How to make a marketing plan for high-tech B2B?

You may have the best product in the world but, if nobody knows about it, you will likely not sell very much. The essence of marketing is to communicate to your relevant potential customers why they should buy your product.

There are a lot of different marketing channels to use like TV-Commercials, on-line ads and your website. Likewise, you can create a lot of different kind of content but, it can be overwhelming and expensive to find the right strategy that will be efficient for your marketing efforts.

In this blog post I’ll share my experience on effective marketing strategies when you are selling high-tech products to engineers and scientist in a business-to-business model.

What are the goals for your marketing efforts?

The first thing to ask yourself is: “what are the goals of my marketing efforts?” When you ask about goals for marketing a lot of people will mention things like getting more followers, getting more visitors on the website and higher ranking in Google. These are very nice sub-goals but, the overall marketing goal for most companies selling B2B is to generate relevant and good leads that can be handed to your sales team. The main goal can also by to sell the company or attract new investors. If you are hiring a lot of new employees a goal of marketing can actually be to attract applicants.

In this blog post I will assume the overall goal is to create more leads.

Some marketing activities can quite easily be linked to your overall goals whereas other activities will be very hard to link to your goals. As an example, let us say you are doing a time-limited marketing campaign to brand your company with some on-line, printed and social media ads. One of your potential customer sees this and makes a note of your company. Several months later when the customer has a specific need, he fills out a contact form on your website to get more information. One year later a purchaser from the same company contacts you by phone to get a quote for your product. In this example it is very hard to figure out which specific marketing effort actually led to the new lead. And maybe that is actually not so important.

I recommend to avoid trying to be too detailed in the analysis of your marketing efforts and accept that you will not be able to measure everything. As mentioned above, the key thing is that the sum of all your marketing efforts creates more good leads.

Your target audience

In any communication situation it is important to know your audience such that you can shape your content to be relevant for them and choose the marketing channels they actually use. For instance, if your audience is not on Facebook, you should clearly not spend money on advertising your products on Facebook.

In our case, the audience is typically engineers and scientist that are looking for a high-tech product like the one you are making. However, purchasers, business developers, CEOs, investors and future employees are also part of the target audience for most companies.

The customer journey

The key to your marketing strategy is the customer journey, which describes the process from when the potential customer (the prospect) becomes aware of your company for the first time until he or she decides to buy your products. Unlike the retail business, where purchase decision might be done in a few minutes or hours, the purchase process is generally very long – often months or years – in business-to-business. Understanding the B2B customer journey is therefore extremely important in order shape your marketing content and channels to keep your company “top-of-mind” to ensure the highest possible likelihood that the prospect will eventually become your customer.

There are three main phases of the customer journey and, the marketing channels and contents will be different for each phase as described below. Also, it is very important to consider how you help the prospect move from one phase to the next by so-called call-to-actions.

Awareness

In the awareness phase the customer does not know your company and is likely trying to find a solution to a problem or to learn more about a specific topic. So, we must choose some marketing channels that are non-specific to your company and that your target audiences uses to search for information. The content would typically be tutorials, how-to-guides and product selection guides that help the prospect understand how your technology can solve his/hers problem.

A good example of a marketing channel that works well for the awareness phase is landing pages on your website that show up in Google searches – both organic (un-paid) and Google search Ads (Paid). This means that you must create pages on your website with good tutorials and guides and optimize them for the Google searches. The general rule is that if you write good relevant content your target audience will find it. However, it does help to research a bit on popular search phrases and optimize your content accordingly. The challenge for niche markets is very often that you want to be as specific as possible in the keywords you want to found on but you also want to address a large group of people.

Typical call-to-actions in the awareness phase are typically that they sign up to your newsletter and follow you on social media. Make sure to place clearly visible buttons for those call-to-actions on you landing pages.

Interest

When the customer already knows your company and is following you to learn more about your products, he/she is in the interest phase. In this phase we can use newsletters (direct mail) and posts on social media to send out information about new products and use cases for instance. The main goal here is to regularly remind the prospect of your company and products.

