Adept Research - Specialists in Business to Business Market Research.

Many thanks to all of you who have recently followed Adept Research recently. Greatly appreciated.

Having a great time at The Customer Show. Nice to catch up with Mandy Admiral from CDM.

Scoping Out Your B2B Marketing

I have noticed some very good articles on B2B market recently, but one thing appears to be missing. A set of key logical steps to get the B2B marketing process started. So here are my key steps to help you get started.

SEGMENTATION

How have you segmented your B2B target market? So not just the companies you do business with, but the key people within those companies. Who are they? What do you know about how they make their buying decisions? This flows into Selling.

SELLING

Your sales team probably has a diverse range of skills and experience. Has any attempt been made to profile your team in such a way that you can match up the best person for a specific type of potential customer? For example, while some customers are purely in the procurement/buying space, others may be more in the technical/development space. The latter operate to a different set of priorities. So they will need their own unique selling approach.

So from the above, how can you use the business relationship skills of your team members to effectively separate your B2B offering from your competition? This leads into Branding.

BRANDING

Does your B2B offering have a sense of its unique brand identity? Ie. What does its brand actually stand for in the market?
If your B2B offering comes up in people’s conversations, what would you like them to say about your company? This leads into to Promotion.

PROMOTION

How well set up is your website? How well have you covered the basics for your target market? Now, what are the business relationship messages you are trying to send here?
What other promotional tools do you use? How well are they integrated with the rest of your marketing? How flexible/agile is your marketing? Be honest with yourselves here. Is it really as good as it could be?

B2B INSIGHTS

Is your B2B point of difference product focused? Or service focused? Keeping in mind that behind every successful product there is also a strong service component. Products cannot succeed just on their own. If you are a B2B service provider, you are only as good as the tools you have, so the product has to be good enough to support your service offering.

FINALLY

If you dont have the answers to the above questions readily available, then its time to start your B2B market research process. Before you competitors do and start eating your lunch!

Data vs Analysis vs Insights

You have probably heard the term insights a lot lately. But what actually is and insight? To find out we need to go back a couple of steps and look at how insights are generated.

We start with data collection.

Data can be the aggregated information we receive as a result of performing market research. This can be qualitative, the reasons why something happens. It can be quantitative, when we measure to what extent something is happening.

For qualitative data, it is the key words, phrases and verbatim answers to our research questions. Via a focus group or a depth interview. Plus our observation of the body language. Obviously this can be somewhat limited in a zoom interview, but facial expressions can still be seen.

For quantitative data, it is the number of times we receive a certain answer to the same question we have asked of all the people we are researching. These people are the survey sample and they can number in the hundreds or thousands. We then calculate how these numbers translate into percentages. So for example: A sample of 1,000 people are asked a yes or no question on a certain topic. If 600 people say yes, then we have a figure of 60% here. That then gives us meaningful data to work with.

Now lets look at analysis.

Here we are looking at the data in front of us and asking; what is it telling us about an issue, a product or a service? Then we also ask why is that happening? So the analysis can be for an emotional or a rational series of responses. But importantly, this starts to build up a clearer picture of where all the data and its analysis are taking us.

We then need to match this up with who actually gave us those answers. So the demographic profile of the people we have researched. This then provides us with clarity.

Which brings us to insights.

Insights are the conclusions we reach after we have collected and analysed our data.Insights enable us to:

Confirm some things about the market that we suspected were happening, but we were not sure.

Junk a few myths about the market. Which is a very good thing as believing false myths can cause us to make marketing mistakes.

Uncover something we did not know. But now we can benefit from this knowledge in the future. These new facts are the real insights, which now give us a competitive marketing advantage over our rivals.

Duncan Buchanan on LinkedIn: When can B2B and B2C Market Research Combine Together? ...