Targeted Marketing and Ideal Customer Profiles Improve Campaigns

by Marketing Team | Sep 16, 2024

How Targeted Marketing and Ideal Customer Profiles Improve Campaigns and Lead Nurturing

In this article, we will explain the benefits of integrating your targeted marketing practices with your ideal customer profiles. Combining the two tools enables businesses to optimize their marketing efforts, improve the relevance and personalization of content, increase conversion rates, build stronger customer relationships, and drive better customer acquisition and retention outcomes. It maximizes the effectiveness of marketing strategies and ensures that resources are allocated to the most valuable customer segments.

So, let’s start by defining terms.

What is B2B targeted marketing?

B2B targeted marketing, also known as business-to-business targeted marketing, refers to the practice of tailoring marketing efforts and strategies specifically to businesses, rather than individual consumers. It involves promoting and selling products or services from one business to another.

In B2B targeted marketing, the focus is on reaching key decision-makers within the target businesses, such as executives, managers, or purchasing agents, who have the authority to make purchasing decisions on behalf of their organizations. The goal is to create awareness, generate interest, and ultimately convince these businesses to engage in a commercial relationship.

What is an ideal customer profile?

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a fictional representation of the perfect customer for a business. It is a detailed description of the type of customer who is most likely to derive the highest value from a company’s products or services. The ICP helps businesses identify and target their most desirable customer segments more effectively.

By understanding your ideal customer profile, both Digital Demand Center and our customers can better tailor marketing strategies to reach the most qualified prospects. The creation of an ideal customer profile involves analyzing and understanding the characteristics, behaviors, and needs of existing successful customers. Here are some key components typically considered when developing an ICP:

Title and Level of Contact – You want to ensure your marketing efforts reach buyers that can make or influence a purchase decision.
Functional Area – Understanding the specific roles or departments involved in purchasing decisions, such as procurement, marketing, IT, finance, operations, human resources, and executive leadership, is crucial for effective targeting. Tailoring messaging to decision-makers’ needs and priorities within these functional areas enhances campaign effectiveness.
Vertical Market – This is especially important if having existing referrals or expertise is important to close the sales.
Demographics – This includes information such as industry, company size, location, annual revenue, and employee count. These demographics help identify businesses that align with the company’s target market.
How to Run an Account Based Marketing Campaign – Identifying the specific challenges, problems, or needs that the ideal customer faces helps position the company’s offerings as solutions. This understanding enables businesses to create targeted marketing campaigns that address these pain points effectively.

We also recommend that you look at past customers that you struggle to retain. This means analyzing your past failures. Understand what type of customers drive the least amount of revenue for the most effort.

Three Reasons Why an Ideal Customer Profile Is Important for B2B Targeted Marketing and Lead Nurturing?

An ideal customer profile is a key factor in any successful B2B marketing strategy. Defining an ICP helps you understand how to:

Maximize your targeted marketing budget.
Decide what content to create for your campaigns.
Ensure better open rates for email campaigns.

How does an ideal customer profile help you to understand what marketing channels to use for your business?

An ideal customer profile can help you understand which marketing channels to use by giving you an idea of where your audience resides. Knowing the age of your target customer will can help you choose the most effective platforms and methods for reaching them so that you’re not wasting time, energy or resources on marketing that won’t be successful.

By understanding where and how your target audience likes to receive messages, you can craft campaigns that deliver maximum reach and engagement. For example, if you’re marketing to baby boomers, it might make sense to focus more on Facebook and display ads than other social media to build your initial awareness. Similarly, when your ICP contains the characteristics of your target customers, such as industry, company size, and location, you can more easily identify the platforms or channels commonly used by your target audience. For example, if your ideal customers are primarily active on LinkedIn and attend industry-specific events, this suggests that utilizing these channels could be beneficial for reaching and engaging with them.

If your target audience heavily relies on online research and engages with content through social media, investing in digital marketing channels like social media advertising, content marketing, or search engine optimization (SEO) could be effective. On the other hand, if your customers prefer face-to-face interactions, attending trade shows, conferences, or industry events, may be more suitable. If you’re targeting millennials or Gen Z, digital platforms like Instagram and YouTube would likely be more effective.

