Prior to launching a B2B lead gen campaign, its critical that you identify and target the ideal audience. This process is key to building a solid sales and marketing foundation for any business.
Random B2B sales targeting can lead to a waste of time and money. Companies that don’t effectively define their most profitable target audience tend to lose the competitive edge. A number of businesses target anyone interested in their products or services while others say they target only small businesses. Yet, both these segments are overly general.
Targeting a particular audience does not translate to excluding those who do not meet a given criteria. Instead, this approach enables marketers to direct resources on specific prospects that are more likely to turn into paying customers. This is a more cost-effective and efficient way to reach the target audience.
The target market can be broken down into multiple segments. This process typically comes before targeting. Besides income, company size and type, there are many other ways to segment the market. Behavioral and psychographic characteristics like usage rate and interest also play an important role.
Analyzing current customer base allows you to identify the reasons why businesses buy from you. You can also gain insights on which customers bring the most business. Doing so enables your organization to tap into the segment.
The RFM Method
The RFM method is one of the most effective ways to analyze lifetime customer value. The approach is used in heavily direct and database marketing and is one the best ways to create your ideal sale target audience profile.
The acronym stands for:
- Recency — When last did the customer buy from you?
- Frequency — How often does the customer buy?
- Monetary Value — How much do they spend?
This information is gleaned from the sales data. You can use the data to create a customer profile table listing the purchase value, data of purchase and customer name. Marketers use different methodologies to understand customer behavior and value. One approach is to assign a scale of 1 to 10 while another creates categories for all applicable attributes.
All customer segments featuring demographic data and weighted RFM scores in the same clusters are a clear indication of a more accurate and stronger interpretation.
The main objective of the analysis is to pinpoint migration patterns over time. It also provides an opportunity to determine how the customer migration patterns shifted into predictable patterns. By conducting the analysis, you can identify effective marketing strategies that are well suited to each migration cluster.
Click here to learn more about proper RFM implementation.
Purchasing Triggers
Triggers create a need for a particular service or product. The event generally leads to an active search for the ideal product or service. The need also generates a sense of urgency. A company that scales operations may have to update some of its equipment among other things. A detailed understanding of these triggers allows you to tailor marketing messages and recognize your target audience.
Firmagraphics
Firmagraphics make it easier to aggregate firms into specific market segments. You can take advantage of descriptive attributes to define your target market. This allows your organization to focus marketing efforts on business customers that are more likely to make purchases. The most commonly used attributes include performance, size, structure, location and status.
Uncovering Customer Pain Points and Gaps in your Target Audience
Customer’s pain is caused by a perceived or real gap between current circumstances and the desire for an improvement or solution. As a marketer, it is your responsibility to close the gap. Your ability to identify and eliminate multiple or larger customer pain points creates sound opportunities to convert a prospect and retain them as a paying client.
Experts believe that it is almost impossible to maximize revenue without identifying and eliminating key pain points. Fortunately, the Sandler Pain Funnel allows you to gain an understanding of the existing gaps. The approach involves asking the customer a set of key questions. The process requires requesting the customer to elaborate the nature of a need.
You should ask how long the client has experienced the problem. In addition, make an effort to understand the cost of the problem and how the client has tried to resolve it.
More information customer pain point identification can be found here.
Best Practices for Content Marketing
Content marketing plays a vital role when it comes to creating demand and is a key cog in any outbound marketing campaign. It helps you improve brand awareness and increase lead generation. When properly implemented, this approach builds credibility with both existing customers and prospects. Content marketing achieves this objective by providing relevant information that resonates with the target audience’s needs.
Identifying new topics for your content marketing efforts requires regular research. The topics should satisfy information needs of your target market. The content can be in the form of white papers, webinars and blog posts.
For your content marketing campaigns to succeed, you must do the following:
- Read industry blogs
- Subscribe to your competitor’s newsletters
- Understand your buyers
- Identify key stages of your buying cycle
- Keep track of customer’s questions and service needs
Maximizing Effectiveness Through Keywords
You should aim to adopt search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that serve both website visitors and search engines. When it comes to keywords, best practices dictate that marketers should target one keyword per page. Web page visitors expect to see the specific words that brought them to the page. For this reason, it is important to include the keyword in your copy at least three to four times. The placement must still ensure that the words sound natural.
On the other hand, it’s vital to avoid overdoing anything because you are writing to people not search engines. Do not undermine user experience for the sake of optimization. Long form articles usually rank better and provide an ideal opportunity for keyword placement.
Creating a Sales Funnel with Landing Pages
Sales funnels can be created using a wide variety of landing pages, including webinar pages, social media pages, free demo pages and more. This approach requires testing to identify the ideal landing page for your sales funnel. One way to create a sales funnel involves retargeting lost traffic.
With this method, you implement a code into the landing page that identifies and triggers a specific engagement. For instance, you can use a retargeting advertisement.
Meanwhile, experts recommend segmenting visitors based on traffic source. You can also take advantage of landing page form data, such as zip codes, email addresses and names.
Business Leads
Prospect leads can come from a wide array of sources or activities, including social media and content marketing campaigns. This aspect is usually combined with lead management with the aim to channel prospects through the sales funnel. The leads come in two variants: marketing leads and sales leads.
Sales Automation
Sales automation provides a viable way to eliminate time-consuming tasks. It comes as no surprise that this sales tool is increasingly becoming important. The systems help ensure that your organization does not miss out on any opportunities. You can use the programs to set reminders and manage follow-ups through various stages of the sales process.
Automated tools allow you to carry out more accurate forecasting based on orders, quotes and opportunities. In addition, they enable you to prioritize sales tasks based on rank assignment. This ensures that sales staff focuses on the highest quality leads. Cross and up-selling is drastically improved due to better understanding of buyer persona, order history, demographics and other key metrics.
Furthermore, one of the primary functions of most sales automation platforms is lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is the process of providing continued education to your prospects and clients so that they can be confident and remain confident in the tools and services that you provide.
Sales managers can lead the team more effectively because they have access to each sales representative’s performance details, including sales figures, opportunities and customer contact stats. This information allows managers to identify areas of weakness and provide guidance.