When you’re developing your marketing strategy, where do you start? How do you frame your ideas? For many leaders of industrial B2B organizations, marketing is a necessary evil: a distant second to engineering and other business functions. As a result, marketing becomes words on paper, trying to describe all that their products can do. But that’s where the first disconnect happens.
The cornerstone of your marketing strategy is your messaging. Your messaging should create a connection with your audience and compel action. Your messaging should be based on a deep understanding of your audience and speak to the problems and opportunities they face. When you reduce your message to the technical prowess of your designs and product features, you miss the powerful opportunity to help your audience achieve their goals and solve their problems.
Donald Miller, author of StoryBrand, reminds us, “People don’t buy the best products; they buy the products they can understand the fastest.” People want to quickly know that what you’re offering will not only meet their technical needs, but also solve the problems they are facing. Those sound the same, but they’re actually quite different.
In the industrial B2B space, we live in the world of hard facts, statistics, acronyms, certifications, regulations, and general wordiness. While everyone touts their product’s prowess, you have the opportunity to stand out from the crowd through poignant messaging that highlights how you can help your audience realize their goals and address their problems.
For example: how will your product make their life easier? How will it improve their workflows and save them time? How will it reduce their time on the floor? How will it help them advance their career? How will it prevent downtime? How will it improve their bottom line?
Answering these questions highlights the value of what you’re providing and will help you clarify and strengthen your messaging. It is incredibly powerful to let someone know your product will not only meet their technical needs, but it will also help them advance their personal and professional goals. This kind of pointed message helps you stand out from competitors because your ideal clients will resonate with your message. Messaging that is steeped in empathy and based on a solid understanding of your audience can do so much more for your organization.
Messaging Creates Alignment
Alignment is undeniably important in successful organizations. For example, well aligned companies are known to close 38% more proposals. One study found that “highly aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster and are 72% more profitable while significantly outperforming their unaligned peers in terms of: Retaining customers 2.23-to-1, Satisfying customers 3.2-to-1, Effectively leading 8.71-to-1, Engaging employees 16.8-to-1”.
For organizations who rely heavily on a global sales force or complex distribution networks, creating alignment can pose extra challenges. But bringing everyone together on the same page with clear and consistent messaging statements can help everyone stay in alignment. This is especially true if there is a process for taking feedback into account during the messaging process, which also creates buy-in.
Messaging Builds Team Engagement
Using a solid messaging development process that incorporates cross-functional input and deep conversation, the team is more likely to feel engaged in your messaging.This can increase overall unity, camaraderie, and teamwork. Employees who feel they are a valued team member are more productive and can improve company profits. Gallup research shows that companies with engaged employees benefited from a 17% increase in productivity and a 20% improvement in sales. Moreover, companies with high employee engagement rates experienced anywhere from 24% to 59% lower turnover rate than competitors with less engagement.
Messaging Allows for Consistency
Standing out from the crowd is difficult but crucial. To be remembered by your audience, your message must be consistent. A brand needs to create 5 to 7 impressions with a person before they will even remember the brand. If the messaging and branding are inconsistent though, this range of impressions would increase. Brand recognition often happens subconsciously, so if there is little consistency, the consumer might not realize they are seeing the same brand or hearing the same message.
When you develop messaging statements and build your marketing from an aligned place, your marketing will experience more consistency. Your impressions will be more meaningful, allowing people to remember your brand more easily.
Messaging Speeds Up the Sales Cycle
Did you know that nearly 75% of B2B organizations need at least 4 months to close a sale to a new customer? In the industrial B2B sector, the sales cycle is often long and complex. But can you shorten that cycle? With clear and compelling messaging, you can repel poor-fitting leads and attract more of your best-fit prospects, improving the composition of your opportunity pipeline. In addition, by providing the right information to your prospects at the right stages in their sales cycle, they will be able to move through the process with less waiting. The result will be more satisfied customers for your business.
Messaging Decreases Burn-Out
When you are constantly working with clients who aren’t the right fit, it can be exhausting for both you and your team. Managing unhappy clients and prospects can lead to burn-out. A burnt-out team doesn’t innovate, collaborate, or expand. Instead, they switch into survival mode.
Many people don’t think of messaging as a deterrent to burn-out, but good messaging repels poor-fitting prospects while simultaneously attracting your ideal clients. A number of factors can go into burn-out, but working with clients who make the job easier goes a long way in improving relationships and easing tension within your team.
How Can You Define Your Messaging?
Defining your messaging comes back to defining the value of what you offer from the perspective of the emotional, professional, and practical needs or desires of your ideal client.
Here at Strativise, we take our clients through a customized messaging framework workshop to determine your messaging statements for your ideal client profiles. We work with your cross-functional team to develop your messaging, with the ultimate goal of building a strategic marketing plan designed to meet your ideal clients right where they are at. We remove the sometimes daunting nature of marketing and break it down to its simplest form. We use our expertise to build a masterfully crafted, customized plan based on your own observations and input.
At the end of the day, you already know what your message is… Sometimes it just takes a guided conversation to clearly define it. If you want our experience, strategy, and guidance behind your organization, you can book an obligation-free strategy call with our founder, Nate Maguire, to see how Strativise can best support your organization.