As a B2B Marketer, you're still marketing to individuals.
Key to great B2B Marketing messaging is to understand that you are convincing someone to spend someone else's money. In addition, you have to help them make it easy for the organization to move forward, vs. adding another complex decision.
This means you need three levels of positioning, value proposition and messaging.
- Appeal to the individual using traditional B2C messaging rules. Understand their wants and desires. What do they hate? Who is their villain? What social group do they want to belong to? What will make them look better? What can help them grow personally? This is based on the typical "Maslow Pyramid" based messaging.
Step one gets them to open your email, click on your search link or consume your content.
- Equip them with tools to go talk to their boss or other stakeholders and get budget, approval or support. These are the "economic" arguments. How will your solution help them save money, do things faster, improve quality, or make the company or their boss look good?
- Mitigate any objections of the technical, financial, process or legal type. A B2B buyers' decision will encounter multiple people who can say NO and are less eager (or able) to say YES. Now that your Point of Contact is excited about the solution, you need to help her "sell" it internally by making it very easy for her to handle objections from IT, Security, Legal, Finance or even Sales who might think your change can impact their prospects.
Our job as B2B Marketers is to build our value prop and messaging framework to address all these three layers. This is Key to the B2B Buyers Journey.
