Why your Marketing Machine is Broken

This article applies to small B2B services companies with a complex sale (e.g. IT, engineering, software development companies).

Some marketing sucks.

Why?

Because it’s ineffective.

Let’s make sure we’re on the same page.

Here’s what I think your marketing should be focused on (in order of importance):

  1. Sales-ready lead generation
  2. Sales-ready lead generation
  3. Sales-ready lead generation
  4. Customer experience improvements
  5. Supporting optimization of the true value of a new customer (see How To Determine the True Value of a New Customer)
  6. Marketing-qualified lead generation (identifying those that are a good fit, but don’t currently have a need).

There is a place for “brand image” and fluffy, funny, catchy videos, but it can’t be the core of your marketing if you’re a smaller B2B company.

The core of your marketing needs these 3 elements to be effective:

  1. Empathy
  2. Understanding what problems you solve that your customers want most
  3. Ability to analyze small data sets

Top reasons I see smaller B2B services companies struggle with marketing:

  1. You’re engaging people that don’t have a need (and probably never will).
  2. Your marketing and sales groups don’t work together as a team.
  3. You think that marketing is about logos and pretty pictures.
  4. You think that your potential customer cares about you.
  5. You’re just blabbing about yourself.
  6. Your content is focused on you, not the problems you solve or your customer.
  7. You think your company’s skill set is easily transferable to a new application space.
  8. You think your company culture is something that it’s not.
  9. You think you need to be a household brand name.
  10. You think that your customer base is those “people that need [insert solution we provide]”.You believe in the “build it and they will come” philosophy.
  11. You’re in denial about what it takes to acquire a new customer.

You’re engaging people that don’t have a need.

A lot of time and effort is put into engaging your audience. Especially with content. You think hard about what your customer wants to learn about that overlaps with what you know about as well.

Be careful here. You can easily fool yourself into thinking that you’re engaging the right people because you’ve found topics that your target audience is interested in. These people (often DIYers) may gobble up your content all day long without ever becoming a customer. That’s not to say that none of your content can’t be in this category, but you need to be honest with yourself about how much of it is in this category.

Your marketing and sales groups don’t work together as a team.

Marketing and sales is all about the customer and their needs. From a buyer’s perspective, marketing and sales is all a single (albeit complex) journey, so why do you think you can operate your sales and marketing groups as segregated entities? You can’t, or at least, you shouldn’t if you want to be effective. You need to be marching to the same drum beat. It’s not that you’ll perform the same activities. You won’t. Although you will work together in several areas, such as:

  1. content creation,
  2. business strategy (especially when it comes to priorities),
  3. and digging into the depths of the customer and their problems, pain points, and mindset.

So how do you get everyone rallying around the same goals? You create common goals that everyone is targeting. A goal could be around increasing quantity or quality of sales-ready leads, content that supports the sales process, or even increasing awareness of your company. The goal doesn’t need to be quantitative (you’ll actually have a hard time getting buy-in on that until you have some baseline numbers to reference as a starting point), but strategically you want to be able to align the vast majority of your activities with your goal. If you can look back at the core of your activities and explain how they tie back to your common goal, you’re headed in the right direction.

You think that marketing is about logos and pretty pictures.

If you think this, get help now. If not from RocLogic, then someone else. You can spin your wheels forever on this one and not get traction. It’s not that visuals don’t matter, it just shouldn’t be the focus. Check out this article on good and bad reasons to overhaul your website.

You think that your potential customer cares about you.

They don’t. And it’s kind of nuts to think otherwise, yet I see this one all the time.

I’m not saying they don’t care about you as a human being in general, but they don’t care about your company, or what you’re trying to sell. They care about the problem that they have and how to make it go away.

You’re just blabbing about yourself.

I see utter self-promotion all over the place, and sometimes not even about cool things.

Sometimes I see small companies blab about inviting people to their booth at XYZ trade show without even a good reason to do so other than the company wants them to. Nuts.

Other times it’s self-promotion about expanding to a new location or a holiday party or some award that only your company cares about.

Just stop. It’s not getting you where you want to go, and it’s just raising the noise floor for everyone.

You’re content is focused on you, not the problems you solve or your customer.

Oh empathy…. This one can be challenging, I’ll give you that. But you’ve got to try.

Of course you have to say something about yourself, but make sure you’re honing in on the aspects that your customer cares about. You really need to put yourself in their shoes. There are some really effective ways to go about this.

You think your skillset is easily transferrable to a new application space

Let’s say you have a particular solution that you’ve been delivering on for a long time. It’s your bread and butter. Someone in your company decides that you can deliver a new solution to a new set of customers.

Careful… just because your company has the skillsets to tackle a new application area, doesn’t mean new customers will believe you can. What matters here is how big of a stretch it is from where you’ve been to where your company is trying to grow.

If you can still mostly speak the same language, you’re probably in a decent spot. If it doesn’t quack like a duck though, you’d better be approaching your existing customers first before you try to take on new ones. You need proof points.

You think your company’s culture is something that it’s not

If your company is funny, showcase that. If your company is serious, showcase that.

Don’t pretend to be the super cool progressive company if that’s not you.

Be authentic.

You think you need to be a household brand name.

Sometimes small companies try to seem bigger than they are. Why? There are advantages to being small as well. You’re likely more flexible, quicker, and have less overhead than the big guy.

The problem really comes into play if you spend a lot of time and/or money on becoming a well-known brand. You just won’t have the budget to rise above the noise.

If you do feel like you need to be well-known, then really narrow your universe so that you can be known within a niche community. If you’re wondering if you should be more narrow or less, lean towards being more narrow.

You think that your customer base is those “people that need [insert solution we provide]”.

Whenever a company describes their customer base as those people that need what they have to offer it makes me cringe. This means you don’t know who your customer is, or your customer base is so broad that they can’t be described.

  • If the former is true, there’s ways to address this with feedback and analysis.
  • If the latter is true, there are other ways to address it by breaking the set into multiple subsets.

You believe in the “build it and they will come” mentality.

This one can come into play when you have subject matter experts (SMEs) making decisions as SMEs, as opposed to SMEs making decisions as business leaders.

You can spend obscene amounts of money and energy on developing a solution that has no discernable or findable customer need.

Now re-read that last sentence. Don’t do this.

It’s all about the need.

There are various methods to approaching this problem. I’m a fan of any methods that let you get feedback from the market quickly and without having to go all-in.

Check out why you need a niche and what to do about it.

You’re in denial about what it takes to acquire a new customer.

If you think you can just slap a landing page down or get a booth at a trade show and the customers will come pouring in, you’ve got a rough road ahead of you my friend.

It takes a LOT of work to acquire a new customer. It takes a lot of pieces to line up in the right way to get even the opportunity to acquire a new customer, not to mention actually close the business. You can do 7 out of the 8 things right, but that one thing you do wrong will prevent you from your ultimate goal.

The good news is that once you get a marketing machine and sales machine running, things happen with a lot less effort (it’s still work, but it’s more manageable).

Next Steps

Want to try to fix your marketing machine and start focusing more on sales-ready leads? Reach out and we can chat.