The desired call to actions could be that the customer clicks on a link in a newsletter to read more on your website or fills our a form on the web sites to get in contact with you.

Consideration

Finally, the prospect is now ready to order a product from you and the main channel for this is your website with good, easy to navigate product specifications and pricing or ordering info.

At this point the main call to action is that the customer requests a quote.

Which type of content to focus on?

Content can be text, pictures, video, graphics or a combination of these The main requirement for content to be good is that it is relevant for your target audience. The readers should be able to quickly determine that it will be valuable for them to read the content otherwise they quickly move on to the next search result in Google. We all receive tons of information every day so whatever you post on-line has to stand out. A few really interesting posts are better than a lot of un-interesting posts.

In my experience, the best content is technical guides and tutorials that is not too salesy. Generally, you should think of a question that your target audience has and create content that answers that question. You may think that your don’t really have anything worthwhile to write. But, I guarantee that there is a large amount of knowledge among your colleagues that just needs to be made accessible to your prospects.

Here is a list of content types that I recommend to focus on exemplified by a coffee machine as the product

• How to guides – How do you select the right coffee machine?
• Tutorials – How does a coffee machine work?
• Application examples – How to cost efficiently run a huge amount of coffee machines
• Calculators – enter the amount of cups of coffee used in your company and get a calculation of how many machines and the required water and power supply you need.
• Customer cases – Read how Great Fun Learning reduced their power consumption by 25 % by switching to intelligent coffee machines
• Product information – Data sheet for Coffee Machine model C0FF-33
• Invitations – Meet us at Coffee World Exhibition booth 1234 in Kona
• Corporate news – We are investing 200 mio EUR in a new factory in Kona and creating 1000 new jobs.
• Company culture – Hear what our employees say about working for us in this video

Which channels to focus on?

The choice of marketing channels depends on your target audience, products and budget but, below is a list of what I consider primary (must do) and secondary (can do) channels that will work well for most companies selling high-tech products to engineers and scientist in a business-to-business environment.

All the secondary marketing channels can be very effective but, if you have limited time and resources I suggest to focus on the primary channels.

Primary (must do)

• Contributed articles in technical journals/magazines
• SEO optimized landing pages
• LinkedIn posts (free)
• Newsletter
• Exhibitions/trade fairs
• Press releases

Writing contributed articles in trade magazines are a lot of work but also reaches a large audience outside your company’s direct followers. And, the magazines are generally considered high quality and trusted sources of information. As mentioned previously, Search Engine Optimized landing pages on your website can be very effective in attracting new prospects early in their buying process. LinkedIn is still the main social media for high-tech professionals and posting good content regularly will keep your company top-of-mind among your followers. By engaging your followers to repost your content you can even use LinkedIn to reach new prospects. A list of people that have actively chosen to subscribe to your newsletter is a very, very valuable asset because it gives you a targeted audience to communicate with directly. Participation on a trade fair with a booth is in my experience still one of the most efficient ways to get new leads even though it does take time and the cost can be high. Press releases about corporate news or new product launches should be sent to a large group of media which in turn will print your news more or less unedited and thereby reach a much larger audience.

Secondary (can do)

• Google Ads
• Ads in printed and/or on-line magazines
• Webinars
• Youtube
• Twitter
• Facebook, Instagram
• Podcasts

In contrast to contributes articles, ads are generally quite ineffective and expensive. Webinars are – just as contributed articles – a lot of work but, they can be effective to reach new prospects. If you have video material it may not be too much work to create a company Youtube channel and post the videos there. Youtube is actually becoming a major search engine for many people. Twitter is used a lot for politicians and the media and not so much by the engineering community. Having said that, investors tend to use Twitter so, if you are looking for new investors you might want to consider Twitter. Facebook and Instagram are used by engineers but, mostly for their private life and not for the professional work. Facebook however, can be a good channel to reach new employees. Finally, Podcasts are the new channel but, at the moment I do not believe it is used much by the engineering community for professional related topics.

I hope this information was helpful and I welcome comments and suggestions. You are very welcome to contact me if you want to learn more.