Tuesday Marketing Notes (Number 66—January 23rd, 2007)
A B2B Marketing Newsletter for BMA Members
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by Eric Gagnon
Whether you’re an experienced marketing manager in your company looking at entering a new and unknown market, or if you’ve just been hired to work in marketing for a new company in a new industry, or if your agency has an opportunity to land a new account in an unfamiliar industry, at some point in your marketing career you will have to get your company or client’s marketing program up and running in a market that’s new to you.
While execution is the most important part of any marketing program, you need to decide where you are going to execute, and how, by identifying the marketing media, methods, and deliverables that are a part of your marketing program. This can be intimidating, especially if you’re feeling your way around in a strange and unfamiliar market.
So, faced with having to develop a marketing plan for the new market you don’t know, where do you begin? You could haphazardly ask people in your company who think they know, or you could reactively chase the opportunities thrown your way by your company’s CEO or sales team, but the professional marketer knows how to systematically approach any new market to uncover the marketing opportunities available, and to assess the best options for launching their marketing program within this market. This process of “scoping” a new market is the first step in developing a marketing plan for a new and untried market.
Business is Business
I once knew a former marketing executive who became a venture capital investor, and who had the uncanny knack for being able to successfully size up, execute, and capitalize on a wide variety of marketing opportunities across a widely diverse range of industries. He once said to me that “business is business:” That is, when you take a close look at any new industry, there’s not much difference in the way products are sold there compared to any other industry, and there’s certainly not much that’s different in the motivations that drive people to buy one product in one market, and another, vastly different kind of product in the market that’s new to you.
Business is not only business in every market, but people—and their motivations—are the same, too. Regardless of the industry, people read trade publications, attend trade shows, access relevant Web sites, and work in companies where they can receive mailings from companies like yours. They are more, or less, likely to do some of these things more than others. And your job as a marketer is to reach the potential prospects who are most likely to buy your company’s (or client’s) product. In view of these facts, there’s no need to be intimidated by a new market when you recognize that markets, and the methods for reaching these markets, are mostly the same, regardless of the industry you’re targeting. People are people, too—and they’re all driven by the need to save money, to make money, to get ahead of the other guy, or to be more efficient, productive, or profitable in their business, regardless of what business they’re in.
Who’s Your Prospect?
The first step in scoping any new marketing project begins with a three-step process of:
1.) Identifying the best sales prospects for your company’s product or service;
2.) Locating those prospects wherever they are;
3.) Applying the best marketing tools to reach these prospects
As obvious as this may seem, many companies have wasted billions of dollars in marketing expense by making the wrong choice at any one of these steps—or ignoring these steps entirely by spending too much money on the wrong approaches to their new marketing program.
Step One: Identifying Your Company’s Sales Prospects
I’ve always felt that background experience in sales is an essential prerequisite for being a successful B2B marketing manager or agency professional, because there’s no substitute for the face-to-face process of prospecting, selling, and closing the sale to helping marketing professionals understand how to locate these likely prospects, and what motivates people to buy.
When thinking about your company’s best prospects, it helps to think like a salesman who has just been given the responsibility of selling your company’s product or service. Here are the questions a salesman would typically ask when “scoping out” a new business-to-business sales assignment:
• In what markets or industries would we find the most likely buyers of our product?
• Within these markets or industries, what are the types of companies who would be the most likely buyers?
• Who are these companies, and where are they?
• Within these companies, who would be the key person most likely to buy our product?
• What is the single characteristic, such as a job title, or a prior history of using or buying products similar to ours, that identifies these prospective buyers?
You may already know this information, but if you’re new to your company, you can get answers to these questions as you conduct your “sales rep’s de-brief” in the sales copywriting steps detailed previously in TMN #27 at this link: http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com/tmn032806.html ). Although there may be more than one or two best answers to the questions above, you are looking for a consensus opinion from your company’s sales reps that points you to your company’s one or two best kinds of prospects, not a laundry list of all the prospects your company’s sales reps call on.
Step Two: Locating Your Company’s Sales Prospects in the “Marketing Media” that Reaches Them
Once these “who is likely to buy?” questions are answered, the next set of questions relate specifically to your role in developing and executing marketing projects to reach these prospects:
• What trade publications do these prospects subscribe to?
• What trade shows and conferences do they attend each year?
• What trade associations do they belong to?
• What Web sites do these prospects link to on a regular basis?
• How do our competitors currently market and sell their products to these prospects?
• What other companies currently sell products, complimentary to our company’s products, to these prospects?
These are the essential questions asked by any experienced marketing or product manager (or researched in advance by those of us on the agency side). The answers to these questions reveal the resources available to your marketing program, and the marketing tools required to reach these prospects.
Trade Publications
You can research trade publications in any new market by checking the Standard Rate and Data Service (more commonly known as SRDS) Business Publication Advertising Source, available online (by subscription at srds.com), or free at any major city library. The SRDS directory contains nearly 10,000 publications organized into 180 business-to-business market classifications.
Each SRDS publication listing contains all the pertinent information you’ll need on that publication: Description, contact info, editorial focus, and, most important, circulation base and ad space rate information. In most markets there are usually no more than two publications (sometimes three) who dominate that market, and these are the ones you’ll find with the largest circulation figures reported to SRDS. Now would also be a good time to contact space reps for these publications and get their media kits along with several back issues of their publications—just call the publication’s space rep and they’ll give you everything you need.
If you’re in a hurry to start researching trade publications of interest, major city libraries also maintain extensive back-issue collections of trade and industry publications, so they’re a good place to start researching right away.
