Are you showing your B2B prospects love?
Or have you lost that loving feeling?
In marketing we are all about the love. While sales is “show me the money” marketing’s role is to work with sales to make a prospect match so they can close the deal. Our target prospects are all about “show me the love”. If you do not show them the love they are going to go where someone else is showing them the love. Showing the love is not as easy as easy as it sounds.
We recently quoted a study in 5 ways to determine that ABM is right for your company that helps shed some light on how hard it is today. It may be a pertinent read after you finish reading this blog post.
According to a study by KoMarketing: The leading reason business buyers have limited engagement with B2B vendors is because marketers are sending them too much irrelevant content (34%).
If marketing’s job is to make a match made in heaven, then the goal is to show prospects the love by meeting their needs. Ten years ago, most marketers were just getting started with content marketing and executing content through social, paid, email and other channels. Today pretty much every brand in the marketplace is producing content. This has created so much noise that any given topic you are writing about for your audience has probably been published multiple times; including this post. There is definite evidence of content fatigue in the market, particularly with more general topics that relate to your broad audience. Your email marketing conversion metrics are probably dropping off, conversions through social channels, paid, and organic, are probably eroding, and you are driving less outcomes with the same effort. It is time to admit “you’ve lost that loving feeling.” Ohh…no.
So how do you rekindle the love? For starters, you can connect with the target customer in a more meaningful way. We need to start focusing on them. What do they really care about? What can we help them with that will impact their business? We are not talking about your market, but each individual company. What does a particular company really need? Chances are it is a little different than everyone else and your message is not getting through. It may be time to give your target accounts some love with an account-based marketing (ABM) approach. Think of it this way: Relevancy = Engagement = Increased Outcome
We show our target customers love by being relevant. Many people are confused by ABM and think it is just about sending gifts to target customers to get their attention. It is way more than that. In fact, it is a very efficient way of marketing once you establish a cadence. We always suggest starting simple before becoming too complex. You can actually do it within your existing budget (another misnomer is that ABM is expensive.). Your first step should be to isolate a group of targets within your target accounts that all care about the same issue/problem/or value proposition, and speak to them as if you are only speaking to them. Show them some love by being relevant with content and messaging that lets them know they are important. The goal is to make them feel as if your solution is built just for them. Remember: Relevancy = Engagement = Increased Outcome
Then you will become the modern-day cupid and make the connections to close the deal. We want our prospects to say: “you had me at hello.”
You may need a dating coach to woo the targets of your desire, aka net new logos that you would love to have on your customer list. Reach out to us. We can help you get that loving feeling back.
