There’s a wide variety of marketing channels to connect with your target audience. Social media and email marketing offer a highly-personalized way of reaching out to customers compared with television and/or radio commercials and direct mail. However, while you’ll want to use digital methods too, there’s still no replacement for B2B telemarketing when it comes to connecting in a meaningful personal way with your target audience.
Related: B2B Lead Generation Strategies for Success
Table of Contents
What Is the B2B Target Audience?
Think of your B2B target audience as a group of people who you want to contact and demonstrate how your products and services are the solutions to their business challenges and problems. They are your ideal customers. Your target audience meets all of the criteria to become your best customers.
Let’s look at four aspects of a solid B2B target audience:
1. Their Needs
The first thing you should understand about your B2B target audience is their needs and how important they are to both them and your business. Your products and services need to fulfill your target audience’s needs to create a solid match and mutual interest. What you’re trying to do is deliver value to those customers with your products and services.
However, everyone perceives value differently, and it’s highly influenced by their target audience’s needs and what they need right now. B2B deals are usually much larger than B2C ones, which is why it’s essential to understand your customer’s needs fully.
All in all, if your target audience doesn’t have an inherent need for the solutions that your company can provide, it’s time to create a better target list. We’ll get into that later in the article.
2. Their Decision-Making Power
Another significant consideration when identifying your target audience is their decision-making responsibilities and capabilities. You don’t want to waste time on customers that might need your solution but don’t have decision-making responsibilities or financial means to make the purchase.
The two parties you should focus on in your target audience are decision-makers and influencers (and no—we’re not talking about the social media kind). Influencers will have a say in what to purchase (or not) for the company. They are typically SMEs who understand what you have to offer and can educate the decision-makers about your services. These people are usually at managerial levels within the organization.
The decision-makers are the people who will (hopefully) sign the deal and make the final purchase decision. They aren’t necessarily experts like the influencers, but they will be knowledgeable about the company’s needs.
To successfully advertise and sell to your target audience, you need to satisfy these two groups.
3. Their Urgency
By urgency, we mean how quickly your target audience needs a solution to their problem. If their urgency is low, it can turn into a long sales process with a lot of time spent going back and forth with your customers.
Target audiences with low urgency can cost you money, resources, and potentially lost opportunities elsewhere. We recommend focusing on the people who have the highest urgency.
People with high urgency are the most likely to move quickly through the sales process, make a fast purchase, and avoid unnecessary delays.
- Low urgency customers mean a slow sales process and a high cost per acquisition.
- Medium urgency customers mean an average sales time and an average cost per acquisition.
- High urgency customers mean a rapid sales process and the lowest cost per acquisition—this is what we want.
Urgency levels are equally crucial for your marketing team, as creating effective content and ads means catering to that high sense of urgency.
4. Their Budget
Finally, you need to consider your target audience’s budget. There’s no reason to target people that won’t have the means to implement your solution, even if it is perfect for their organization. Selling to someone who meets the three above-mentioned criteria but is missing the budget is a waste of your time.
At times your products and services can be a perfect fit, but cost more than a small and mid-size company can budget for. Don’t underprice your products —recognize and justify your value proposition. Next, improve your audience targeting to find better matching customers.
Benefits of B2B Telemarketing for Connecting With Your Target Audience
Several specific and essential benefits come with B2B telemarketing; here are a few of them:
Direct, real-time contact
There’s simply no other way to get immediate contact with your prospective B2B buyer, allowing you to learn about their:
- Business challenges
- Plans or projects in place to resolve challenges
- Schedule and buying cycle stages/steps
- Budget availability
- Competitive analysis
At the same time, you can answer questions about your product/services and position your brand as one of the best solutions to solve their business challenge.
Reach large audiences
B2B buying decisions rarely come down to one person, especially if you’re selling a big-ticket item. Telemarketing gives you the ability to identify and reach out to multiple contacts in a fast and cost-efficient way.
Ability to segment your marketing
Segmenting your content to target specific groups on LinkedIn is possible, but every call is easily tailored to your contact’s needs when it comes to telemarketing. You cannot match the personalization possible with telemarketing through any other type of channel.
Instant feedback
By talking through various topics with your contacts, you can learn what’s on their mind and what types of content might interest them in the future. For example, if you recently published a white paper or had a video go viral, talking with your contacts and getting instant feedback on your content is priceless.
Nurture leads
Telemarketing gives you the ability to answer questions, address concerns or reservations, offer promotions, and generally move each contact along in the buying process. It gives you the ability to promote and strengthen your brand and motivate clients to consider your offering more favorably. Other forms of marketing tend to be more passive and less personal. B2B telemarketing allows you to nurture leads until they convert to customers.
