B2B marketing… start by developing trust. Everything else comes after.
June 2024, Post 4/10, 6 min read
Before you can develop trust with the people you’d like to become your customers, you need to be found.
The challenge is it’s getting harder and harder to stand out – the proliferation of content, 4.6bn pieces produced every day (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-were-hungry-remarkable-content-infographic-brian-solis), only accelerated with the recent explosion of AI means it’s harder than ever for you and your business to be found.
A further consideration is that the traditional buyer journey is now starting, and increasingly staying, online with Gartner suggesting that 80% of buyer interactions will happen in digital channels by 2025.
And it gets worse because people don’t want to speak to your sales team, in fact they will actively avoid it with up to 70% of the sales journey complete before someone reaches out to sales.
The issue is they can’t start to work out if you’re the right solution for them if they can’t find you.
The following stats further emphasise the importance of having a presence with 84% of C-suite using social media to make purchasing decisions and 80% of business decision makers preferring to get company information from a series of articles rather than adverts.
This is a business challenge not just a marketing one and whilst there’s much to unpack we’re going to look at a couple of practical steps that can help move things forward.
Creating and Demonstrating Value
Creating value, at its core, is about having clarity on what you stand for, what you offer and how you help your customers better than anyone else in your space.
To do this you need to identify your USP – the one thing which serves your customers better than anyone else. You might think you’re clear on this however if your answer is a statement that includes how you’re the biggest, cheapest, or any other adjective then I suggest you review it.
The core statement shouldn’t be about you at all, it’s about the value you create and provide for your current and future customers.
The starting point then is about understanding your customer, their needs and working to identify (and communicate) how you answer their challenges uniquely well – if you can’t do that then give it some focus, fast.
Whilst it will certainly link to and be supported by defining your mission, vision, values and all that goes into a full and rounded brand strategy it doesn’t need to be that complex. You don’t need to spend enormous budgets on taking some simple and often powerful steps.
I’ve been in enough ‘brand’ workshops to recognise that more often than not the answers are within the people in your business – between you big strides can be made on creating a simple vision – the key part is then sticking to it and ensuring you and your teams live by it.
The framework below is a useful reference point to get started in identifying your purpose and ultimately working that into your customer focussed messaging.
How do you sound?
Once you have clarity on why you exist and the unique value you provide it’s then about starting to articulate this, authentically.
A simple way to get started is to move your messaging to the first person, make sure it sounds human, does it read as if you’re speaking to someone? and then it’s about trying to be helpful and provide something of value before asking for something in return.
Make sure you craft your message to what you know of your customers, show them you’re doing your best to understand their needs and that you’re using what you know to provide further value and a more targeted experience.
Steps to get started:
Identify customer need and how you address it, uniquely well
Clarify what you know of existing customers and use this to segment them
Craft messaging to their needs and preferences
Ensure you’re speaking in the first person – be human
Share something helpful before asking for something in return
Do this for one specific product or item you want to promote and start with the channels you own.
Craft a customer focussed, benefit-led, piece of copy for a dedicated landing page then use and adapt this for an email and couple of social posts.
It’s a small step but by having a practical jumping off point and keeping your focus on the customer it will help bring to life the steps above.
Don’t get me wrong, doing this once won’t revolutionise your business overnight but it’s a positive first step on the journey in moving from transactions to relationships and it can have quite impactful outcomes as the example below illustrates.
The key here is that once started you need to do it consistently, you need to show your customers this is you, you’re turning up each day and the authenticity, in time, will create the trust and in turn develop a return for you and your business.
Keep these useful ‘rules to live by’ in mind as you start to craft your message.
Some food for thought - A Practical example
The below is an example of how applying some of this thinking in a dedicated area can have a big difference in outcome.
One of the companies I was working with had been sending a daily newsletter for a period of time, the content and articles within it were the same and it went to the full dataset without any context or rationale for the recipient.
The engagement from this had plateaued and there were initial signs that it was soon to be in decline.
Using the framework set out here we did the following:
Reviewed what we knew about those receiving the newsletter
Identified 5 core industry themes and aligned them to specialisms held by our customers
Created a new email template which enabled us to map content topics to specialisms (this was internal effort, but created a better customer experience)
Focussed on how we framed the content from subject line, to adding an intro explaining what they were receiving and why, plus a short piece of insight on the articles
Simply put we created a more targeted set of messages based on customer interest and need, we crafted this to be helpful and give people things they wanted whilst focussing on ensuring all of this was written simply and directed for the reader.
This led to an immediate 60% uplift in engagement rates for the emails and it transferred to the articles themselves with 50% growth in article readership as well as 30% more articles being seen, read and engaged with.
This example is about how we improved approach for existing customers, but the model holds true and can be started with the simplest of things – just remember your customer is a person just like you, keep them front of mind and focus on what you can do help them get value from what you do – with that you won’t go too far wrong.
As Andrew Davis said; “Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust and trust drives revenue.” Marketing is key to unlocking the opportunity that trust delivers for a business, focus on your customer and the rest will follow.
Rowen Graham-Collins is a pragmatic Marketing Leader who has grown the customer base, increased revenues and driven year round engagement across B2B and B2C companies from sport to FTSE100s and more recently media, data and tech enabled start-ups. He’s ex The Lawn Tennis Association, Royal Mail, RX Global and Contentive, a Blenheim Chalcot company. He’s now providing consultancy to a range of start-ups and scale ups across the media, data and events space. www.linkedin.com/in/thergc