Target Marketing Best Practices: Connect With Your B2B Tech Customers

Target Marketing Best Practices: Connect With Your B2B Tech Customers

Sharpen your arrows! We are going to help you hit your target’s bullseye every time — your target audience that is. 

When creating your business, connecting with your target market was your first priority, so why does it feel so difficult to continue connecting with them. Well, your customers are a moving target, with constantly changing pains and needs. It’s important to meet your customers where they are today. This is where customer research to determine your target market folds into your overall marketing strategy. 

Target marketing is crucial to every sales and marketing strategy because it’s the foundation everything else is built on.

• Sales “chases” the target buyer
• Marketing “messages” to the target market
• Marketing campaigns “meet” the target market where they shop.

You must know your audience, study them, and discover their needs to even begin your campaigns and drive leads. 

So let’s hit your target audience, so your marketing and sales team can thrive.

To effectively connect with your audience, you must mold your marketing strategy to their ever-changing needs. Targets move and change as we discussed in — “How to Reset Target Marketing in the Wake of a Pandemic.” Your customers’ needs change due to their environment. 

Therefore, you need to reevaluate how you’re going to approach your target market every campaign. 

• Are your customers’ needs the same they were a year ago? 
• What pains are my customers feeling right now?
• Will your campaign resonate and differentiate you with your target audience?

B2B Tech Marketing Best Practices – Set Yourself up for Success With Customers from the Beginning

How does hitting your target market set you up for success? When you hone in on your target demographic and truly understand their pains and needs, that knowledge will fuel the rest of your strategy. It will help you hit the bullseye and see success in all areas such as:

• Content Strategy – You need to know who your audience is, so your content resonates with them. And when your content is valuable to them, you form a strong, loyal customer relationship. 
• Value Proposition and Messaging – Your proposition and message should reflect your audience. Use keywords that speak directly to them, so they understand you can provide what they need. Then, your positioning can shift depending on the exact audience a piece of content like email, social, and ads aim to attract.
• Sales and Marketing Alignment – Your sales and marketing can unite when you both have a clear idea of your target audience because both teams revolve around the customer and their needs. You don’t want to be on a different page of who your audience is and how to attract them.
• Integrated Marketing and Campaigns – All your campaigns and marketing should focus on the customer, so you need to know your target audience to achieve your goals for your campaigns.

Find Your Target Audience — The 3 Biggest Mis-steps in Targeting Your B2B Tech Audience

Just like an archer must set themselves up with a good stance and form before releasing their arrow to hit the target, you have to set up before you can connect with your target audience.

Here are the top 3 mis-steps which Forbes points out in their article when targeting your audience:

1. You aren’t watching your competition

Work smarter, not harder. Your competition has probably already done some leg work with researching their target audience, and you can use that. You should look at your competitions’ 

• • Messaging on their platforms
  • Claims and angles on their campaigns
  • Popular seasonal trends they focus on
  • Sales approach and method

Things like these will give you insight into how your competitors try and reach their audience. What keywords are your customers using to search for answers to their pains? Have your competitors seen success with their marketing strategy? Are there any areas of opportunities for you to stand out from your competitors?

HubSpot states that finding what your competition is missing during marketing planning is key. You want to be different enough, even more specific, than your competition so that a person chooses you over them.

2. You’re not engaging with your audience

The best way to get to know your audience is to talk to them:

• • Start conversations on social media
  • Talk to them on the phone
  • Email back and forth in marketing and sales emails
  • Post in online groups in your industry

Through conversations, not only will your audience see that you actually care about their needs and goals, but you will gain a depth of qualitative research you can only discover through direct customer input. 

Your qualitative research will help inform your quantitative research as you will truly know what to research. Both qualitative and quantitative research are pivotal in shaping your marketing strategy for the better. 

3. You don’t truly know your customer

You can also learn from current customers. To help in our understanding of our clients’ target audiences, we conduct personal interviews with customers. We want to discover what their buying process is like to shape our campaigns:   

• • What pains they are experiencing that lead them to solutions like yours?
  • What business activities trigger those pains?
  • What keywords do they use in their search?
  • What channels do they use regularly?
  • Who and what influences them in their purchasing?

Gathering all this in-depth target market research allows you to know for certain where to find your customers and how to aim your arrow and hit the bullseye.

The Benefits and ROI of Target Marketing

General campaigns addressing “general” pains won’t help you truly connect with your target buyer and it definitely won’t help you separate your company from the competition. You’ll find yourself not hitting the mark and ultimately losing people to your competitors.

You get the best results when you can get the closest to the bullseye (their pain) by taking the time to research, study and understand your target market.

HubSpot found that emails aimed at a target customer “can improve click-through rate by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Also, they drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails.” 

Archers aim to hit the bullseye on the field just how you should aim for the bullseye on the B2B business “field” to stay competitive and see great marketing and sales results! Do you need help hitting your target marketing bullseye?

Book your free 30-minute consultation with our B2B tech marketing experts to learn more about how target marketing and buyer persona research should fold into your marketing and demand generation strategy.