B2B telemarketing allows you the chance to give your lead nurturing a boost.
If you are a company that has a longer sales cycle, you need to figure out the best nurturing process to help move prospects to the next phase of their purchasing process. Of course, you do not want to rely on prospects moving through. However, by taking a proactive approach, you can provide valuable assistance in the decision-making process.
This is an essential value-added service; you’re providing resources to inform, educate and support their decision-making. Nurturing can come in the form of offering additional content relating to their particular situation or answering questions about your product or service. It’s about keeping the lines of communication open so that you emerge as a trusted partner, rather than a company that keeps emailing them junk or clutters up their social media feed with useless content.
Provide the correct information at the right time
One of the benefits of using telemarketing as part of your overall content marketing strategy is providing the right message when your prospect needs it most. This means that you are so closely aligned with your contacts’ decision-making phase that you’ll never send them an email designed for initial consideration of your products if they are in the final stages of making a decision.
This kind of insight into your contact’s buying decisions requires a high level of attentiveness, and telemarketing makes that possible.
Follow up with your contact
Pairing telemarketing with other communication channels enables you to follow up in a more timely way with your contacts. For instance, after talking with a potential buyer about specific challenges they experienced, you can send a follow-up email with a link to a blog post, a white paper, or a case study addressing the specific topics you’ve just talked about.
It goes the other direction, too, allowing you to make a phone call to survey recipients of your content, allowing you to evaluate the effectiveness of your content.
Keep it personal
Automation is one of the most critical developments in marketing. The ability to send a follow-up email after a potential buyer browsed your site is a valuable tool. It will often be a very productive action helping you move a contact along to the next step in your sales process. However, it does not eliminate the need for personal communication. Adding a personal touch (using telemarketing) will help you stand out in a market crowded with companies trying to save resources through automation alone.
Rather than choosing to use either digital or traditional marketing methods, consider how using both as a part of your strategy eliminates the drawbacks of each and supports their strengths. For instance, social media is passive, and you could spend a lot of time trying to develop relationships online. But, on the other hand, it’s an excellent method to broadcast a message and communicate your brand’s values using a video, white paper, infographic, etc.
By contrast, telemarketing is very proactive; it enables instant relationship-building. Unlike social media, it can be harder to use telemarketing to communicate your brand message in a way that matches the power of a video or image.
By combining telemarketing and social media benefits, you get the best of both worlds. You can build brand awareness online with social media and build relationships through telemarketing.
There’s simply no substitute for the warmth and connection that comes with a one-on-one conversation. You begin to build a relationship based on trust and loyalty, which is hard to duplicate using digital marketing channels alone.
Related: The ROI of B2B Telemarketing
How to Find Your Target Audience With B2B Telemarketing
Defining your target audience is crucial in deciding how you will distribute your content. There are several channels at your disposal in assisting in this task. Still, telemarketing can become a key part of the process of narrowing down your target audience and determining what your content marketing distribution strategies will be.
While it’s true that the best content is worthless when a proper channel isn’t utilized, there is no need to work to find a channel when no content exists. Instead, it is vital to balance creating excellent content and finding the target audience through their preferred channel.
A significant amount of research should correctly identify the target audience and their channels to inform themselves. Telemarketing is a resource that has proven invaluable to marketers who are working to identify their target audience correctly. Print advertising, email, social media, and search engine marketing are all good ways to deliver content to the target audience, but none are as proactive as telemarketing.
Telemarketing works because it targets only the audience that fits the qualifying criteria. The conversational nature of telemarketing informs the marketer about the wants and needs and their position in the buying cycle. Telemarketing helps gather intelligence that you can use to improve the content, improve products, and offer data to make fact-based decisions in the future. Furthermore, telemarketing is the channel that can deliver content in real-time to the right people.
The goal of most marketing professionals is to deliver quality content to the right people at the right time, thus generating outcomes that produce an excellent ROI. But, of course, measurable results aren’t always possible in marketing. Still, it’s easy to see exactly how much time is spent on each lead, which leads convert, and how the content is being delivered when using telemarketing.
Five Types of B2B Target Audiences
Before we go further, let’s look at five basic types of target audiences:
1. Company Size
First, you’ll need to know what size of the company to target. Start by looking at different types of company sizes by analyzing the
- Number of employees
- Amount of branches
- Yearly revenue
- Department size
This ties in with your target audience’s budget—target companies that are most likely to be able to purchase from you within your price range.
