Understand what matters to B2B buyers and make your marketing more relevant
Inside companies, we spend a lot of time discussing questions like:
How can we reach more potential customers?
How can marketing help sales build pipeline?
How do we communicate our new capabilities?
Which channels should we invest in?
How can our content better support sales?
How do we show that marketing is making a difference?
Fair enough. These things matter. Marketing needs to help the business grow, and sales needs opportunities.
And it's easy to see why these questions take up so much attention. Leadership wants growth, sales needs opportunities, and marketing has campaigns to deliver.
But how often do we stop to think about what's actually going on in our customers' world?
What they're trying to achieve, what's worrying them, what they're struggling with and why they might pay attention to us in the first place?
We may know our target segments and buyer roles, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're looking at our marketing through their eyes.
Meanwhile, in your customer's world...
The people we're trying to reach may be having entirely different conversations:
How can we get this project back on track without putting more pressure on the team?
Is our current way of working still good enough, or is it starting to hold us back?
What happens if we don't change anything?
How do I convince my colleagues that this is worth investing in?
Is solving this really worth the time, cost and disruption?
Could we handle this ourselves with the tools we already have, perhaps using AI?
These questions may have very little to do with our product, at least on the surface.
Customers are busy running their businesses, managing people, delivering projects, controlling costs and meeting expectations. They have their own priorities, and our offering is likely to be only a small part of their world.
Some may already be looking for a solution. Others may be dealing with a problem they've learned to live with. And some may not have considered that there's a better way of doing things.
What matters to them can change, too.
A problem that wasn't worth addressing six months ago might suddenly become a priority because a major project has gone wrong, costs are rising or the business is growing faster than its processes can cope with.
And in B2B, we're rarely speaking to just one person. A business leader, a technical evaluator and someone who will use the solution every day may have very different priorities and concerns. They may also have different reasons to support or resist a change.
That's why knowing who our buyers are is only part of the picture.
We also need to understand what's going on in their world, what they're trying to achieve and when what we offer might actually matter to them.
Where does your offering fit into their world?
We might be excited about the automation features in our new software, while our customer is wondering how their team can handle a growing workload without hiring more people.
Unless we can connect what we offer to something that matters to them, why would they pay attention?
Before deciding what to post, where to advertise or which campaigns to run, it's worth looking at how our customers' priorities connect with what our business can actually offer.
I find it helpful to think about four things.
1. Customer context: What's going on in their world?
Who are we trying to reach? What are they responsible for, and what are they trying to achieve?
What gets in their way? And what might make them question how they're doing things today?
Knowing a buyer's job title or industry tells us something. But it doesn't tell us much about the pressures and priorities shaping their decisions.
2. Relevance: Where could we actually help?
Where could our offering make a meaningful difference?
What alternatives do they have? They might choose another provider, keep using their existing tools, do the work themselves or simply carry on as they are.
Why would they consider changing, and why might they choose us?
This is where we need to connect what customers care about with what we can genuinely do better or differently.
3. Messaging and proof: Why should they care or believe us?
What might make someone stop and think, "Actually, we should probably do something about this"?
How can we explain what we offer in terms that matter to them?
And what would help them believe us? Perhaps a customer example, a demonstration, a comparison or evidence of results.
Someone who isn't thinking about changing anything may need a very different message from someone who's already comparing solutions.
4. Content and channels: What should we say, and where?
What would actually be useful or interesting to the people we're trying to reach?
It might be an observation that makes them see a familiar problem differently. A practical example they can learn from. A comparison that helps them weigh their options. Or a customer story that shows what's possible.
What should our content help them understand or do, and where are they most likely to come across it?
The point isn't to create more content for the sake of it. It's to have something worth saying to the people we want to reach.
Start with what matters to them
You don't need to turn these four areas into a big exercise before doing any marketing. But they're useful questions to come back to when planning campaigns, creating content or deciding what to focus on.
And of course, our choices still need to work for the business. Not every customer is the right customer, and not every problem is ours to solve.
Understanding customers doesn't mean letting them dictate our strategy. It means making better decisions because we understand their reality.
Because however important our product is to us, customers have plenty of other things on their minds.
If we want them to care about what we're offering, we need to start with what matters to them. Not just what we want to tell them.