And by marketing activities, I’m not talking about our bullhorn-wielding friend on the left. He’s shouting, he’s interrupting, he’s just trying to complete a transaction so he can move on.
Marketing and selling in a business-to-business environment is not a transaction, it’s a series of interactions between you and the buyer. This series of interactions is a process that results in some of these buyers converting into customers. The more you can improve the process, the more customers you will produce.
The main way to improve the marketing process is to improve each of the component marketing activities.
As you improve each activity, you’ll be able to:
- Identify and increase the value you create for buyers
- Find and win more of the right kind of customers
- Spend less money converting buyers into leads or customers
Each marketing activity has four critical elements. By understanding these elements, you’ll be able to improve each of your marketing activities. The four elements are:
- Ask for the buyer’s attention.
- Give the buyer something that creates value
- Request something in return
- Measure your results
Ask for the buyer’s attention
The first step is to ask for the buyer’s attention. If you have no prior relationship with the buyer, getting attention could be through a Google ad, a paid notice in a targeted ezine, or an article that you contribute to a trade magazine. If you already have a relationship, getting attention could be through the buyer’s RSS feeder, an email newsletter, or the telephone.
Which method you use to get the attention of the buyer is not just a question of the most effective medium. It’s a question of what you have permission to do. At the beginning, you don’t have permission to send an email or make a phone call, but you do have permission to make it easy to find you through a search engine or other information sources where your buyers seek information.
As you help buyers on their journey, those who value what you provide will give you more permission. They will become ready to have more direct and personal communication like email and eventually phone calls and face-to-face meetings.
Give the buyer something that creates value
The most important element of any marketing interaction is to create value for the buyer. Creating value is your guiding light, your compass, your North Star. You create value by understanding the problems and opportunities that face your buyers and by helping them to understand your role in addressing these problems.
What is value? It is something the buyer is willing to pay for, not necessarily with money but with the buyer’s valuable time and attention.
Here are some questions to ask: Would the buyer be willing to pay to read your article or report? To watch your webinar or stop by your trade show booth? If the buyer does any of these things, what value will you create to make the experience useful and valuable?
Ask for something in return
Marketing interactions are an exchange of value. If you create value for the buyer, you have the right to ask for value in return. This could be an email address in exchange for the white paper or report you are sending. It could simply be an agreement to continue to receive your email newsletter instead of opting out.
And at significant points in the marketing and selling process, it could be agreement to see a demonstration of your capabilities or payment in exchange for the value of your product or service.
Asking for something in return not only enables you to keep the buyer’s journey and your sales process aligned, it also lets you test and measure the results of your activities.
Measure your results
Because after all, the goal is to continually improve each marketing activity and the only way to improve them is to measure and analyze your results. You can make changes in your marketing interactions (different ways of asking for attention, creating value and requesting something in return). By measuring your results against your baseline performance metrics, you can learn which changes produced better results and can continually improve your marketing process.
Marketing and sales is a process in your company that converts potential buyers into customers. By identifying the activities that make up your sales and marketing process, you can individually improve each one. The more you can improve each of the individual marketing activities, the better your process will perform and the more customers you will produce.
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