Advertising, marketing, business development, branding, logo design, networking, social media, content marketing, search engine optimisation, pay per click, exhibitions, conferences, referrals, lead generation, email, snail mail and telephone calling. What a minefield for a small business! With so many companies offering advice, what should you do to grow your number of potential customers?
The simplest of marketing revolves around matching the seller to the buyer using the best match of the 4 P’s: Product, Price, Place & Promotion. In more complex situations, such as procuring expensive professional services like lawyers and architects, People, Processes and Physical evidence become important and the 4 P’s are increased to 7 P’s.
Given that services and products are ultimately purchased by people, it makes sense to design the promotion of the service or product to match the target market and communicate the proposition via a channel they will use. Traditionally this has been carried out by segmenting the market by demographics. In the case of business to business, you should target a “job role for a type of business” regardless of the person’s personal characteristics.
Research has shown that there needs to be probably at least seven points of contact before a sale will occur. As with most activities in business, the same seven standard points of contact will not work in every situation and therefore several solutions should be considered.
In the initial stages of a business, selling to those you know is often the most common way, and then you expand your market by those people referring your product or service. As businesses get established, growth via word of mouth is common. When asked, “how do you obtain your work?” most small businesses answer, “by word of mouth”.
But networking is only one point of contact. The chances are someone will also look at your web-page, look you up on social media or seek a reference before buying. So, consistency of message across all sources of information is vital and should be adapted for the audience of that platform.
Getting past growing by “word of mouth” for B2B businesses can be a big obstacle. There are more people involved in the decision and more external influences. To work out who the decision makers are, who influences them and who the decision maker must get approval from, an industry relationship map should be drawn up.
The internet age has added several hundred more channels, but your targets will only be using a small number, so identify them and don’t disregard the pre-internet channels. Referrals, advertorials and suitable physical networking still work. Everyone is different, and as a result you may be fortunate enough to form a relationship with the person in your “target ideal job role” in the least expected places.
