Marketing Mental Model
Happy Spring My Friend,
Not much news from my end this week.
So for today’s occasion let me serve you with three flat marketing jokes:
Why don’t marketer’s like trampolines?
They’re scared of high bounce rates.What does the SEO professional think of twins?
Be careful; duplicate content!
What is the safest place to hide a body?
The second page of Google.
….no worries, I’ll wait right here until you stop laughing.
Done?
Great.
Now you’re ready for…
...Today's topics
📈 Brand Strategy:
B2B Marketing Mental Model
🧰 Tools of the Trade:
Articles, Tools and Inspiration for Marketers
⛑️ Reflections from the Trenches:
On Procrastination: Manage What Already Exists
📈 Brand Strategy
B2B Marketing Mental Model
A lot of marketers nowadays agree that B2C and B2B marketing are the same, in the end it’s all just people we are trying to appeal to with our brand. And I agree wholeheartedly, BUT there is one fundamental difference I’d like to talk about today.
The main difference between B2C and B2B marketing
Where B2C marketing focuses a lot on emotions, impulse buying and marking use of shorter evaluation periods, B2B marketing must adhere to company buying cycles.
The decision whether to buy software as a business depends on many internal timing factors and the education and approval of several decisions makers or decision influencers within an organization. The timing must be right.
For example, if you have just bought a new marketing automation suite, you will not shop around for another such product for at least a couple of years. No matter how hard you are sold to.
Studies by various vendors have shown that in a lot of industries only about 5% of your total addressable market are currently actively looking for the product you have to offer.
We already know how to capture demand of those 5% in your market who are ready to buy: Direct Response Marketing:
PPC Ads
Outbound marketing
Intent-keyword SEO and Google Ads
But what to do with the people who currently don’t want to buy?
What about the ~95% of the target buyers who are currently not looking for what you have to sell? Let’s look at two things we can do to make sales easier in the future.
1. Building mental availability, so they think of you when they need X
This starts with raising awareness of your product: what is it, what do you use it for, when do you use it.
If the space you're in is very crowded, take a fundamentally differentiated position in the market (different Jobs To Be Done, etc). Aim to be maximally visible for all category buyers.
That means be active on organic social, do various forms of content marketing, brand ads, events, and so on - all the things you already know you should be doing. Quality matters here - producing mediocrity will do very little for you.
2. Engineering more triggers to remind people they need X
When do people think that they might need to do X?
For instance, a typical trigger for thinking of a customer feedback tool like Wynter is when a company is re-doing its website or changing its positioning. That's great, but that doesn't happen too often.
So they focus on getting people to think of them also when they're launching that webinar registration page, when they deploy those new PPC landing pages where they drive a lot of revenue-related traffic to, when they're optimizing their sales funnel, and so on.
First, make a list of 'events' that happen in your target customers' life where they might/should think of you. Then, develop marketing campaigns/efforts to raise awareness that your company should be used for those things.
A great example of this is what everyone's favorite media company Profitwell is doing with their content: essentially they have a 'show' for each of their use cases. So they're reaching category buyers AND educating the market about their use cases through edutainment.
Three Takeaways of this mental model
1. Mind the buying cycle - In B2B only 5-10% of the market currently is in buying mode for what you have to offer. The other 95% do not want to be sold to, but educated instead.
2. Direct Response Marketing for the 5% who want to buy - People who are ready to buy want and should hear what you have to offer right now. So use traditional direct response channels like PPC Ads, outbound marketing and intent-keyword SEO to reach them.
3. Educate the 95% who are not ready to buy - Focus on being top of mind for all the potential customers who are currently not ready to buy. Your goal is to build brand affinity, trust and knowledge around the topics your company seeks to make an impact on.
→ Do not hard-sell people who are not ready to buy with direct-response methods. Yes you might convince a few and make a couple more sales in the short-term. But you will also turn off A LOT of future would-be-buyers if you keep talking about yourself instead of providing value and building trust in your market and industry.
🧰 Tools of the Trade:
Articles, Tools and Inspiration for Marketers
💬 Live in the world while you are alive
"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” - Joan Didion
👨🎓 Marketing & Leadership Education
[Promo] How to successfully launch a Product-Led Strategy - Our friends over at Realgrowthhacking are organizing a webinar on PLG strategies. Use this link to sign up.
Marketing is More Than Growth - “Becoming a marketing leader means moving beyond the traditional definitions of growth and integrating the three domains of marketing: brand marketing, growth marketing, and product marketing. Leaders can then forge stronger strategies by proactively assessing changes in the market, the customer, and the business that necessitate a shift.”
🤩 Brands and (digital) Products that caught my eye
[Promo] Unbundling Report for Sub-Reddit “r/marketing” - 400k - this is the number of subscribers on r/marketing! Now, what are they talking about, who they are, and what they love? No need to read all the posts to find it out, Ben from Unbundling Reddit just issued their last report on this subreddit. Super helpful if you sell to marketers.
Scrap - A tool to scrape and create leads lists from Google Maps.
Audioread - This nifty Chrome extension allows you to queue up and listen to any blog article, PDF or email in your favorite podcast app.
📚 Interesting reads
The Future of the European Union - Over the years, comfy Europe learned to put well-being before values. Now, for the first time in a long time, the Europe is united in defending its values. Where do we go from here?
Attention Deficit - Attention deficit has become a trait — not a condition. Distractibility, inner frenzy, and impatience define modern life. Now attention is the scarcest resource.
⛑️ Reflections From the Trenches
On Procrastination: Manage What Already Exists
It is tempting when it comes to our To Do list to focus our attention on an imaginary future.
We can so easily get caught up in future plans, in grand visions, in theoretical scenarios about what could/should/would happen. But if you treat productivity as a way to improve your relationship with reality, it becomes very clear that we have to focus our attention instead on “managing what already exists.”
Instead of all the tasks you will or should do, how about the ones you’ve already started but not finished?
How about following up on that thread you started, wrapping up the final stages of the last project you worked on, or gathering the random papers sitting on your desk right now?
Okay, but what about the future?
The truth is, the future doesn’t exist.
At least not the way you have carefully arranged it in your head.
If you can’t manage the work-in-process that exists now, what makes you think you will be successful in managing the work yet to come?
When you commit to managing the work that already exists, a curious thing happens. The part of your mind that was occupied just keeping track of that work gets freed up. The stress and anxiety of not quite knowing how much is actually on your plate is relieved.
Paradoxically, shifting the time horizon of your planning closer to the present creates the space you need to imagine the future you want to create.
When you manage what exists now, your mental map of the world gets just a little more accurate.
You see more clearly how that action you took weeks ago produced the situation you have now.
You see how certain decisions led to a certain outcome.
You close the feedback loop between the past and the present, which makes your predictions about the future that much more accurate.
That's it for this week.
Talk soon,
Sandro