2. Location
Locations are an important segment of your target audience, too—not every business can target a global market or even a US or UK one. Look at where you can provide your solutions. The most basic locations to look at are:
- Continent
- Country
- State
- City
3. Markets & Niche
Know what niche your products are suitable for and which markets you can penetrate. B2B buyers want personalized solutions, and the more personalized you can get, the higher your conversion rate will be.
Segment your target audience into niches and markets that have similar needs and pain points. You don’t want to go too wide and target companies that will be outside your scope in a few months.
4. Psychographics
Writing compelling ad copy relies on you understanding the psychographics of your target audience—you need to know their needs, behaviors, values, etc.
B2B buyers don’t make on-the-spot decisions; they perform a lot of research to come to a rational decision for their business. Focus on the right values of your services and market them to the right buyers.
5. Demographics
Finally, we have demographics. This segment includes things like:
- Job function / title
- Number of employees
- Gross Revenue
- Language
It’s basic information, but it can help you finalize the missing pieces of your target audience and get a clear view of your customers. Demographics are also crucial for your marketing team so that they can reach buyers on a more human level, creating the personal touch that your B2B efforts need.
Create Better Distribution Habits to Reach Your Target Audience
The goal of most of your business marketing related to social media is to get as many likes, views, and followers as possible. However, are you really getting the kind of followers you want, the ones who are active with your online community and who turn into customers? Are you reaching your target audience?
There are two parts to the equation: content creation and content distribution. If you look deep into the data you have on existing customers, you’ll know more about them and have the information you need to personalize a message to every audience segment. These personalized messages are far more likely to be absorbed and acted upon. Do you know who your target audience is for your upcoming products or services? Will these offerings be a good fit for your current customers? It might take some finessing to entice new clients to come to your brand. However, if you haven’t figured out how to deliver the content to them, it’s all for nothing.
Once you have your content, it’s time to invest in the right channels that can assist you in delivering that content to an audience that is likely to jump into the buying cycle.
Your data should indicate which social media channels your target audience is most likely to visit. The chances are that you are already using Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to connect with your audience. There is a good chance you’ll need to tweak your content to fit the site. Furthermore, you can probably branch out to more sites, such as Instagram or Pinterest, and even TikToc, if that’s where you know your target audience is going to see your content.
A channel that is important in any content distribution conversation is telemarketing. This is a channel that is among the most proactive marketing methods available to you. There is power in conversation, and it comes in a couple of different variations. First, when a telemarketing professional engages in a conversation, they are able to guide the conversation to their advantage. Second, if the lead is truly uninterested in the product or service, the telemarketer can find out why. This is information can be used to the brand’s advantage.
What You Need to Market to Your Target Audience (Hint: It’s More Than Content)
Content is important in B2B marketing. It is what sets you apart and makes your business attractive to others. But good content is only as powerful as the size of your target audience and your ability to connect with that audience. Besides developing a solid content message, you need a solid strategy for getting that content in front of potentially interested business partners. The question is: how can you maximize your target audience connection points?
Making a Connection Happen
The benefits of social media marketing are increasingly highlighted, yet there is still some confusion over what makes social media an effective tool. Creating quality content and posting it is only one part of successful social media marketing.
Search engine optimization is crucial. Your content needs to utilize keywords in such a way that your target audience is directed to your content as a matter of course. Keyword-driven content will boost your connections while still communicating valuable information.
Fresh content and content promotion also need to be part of your marketing plan. Use all of your channels to promote your content and include a clear call to action in every post. You can cross-reference material between social platforms to get the most mileage from your social media content.
Email Marketing Can Leverage Content
Once you’ve created valuable B2B content, you need more than one way to get it out to your target audience. Social media alone isn’t enough. Create a blog subscription where potential partners can access information and insights that are useful to them. Direct your subscribers to your other areas (landing page, newsletter) of quality content. Finally, make your business e-newsletters more about content than selling. Your target audience will be vested in reading what is perceived as more valuable to them than to you.
Telemarketing Campaigns are Powerful Content Tools
Still, looking for ways to drive B2B partners to your content? Telemarketing is a powerful tool in this effort. Telemarketing isn’t only about brand recognition and promotion it can be about content promotion. You have control over the focus of your telemarketing outreach. When you work with a telemarketing partner, you can present a professional and informed point of contact that reveals to clients (and potential clients) your commitment to content sharing, not merely brand promotion.
Marketing to your target audience is about more than creating quality content. It’s about finding multiple ways to share your content with potential partners. It’s about being a source of valuable content that is easy to access. Content promotion eliminates the need for your audience to find your value proposition. Content promotion directs them toward it. It hands it to your target audience, and it does it across all available channels.
