrant more attention if you really want to make a sale.
Content Preferences
Because your goal is to demonstrate the value of your offerings, you must be able to convey that clearly using your content. That’s not the only challenge you have to overcome though. You must also be able to come up with content that’s engaging enough to warrant a closer look from a potential business partner.
This is where you can lean on B2B database providers as they may be able to help you figure out what kind of content is most appealing to certain companies.
If data is unavailable, then it may be time to move forward with a trial-and-error approach. Put forth different kinds of marketing materials such as emails, white papers, and infographics. You can also provide videos as those are more widely consumed these days.
Once you pinpoint the kind of content that your prospective client prefers, you can hone in on that and adjust your strategy accordingly moving forward.
Business Size
Finally, you must take into consideration the size of the business you’re hoping to land as a new client as you start exposing them to your marketing campaign.
A company’s purchasing habits and preferences will obviously be affected by its size.
Smaller businesses will be more hesitant to spend so your offerings must clearly hit a pain point for them if you want to make a sale. Bigger businesses have more resources and it may be easier to convince them to purchase something from your company.
You have to weigh those variables accordingly as you decide which targets to pursue.
It may also be worth taking the time to create different marketing campaigns so that you can connect better with small and big businesses alike.
Conclusion
Knowing your audience is one of the secrets to success in the world of B2B marketing. Once you understand them on a more fundamental level, selling becomes an easier task. Reaching that level of understanding may take time, but it will be a profitable endeavour.
