I've been doing a lot of thinking about what's truly "valuable," lately. In doing so, I've been looking at how B2B companies are positioning themselves with their content and wondering if what they profess to be valuable benefits are really seen that way by customers and potential buyers.
If you take a look at almost any B2B website, you'll find laundry lists of benefits. Kind of a "something for everyone" list of what their products or services deliver. But, what if one benefit, highly valuable to one customer, would actually be considered disappointing by another?
A recent study of 250 Fortune 1000 companies by Kellogg School of Business found that only 30% of them are using technology to track customer and lead interactions with their firm and marketing campaigns. Unless you are gathering intelligence and profiles about your customers' and leads' behavior, preferences and interests, how do you even begin to guess what's "valuable" to them?
Value is based on perception, which means that executing a marketing strategy without insights is like a crap shoot. You'll likely get some response, but you'll also likely leave a lot of potential interest on the table.
If you want to get more attention, build better relationships and transition "sales ready" leads to your sales force, then you need to be able to align value to your leads' perception of what that truly means. This is one reason why thinner slices or segmentation is being used more often. Smaller segments allow marketers to tighten focus and hone in on a topic that has a greater propensity to provide something "valuable" to a specific group of people.
One communication may get a lead to put a stake in the ground defining a valid interest, but it's the follow-on nurturing communications that have a higher opportunity of providing mutual value. That means sustainable interest because you've aligned the value you deliver with the outcome they want, made possible because you know what they're responding to and because, by their actions, they're giving you increasing permission to communicate with them.
In his book, Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin talks about a permission asset as "the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant ads[information] to the people who want to get them." He emphasizes how New Marketing is about reaching the reachable, not the masses. And, he stresses the need to focus on finding products that fit your customers' needs, rather than the traditional manner of finding customers for your products.
