May 2020 - StepUp

As a B2B company, you understand the importance of doing market research before you enter a new market or create a new product. But have you heard of buyer personas? Building a buyer persona is a vital part of market research that helps you focus on reaching your ideal customers.

Generally, it’s useful to create multiple personas since your business probably markets to different segments. These personas are created based on a combination of raw data, experience, smart interviews, and educated guesswork and become a sketch of your key audience segments. Here are the steps we take when creating personas as part of B2B market research.

Make Your B2B Market Research Personal

Getting to know a business, inside and out, is always the first step to better understanding how to market to that and similar businesses. While you may be familiar with the part of your lead’s business that is relevant to your own company, take the time to get a clear picture of the whole business, from the products it makes to the research and development it conducts.

Talk to the Sales Team

No one knows who actually buys the product better than the people who work to sell the product every day. They’ll have a good idea of what types of people within an organization are responsible for learning about and purchasing your product and what information they’re generally looking for.

Capture Website Visitors

If your website has forms, you can use those to collect additional useful information about your visitors such as company size or how the leads found your website. If you can’t capture this information on your website, there are databases available that can take a lead and match them with company size, revenue, and more useful information.

Interview Customers

Getting a chance to talk to real, live customers gives you a chance to ask them questions about their entire purchasing process. How did they research options? What attracted them to your company? How did they make a final purchasing decision?

Discuss Challenges and Goals

When you’re interviewing customers, don’t just talk about your company, make a point of getting to know them more broadly as well. What are the challenges their industry faces and the goals they’re trying to meet? Learn as much as you can about how their industry works because those are questions your company can answer in its marketing materials.

Research Your Buyers

Be a google sleuth and research buyers from companies you know to get additional information. Do they have a college degree? Where are they in their career? Are they married? You’ll start to notice trends in the type of person who holds a certain type of job and these trends will help inform your buyer personas.

Use Different Sources

Talking to and researching one customer isn’t going to give you a complete picture of the buyers for a certain segment, much less the different segments or types of customers a business has. Make sure to research many different customers. Social media profiles can be a great way to learn about people and reading industry news articles gives more insight into trends and challenges they’re facing.

Build a Composite Picture

A single buyer persona is a composite of all the research, interviews, and information you’ve gathered from your different sources. Your goal is to create a handful of fictional people who represent the main market segments you are targeting.

Name Your Persona

Buyer personas are more effective if you give them a face. It’s worth putting the extra effort into building not just an outline, but an imaginary person you can think about as an individual instead of just a title. Asking if “Jeff” would find the content appealing leads to more effective content creation than asking if a VP of Purchasing would find it interesting.

Review Your Personas

Run the buyer personas you’ve created by others in the company for feedback. They’ll let you know if they think you’ve accurately captured the regular buyers or if they think you’re missing a key point. Also, remember to think of buyer personas as a work in progress, and update them as you learn more about your target buyers.

Once you have buyer personas, you can use them as reference points for much more than just content creation. They can help you shape your business strategy and even develop new products.

Want to get started with buyer personas? We can help. Get in touch with us at StepUp to see if you are eligible for a marketing strategy review, which will include initial market research and buyer persona development, all for free. Click below to request your custom marketing strategy review.

The Covid-19 outbreak has disrupted people’s lives as well as businesses. In this article, we want to give you, as a marketer, examples of the most successful marketing strategies that you can immediately implement in your company.

This crisis has changed the business landscape, and the unprecedented consequences are felt around the world. No business or market has been left untouched. Fortunately, all is not lost. With disruption comes growth opportunities and mechanisms to overcome challenges. Crisis times force businesses to become sharper, more creative, and more efficient than before.

With the right mindset, you can use the crisis to your benefit and find future strategic ideas to make your company thrive. The secret lies in understanding your market and customers to identify new opportunities to take your business to higher levels of success.

Continue reading to discover the holy grail of your next growth hack, and ensure the success and survival of your business during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. This article outlines five creative ideas that you can customize to fit your industry and customers to achieve better corporate results during and after the crisis.

Request a FREE one-on-one session to review your company’s Marketing Strategy

1. Recreate your Marketing and Sales Funnel

Things are hard right now and will be for a while. Most industries are registering low conversion rates. In the travel industries, for example, things are terrible, with Delta Airlines losing $60 million daily.

Nevertheless, although consumers are not buying right now, they will do so in the future. Therefore, it is best practice to change your marketing and sales funnel to accommodate this new reality.

Offer your audience something free during these hard economic times: free trials, free courses, or free sessions. Provide them with more content and even give them premium content for free.

