You must be customer centric to win in business

Often when entrepreneurs start up their business, the last thing you have is budget. Either your are in the pre-funding stage or you have some investment and are looking to bootstrap as you go. If you're looking for ideas to help you identify the steps you need to take with marketing your tech platform or SaaS - start here...

You have to know who your customer is before you build your go-to-market strategy

This really is the starting point of any marketing strategy. You simply must know who your customer is, so that you can make your value proposition highly targeted to that specific customer or segments. It needs time and research but it will be time well spent. Don't just lock it away in a drawer either, you want to be constantly reviewing it.

How you build your customer persona?

Spend some time, mapping out a customer profile, or what is sometimes referred to as creating a customer avatar or persona. Often this fits more in the retail space but the concept is not irrelevant in B2B marketing. Your clients are people and therefore you need to identify what all of their challenges are in their job right now and how your platform or SaaS answers their problems and needs. Your marketing wants to tap into their behaviours and you need to both understand their issues and demonstrate that you get it.

The crux of this activity is ensuring that you identify clearly who your ideal customer is. You will likely have various types of customers and their challenges will be different dependent on their size of business, their sector. You need to identify their challenges in business, and how your business services or products can support them to achieve the desired objectives or why they should invest in your platform or SaaS. You should spend time thinking about who your potential clients are serving and any challenges that they may also be having. This information is vital to help you to position your marketing content accurately, it will also feed into any thought leadership that you subsequently create.

Mapping out your prospects

We've found that by creating a document to map each customer segment out alongside the interconnectivity of clients helps to visualise and identify the key inputs for each persona. You will ideally look to create profile maps based on the sector that your clients operate within and understand who is involved in the process. The people using your SaaS might not be the one controlling the purse strings, so you need to work out who your sponsors are and how it might work but business size.

This is time well spent and is not something your should gloss over we cannot stress this enough and in our experience, clients often haven't gone into the depth necessary, or haven't reviewed their customer personas and value proposition for a long time. As an entrepreneur you often want to get started and hit the ground running, but you could be heading in the wrong direction if you don't get this step nailed down. The risk is that if you don't go into enough depth, you won't find the right hooks or identify what your positioning messages should be to make your prospects take note. It impacts your brand messaging and your marketing direction of travel.

Don't overlook your competitors, or potential competition, even if you are the first to market

You need to have an eye on what else is in the market place, and how your platform or service is different, identify what they are up to. You need to identify what your competition are doing, what marketing are they creating, what content are they pushing out on their website and social media platforms and can you identify how it is working for them? There are some platforms that will help you to evaluate performance of social media campaigns and others that will identify mentions by brand, or brand related to keyword - worry about this later, for now we're focussing on your proposition and positioning statements.

If you truly are the first to market, particularly with a SaaS / tech platform that replaces labour intensive processes, then you need to be factoring in your prospect's objections here. Bring in human in the loop to mitigate biases / inaccuracies (if this is an objection factor), time saved to focus on other segments of the process. Many of these reasons you will have already identified in the process of designing your product or service. But don't assume that your prospects will know this. In fact, don't assume anything, what seems obvious to you may not be, particularly when you are new to the market.

Once you have your value proposition defined, you need to identify your marketing strategy - this will involve many channels to market. You'll look to identify the best channels to reach your ideal prospects, and ways in which you can attract them to your brand. You'll also want to factor in other elements such as buying cycles - when are their budgets typically reviewed? You'll want to focus your marketing activities in the run up to these buying cycles, so factor this into your planning.

With over 60% of marketing budgets being spent on the wrong activity, you want to identify the right strategy and when to turn on the spending tap.

Digital marketing allows you to adjust your spending and as long as you identify the parameters of your campaigns performance, collect and analyse data as a whole, not just on each element, you'll get the insight you need.

Picking the best marketing strategies for your business right now

Marketing is the same science whatever the product or service you are selling. The difference will be in the marketing levers you might pull to generate demand in your product or service. As identified above, the first starting point for any B2B business is to clarify who your customer is.

Got a question? Drop us a note here hello@rad-marketing.co.uk and follow #snackablemarketing on LinkedIn for more tips, ideas and suggestions.