As you review these publications, check for products that are competitive to yours, check for ads or selling approaches in presentation that you think are especially compelling, and check for ads that repeat on a month to month basis—an ad that repeats is often an ad that’s proved itself by generating solid response each month in the publication.
Mailing Lists
While you’re checking the SRDS directories, research mailing lists available for rental from the SRDS Direct Marketing List Source, which contains listings for over 55,000 mailing lists, including lists covering your industry and market targets.
Mailing lists for your industry’s leading trade publications are usually your best choice for the initial test mailings in your marketing program, since most of your potential prospects also subscribe to one or more of these publications. You may also find one or two other promising lists of executives by job title or previous buyers of products or services similar to those sold by your company that may also be worth testing.
Trade Associations
Every market is served by at least one or two prominent trade associations, and they’re also a great place to begin the process of immersing yourself in your new market, and for gathering the marketing media you need to develop your marketing plan.
Larger trade associations maintain research libraries storing large collections of useful marketing information: Market research studies, industry analysis, trade newsletters, specialized publications, and other research that can be very useful to your marketing program. Association libraries are often accessible by prior arrangement, even to non-members. A day spent there can be quite worthwhile if the association is local to you, or you can hire an out-of-town researcher for a day to gather information for you.
Trade association member directories are often available for no or modest cost, and are a wonderful starting point for using the phone to survey these trade association lists (using the “Dumb Assistant Method,” described previously in TMN #6 at this link: http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com/tmn110105.html) is an excellent way of gathering names of prospects by job title and responsibility to build your own self-compiled mailing lists, which are often are the best mailing lists you can use in your direct mail projects.
Trade Shows and Conferences
Just as with trade publications, there are usually no more than two (sometimes three) major trade shows worth attending in any industry, and as you’re researching trade publications and trade associations you’ll soon discover the major trade show opportunities available in your field, through published trade news articles and ads in trade publications.
Assessing trade show opportunities: To evaluate whether or not a trade show you’re evaluating attracts the kinds of prospects who you believe will buy your product, ask the trade show producer for a printout of just the company names and job titles from their last year’s list of trade show attendees. Examine this list to see if the show is attracting enough of the kinds of attendees and companies you’re looking for. Asking the show producer to generate this truncated list by company name and job title only should alleviate their reluctance to give you access their entire mailing list, and gives you enough data to make an informed decision on whether or not your company should exhibit at the show.
Online
Of course, there’s always Internet search, and you can spend hours “googling” on your new market, which is also a very good way to read background articles in trade publications online, check competitors’ Web sites, and get more familiar with your market.
The quality of the results you get from any online search depends entirely on the quality of the keywords or phrases you use in your searches. Using keywords that are too general wastes your time by generating too many unwanted search results, and using keywords that are too specific in your initial Google search may cause you to miss some critically important information. So, think about the keywords you need to use in your search, and the best keywords to use first.
To start a search, ask a question: The quickest, easiest way to begin generating keywords for your search is to ask a question, by typing it into the search site’s query box:
• What is the size of the U.S. market for robotic imaging and identification systems in the U.S.?
• Where are video production companies based in Atlanta, GA?
• What is the U.S. balance of trade with China?
• What public companies are involved in the development of amorphous alloys?
• Where can I learn about industrial design used in personal computers?
• Where can I find legal forms, like a sample licensing agreement?
You can also get even better marketing-related information by combining search terms for your industry or business with other defining phrases, such as “u.s. market share,” or entering the names of leading companies in your field, combined with the keywords “competitors,” “advertising,” or “marketing.”
Scoping the Competition and Finding Complimentary Products
Another important part of your market targeting process involves assessing your competition. As a marketing professional, you need to see how your company’s competitors market, present, and sell their products, so that you can both emulate the ways your competitors appear to be successful in their marketing and, more important, establish your own company’s unique positioning relative to your competition.
Start this process by gathering your competitors’ marketing deliverables. To receive this information and make sure your company won’t be screened out as a competitor by a sharp sales rep at the competing company, ask a friend, relative, or neighbor to contact your competitors to receive your competitors’ sales information kits at their business or home address. Carefully scrutinize this material, your competitors’ print ads in trade publications, and their Web sites to get a handle on their marketing abilities, and to begin identifying weaknesses you can exploit in your own marketing program.
While checking out the competition, also make it a point to search for companies selling products that are complimentary and non-competitive to yours—i.e., where prospects and customers for the products sold by these companies may also be quite likely to buy your product as well. If your company’s product seems to be a complimentary “fit” with another company’s product line, these other established companies can often become strategic partners, co-marketers, or licensees of your company’s products in joint- or co-marketing deals that can give your company an immediate injection of sales volume, and tremendous leverage for your marketing program from marketing dollars spent in these business relationships.
Applying the Best Marketing Tools to Reach the Prospects in Your Company’s Market
After defining your prospects, and identifying the relevant marketing media you can use to reach them, you’re now ready to take the third step, which is to examine each marketing option available to you, and assess each marketing tool’s importance and priority in your marketing plan.
Next week, we’ll outline the major marketing tools and marketing media used by trade and business-to-business marketers, how they’re used, their advantages and disadvantages, and the major strategic issues facing each in your B2B marketing program . . .
Questions? Comments? Send them to me at eric@realmarkets.net
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Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), is president of GAA (www.realmarkets.net), a sales and business development consulting firm, and is the author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, the master study guide for the Business Marketing Association’s Marketing Skills Assessment, Skill Builder, and Certification (MSA/B/C) programs.
For more information on The Marketing Manager’s Handbook, available to BMA members at a special discount, link to:
http://www.businessmarketinginstitute.com/book.html
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