By offering consistent and high-quality content to your customers, you build trust, connect with your audience, and increase brand awareness. You also encourage conversions because consumers have the information they require to make informed purchasing decisions.

Digital marketing gurus, HubSpot, and Neil Patel are leading the way with freebies and discounts. Neil Patel is offering Ubersuggest premium features for free while HubSpot is giving out up to 50% discount on their platform.

2. Respond to the Crisis

A recent study by the American Association of Advertising Agencies reveals that 56% of consumers are happy that brands are helping in the Covid-19 pandemic. While some brands are supporting affected communities, others are offering the much-needed help in healthcare institutions. They are giving levity, relief, and resources that those who need them most.

A good number of companies are responding to the Covid-19 crisis with special offers, new services, special resource pages, and other helpful approaches. Here are some examples.

Sisense is helping customers and communities fight Covid 19 with analytics. It is offering relief packages for customers, free analytics, professional services, and strategic consulting.

HubSpot has introduced several support measures and resources to help customers and communities adapt to these challenging times. Among them include new content series, marketing and sales benchmark data, and a HubSpot community for people to connect with like-minded professionals globally.
Quasar: it is helping customers during these times of struggle by offering aid on business continuity. By expanding its manufacturing capacity, the company is helping medical device firms that are facing challenges meeting production goals.

3. Invest in Content Marketing

Currently, social distancing is the new norm. Even after the crisis is contained, distancing between people will stay with us. To tackle the distancing, many people turn to the internet to learn. Also, people still want to research products and services online before they contact a company.

Another great marketing strategy example to survive this crisis is to invest more in educating customers. It will offer a great opportunity for businesses to connect with customers and build healthy relations. Below are a few ways of educating your customers;

Develop a learning center on your website, endowed with guides, whitepapers, webinars, and courses.
Use online learning tools. You can create applications and automation tools that can help your customers. Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest is a prime example of an online tool that generates keyword ideas for clients. Also, HubSpot excels in creating online tools for its customers. Its free Blog Ideas Generator gives customers numerous blog post ideas in seconds.

4. Virtual Events

We are uncertain when real events will be back in our lives. However, thanks to technology, you can host a virtual event. Virtual events occur on the internet and are not restricted to a single locality. With internet connectivity, you can participate in a virtual event from anywhere around the globe.

Virtual events are invaluable for companies during this crisis for several reasons. First, you reach a wider audience because people can join in from anywhere in the world. Second, virtual events are cheaper to hold –you don’t have to incur the costs of booking a venue and hiring an event planner. Third, these events are measurable –you can determine how many people attended, their residence, which sessions were popular, and how the attendees paid for their tickets.

Wista CounchCon is an excellent example of a video marketing platform for enterprises. In 2018, it held its first virtual event called CouchCon. The virtual event featured 13 influencers who taught attendees about using video for marketing. Content Marketing Conference allows you to watch CMC 2020 on-demand for free in May during the pandemic. AltGDC is a primarily-virtual conference on game design and development.

5. Watch Your Industry Pains

The Covid-19 crisis has affected many industries. These industries need to reinvent themselves for the future. The tourism industry, for example, can look into options like virtual tours or 3D visuals of tourist places.

Businesses that fail to reinvent themselves will be removed from the market. To emerge winners in this crisis, enterprises must combine resilience and agility. They must determine where they should be strong, and where to be flexible.

So, a good marketing strategy example is to examine your industry to identify the new pains your customers may be experiencing. It will offer lucrative opportunities for your business to leverage. Here is an outlook of how companies are capitalizing on new customer pains in the wake of the crisis.

Quasar Medical, a medical device manufacturer, saw that there was an increased demand for medical devices, and many manufacturers were shutting down due to the pandemic. The company was fully operated and sought clients who were looking for new manufacturers to meet their demand.
Vintage Grape: like most wine manufacturers, Vintage Grape adopted crisis opportunities and opened an online store to sell wine online.
Game makers and sellers are winning big in the pandemic. With so much time in their hands, people are turning to traditional board games and puzzles. The demand for board games and puzzles has increased significantly.
Artists and handcrafts: artists are coming out prominently as essential professionals in the time of crisis. They are using art to unite people as well as help the masses cope and heal in the face of the pandemic. Artists and handcrafts are taking their works online and getting extensive viewership in return.

Bottom Line

Covid-19 has sent businesses spinning, with many struggling to survive. Luckily, all is not lost. When a crisis looms, it is the ideal time for bold and creative entrepreneurs. This article offers five successful marketing strategies examples you should adopt during and after Covid-19 to ensure the survival and success of your business. You can find one thing to do to make a difference in your business. And if you need help, we can brainstorm together.

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Month: May 2020

How to do B2B Market Research That Brings the Right Customers