What's The Top B2B Marketing Strategy? Understanding The Buyer

ITSMA conducted a survey last year with B2B marketers, and the results shocked the industry. The results showed that over the next two years B2B companies should focus on understanding their buyers. As someone with a B2B company yourself, you probably find this both interesting and exasperating, especially after spending so much time developing marketing concepts.

This doesn't mean that the time you've invested in marketing was in vain. On the contrary: by better understanding your buyer, your marketing plan will become more clear and targeted.

Targeted marketing is one of the best strategies for B2B companies because you can find the buyers who will be more likely to engage with your products and services and eventually become loyal customers. Understanding the buyer is becoming a top priority for B2B companies because it ultimately makes every aspect of your marketing plan more efficient.

So how do you fully understand your buyers? While having conversations with buyers on social media is an excellent method, there are many more techniques that can help you paint a better picture of what your buyers have done in the past and what they're looking for now. You’ll want to find out about your current buyers’ motivations so that you can better target new and untapped demographics.

FINDING BUYER MOTIVATIONS

Motivation is just one part of the buyer personality, though it's a good place to start because it helps you understand what best attracts your buyer. When you fully realize what motivates a buyer, you can tweak your products, your marketing, and your customer-service approaches to target a specific demographic.

One way to get started is through the popular method of creating customer personas. These usually require looking into your existing buyer database to see what the motivations and buying habits of prior customers were.

By compiling this data, you create the persona of the perfect buyer who wouldn't hesitate to buy from you. Keep in mind, though, that you need to understand what fuels the motivations of those buyers. In most cases, it's seeking a solution to a business problem that's overly common, but which never seems to get adequately solved.

It's here that you need to dig a little deeper and find out what kind of business problems are out there that your products could solve.

FINDING NEW BUYER OPPORTUNITIES

You'll be amazed to find that an untapped demographic has actually been looking for a product like yours to solve their industry problems. Take a look at the products your B2B company offers and look at them in a new light. What kind of new problems could they help another kind of business solve?

One way to discover this is to join conversations on industry message boards or on social media where people in the industry congregate. It also doesn't hurt to look into similar industries and see what kind of problems they're dealing with regularly. They may have problems your products could easily solve, which means your products could find a new market niche you never thought was possible.

SHARE INFORMATION WITH YOUR STAFF

Understanding your buyers also means getting all of the information organized in a way that everyone in your B2B company can make sense of it. When everyone, including your marketers, has a full grasp of what your buyers want, you'll all have a better vision going into the future.