Using Online Forms to Get Your Target Audience’s Attention
Effectively reaching out to your consumer base requires some basic knowledge of the brain, especially if you want to achieve better success rates with your online forms.
If your online form isn’t providing the insights you’d hoped for, perhaps you’ve misjudged how your target audience perceives the form itself. While you might place a very high level of importance on the data you gain from your online forms, it’s likely that your target audience sees them as a pain, a waste of time where they have nothing to gain. Your mental approach to the online forms and that of your target audience is not the same.
Online Forms & The Brain (According to Science)
Try considering the mindset of your target audience. When a human being reads something, it affects the most primal part of the brain and the part of the brain that developed later in evolution that controls emotion, and finally, the logical part of the brain.
Scientists refer to the most primal area of the brain as the reptilian brain. It’s the part that we share with almost all other animals and exists almost solely to keep us breathing, hearts beating, and blood flowing. This part of the brain doesn’t process complex information, but roughly 95 percent of our simple, daily decisions are being processed through our reptilian brain area. We mostly make decisions based on instinct/impulse.
The emotional part of the brain is in the limbic system. Most mammals have developed the capacity to process emotion. We decide, within the limbic system, things that are pleasurable and things that are unpleasant. Once we experience something we like or dislike, the brain assigns an emotion to that stimulus for recall later. The limbic system has the capacity to ignore stimuli that evoke no emotion completely.
Most online forms appeal to a person’s logical part of their brain. The neocortex is the area where we plan out our daily routines and process logical thoughts. This area is the newest addition to our cranial area and allows us to make judgment calls based on the facts presented to us. Those of us who use our logical brains best are able to put off short-term satisfaction for long-term payoff.
Here’s How to Create Better Online Forms to Reach Your Target Audience
When you create your online forms, you are thinking the target audience will somehow be influenced to embark on the quick but unpleasant process of filling out your form. Unless your form can appeal to the reptilian brain, you’re probably pushing away the majority of people who see it.
What you need to remember is that each and every field you add to your online forms puts your target audience a step closer to avoiding the task. Too many complex questions will irritate the reptilian brain and trigger alarms in other parts of the brain that will assign a negative emotional flag. What does this mean in a practical sense? Don’t ask questions on your forms that you would not ask a person to their face. Your forms should be easy to fill out and not trigger too many emotional responses.
Use language that is easy to read and understand. If a section of your form might have the potential to be confusing, use tooltips that will help guide them through it more easily.
Finding Your Target Audience Consistently With Telemarketing
Harnessing the power of your data is paramount to finding your target audience for any product. Conversely, if you have inferior data, you’re going to get poor results.
You could have the best product imaginable, but if you’re trying to present it to the wrong audience, it’s going to fall flat. It’s akin to selling snow blowers in Phoenix. Is your data old? Your contacts could have moved or been promoted or left the industry altogether. How do you manage it, and how do you qualify it? Answer these questions to determine where you’re at with your data quality. A better idea might be to hire a telemarketing firm to help you run through some lead development techniques that identify the target market.
You need to know who the decision-makers are within your target audience. Here’s a scenario that plays out too often when the target audience isn’t identified correctly:
You make a call, but you’ve got the wrong name. There is a chance that the company you’re calling has a no-name policy, which means your call is unsuccessful. If by chance, you get routed to someone else, they might not be the person who can help you, so you get routed to another person who might not be at their desk, so you get a voicemail.
This situation can play out over and over when you don’t have correct data, and your calling campaign offers very little return on investment.
How to Fix It
You need to go through your data and profile your contacts. Make sure they have grouped appropriately and are still in the position they were when you last contacted them. Your list might not be large enough, so consider shopping for a list through a broker. Determine if the job role of the contacts on your list fits the role of someone who has decision-making power. You can even scan LinkedIn for supplemental contacts for your list.
A good way to check off useless contacts is to offer them an opt-out every 28 days. If your lead doesn’t have purchasing power, they too need to be profiled accordingly. Not every qualified lead will be ready to close the sales cycle on what you’re currently selling, but keeping them in the loop and nurturing them can lead to bigger sales later.
Reputable telemarketing firms will run a lead generation process prior to their sales efforts. They have the training to carry out telephone interviewing effectively, or as they call it, teleservices. They can quickly go through a list of leads and come out with a fully vetted list that will produce excellent results.
At Blue Valley Marketing, we know about reaching the target audience on a daily basis. When it comes to lead development and customer development, we’ve got proven processes in place to bring value to your campaign. Contact us today and find out how we can help you hit your target more consistently.
Last Updated on September 14, 2023 by Ronen Ben-Dror