B2B businesses highly rely on their audiences in every aspect as they work towards success. These audiences determine the type of messages, products to sell, and even content to deliver. Unfortunately, without a clear sense of the target audience, most businesses stick to random marketing, sending pitches to customers who fail to convert.
As a result, in the long run, most businesses fail to reach their target audience, losing potential customers to the competition. Therefore, the best solution is to define a B2B target audience and send desirable campaigns that are likely to convert. Learn more about the four things businesses must remember to define B2B target audiences.
The Importance of Defining B2B Target Audiences
The total addressable market (TAM) in the B2B industry includes every customer willing to buy from a business. Marketing to this entire group results in a low turnover hence an undesirable success rate.
Audience generation means narrowing down the market to only focus on a group of potential customers within the TAM. These customers share similar characteristics and will likely make successful transactions with proper targeting. To fully tap into this opportunity, businesses must consider four crucial aspects for defining an effective B2B target audience.
1. Understand the Value of Products and Services
Most B2B enterprises need help to reach their target audience because they need to understand the value of their products. Customers buy a specific product because of a problem it solves. Therefore, a B2B enterprise must evaluate the customer’s core problems and the product’s value in alleviating these problems.
Identifying the value of products or services begins with analysing their key features and the benefit of each feature. After listing all the benefits the product provides, businesses must match them to the specific entity they can help. Ultimately, the B2B businesses’ solution must satisfy customer needs and fix their pain points.
2. Analyse the Existing Audience
B2B enterprises have a smaller target audience compared to B2C enterprises. Therefore, defining a B2B target audience starts by analysing the customer base the business already has. This customer base gives valuable insight into how a target audience should look like. Then, businesses can send out customer service surveys asking about their experiences.
This research makes creating a roadmap for audience generation from the most common answers easier. This information also highlights the most profitable customers and why they prefer specific products over others. If the business deals in various products and services, it is easier to categorise these audiences and target them differently.
3. Research the Competition
Businesses peg their growth to the success of other entities within the same industry. Analysing the competition can give valuable insight into who is buying their products and why they are receiving more traffic. Understanding what the competition does differently simplifies the audience generation process. Marketers must identify who the competitors are targeting and the type of consumers within the industry. Doing this allows creating a new market and leveraging the competition’s shortcomings. In addition, it could be an opportunity to absorb the existing customers by improving the quality of products and service delivery.
4. Performance Testing
There could be numerous pitfalls in the process of audience generation because some customers may never convert as the business intends. Performance testing is crucial to ensure that a business sufficiently marks its position in the market. It gives insight into whether the business targets the right audience or has some areas to improve.
Businesses have to take note of personas responding to various messages and the ones sending reviews. All this valuable information can assist in identifying areas that need adjustment. It is crucial to assess whether the market’s traffic can help attain goals during the testing and analysis.
Businesses can also analyse whether they understand the customer pain points that help in making buying decisions. B2B data list providers can assist in creating A/B tests for understanding various buyer personas.
Casting a wide net to attract more traffic may have worked for sales and marketing teams at some point. However, today’s market requires a more focused approach, especially for B2B businesses in a smaller market. Since B2B customers expect a personalised experience, businesses must work their way towards retaining them. Therefore, defining a target audience helps B2B businesses create marketing campaigns touching on the customers’ pain points. A focused strategy will bring in the right customers at the right time.