Finally, an ICP can also help you identify opportunities for expanding into new markets or demographics. For example, if you see that a certain segment of your target audience is disproportionately engaging with influencers on TikTok, it could be a sign that you should consider investing in influencer partnerships to reach those buyers. By understanding where and how your target audience prefers to receive messages, you can tailor content and campaigns for maximum efficiency.

But it’s important to remember that, according to Salesforce and Hubspot, email remains the preferred channel for initial awareness and education for the B2B buyer.

How does an Ideal Customer Profile help you decide what content format to create for your campaigns?

Your ideal customer profile can also help you decide what content format will be most effective for engaging with your target audience. Depending on the interests, goals and needs of your ICP, certain formats may be more suitable. For example, if your ICP consists of younger generations, then creating visual content such as infographics or videos might be effective in capturing their attention.

On the other hand, if your ICP consists mainly of professionals, then creating content such as white papers and webcasts may be more appropriate. This is especially true if you have a complex sales process that requires building trust with your buyers over time.

Understanding the interests and needs of your ICP will help you identify which formats would be most suitable for delivering quality content that resonates with them and encourages them to become curious about your solution.

No matter what format you choose, it is important to always be mindful of the message you are trying to communicate. Focus on creating content that is accurate and clear, as this will help your audience easily understand the information being provided. Additionally, ensure that your content is relevant to the interests of your ICP.

How does an Ideal Customer Profile Help you build better email subject lines?

Knowing your ideal customer profile helps you create better email subject lines that will resonate with your target audience.

Email subject lines will be tailored to the potential buyers’ needs and also help to make it clear why they should open the message. By focusing on areas of need and potential pain you will get more opens.

For example, C-Level Executives care about strategy and the organization’s performance: They prefer subject lines that are often more top line focused like:

“A Proven Strategy to Increase Your Profits”
“How Does XXXXXX Increased Productivity?”

By focusing on the top line and strategic value that you are providing, C-level executives will be more likely to open your message.

And as a second example when selling to managers you may want to stay focused on their team and efficiency. When writing email subject lines for managers, they should also be clear and informative but focused on the team, cost savings and shorter-term goals such as:

“Learn How to Increase Your Team’s Efficiency”
“Increase Productivity with This Simple Solution”
“How To Increase Production This Quarter With…”
“Discover How You Can Save Resources”

Summary

By developing an ideal customer profile, businesses can focus their marketing efforts and resources on attracting and serving customers who are most likely to become long-term, profitable relationships. The ICP guides various aspects of marketing, including messaging, content creation, lead generation, and customer acquisition strategies.

To learn more about how Digital Demand Center can help you maximize your sales and marketing budget we invite you to check out our eBook on the Digital First Transformation.

Why Outsource Lead Nurturing and Demand Generation

by Marketing Team | Aug 16, 2024

Do I Really Need An Outsourced B2B Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing Partner?

First – Why Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing is Required for Success

Why outsource lead nurturing? According to Forrester, your typical buyer now consumes 7-15 pieces of digital content prior to engaging with a sales rep. And 80% of buyers want to avoid scheduling time with a sale rep until they have completed their pre-sales research and are “Sales Ready”.

This change in modern buyer’s expectations and needs is so rapid that, according to a recent Adobe research project, 82% of marketing professionals stated that marketing has changed more in the past two years than it has over the past fifty years. With this buyer shift, and the proliferation of sales automation technologies and content marketing, buyers now expect sellers to provide their pre-sales education digitally. Buyers also expect sellers to deliver educational content marketing deep into their buyers’ journey.

B2B Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing Content Needs

With the exception of enterprise companies, most sales and marketing organizations lack the time, resources, experience, expertise and talent to properly manage a systematic marketing process that meets the new digital first needs of the modern buyer.

This new set of buyer expectations also means lead generation is now just the first step in a multi-step content marketing and lead development process. It also means that a successful marketing process is no longer as simple as writing a blog every week, sending sporadic emails, posting on social media every few days and running pay per click campaigns to generate the lead.

To produce a sustained sales funnel now requires a team to manage different processes and tactics systematically to generate demand for a solution. These processes include: lead generation campaigns, pre-sales education campaigns, lead nurturing and sales automation tactics to encourage conversions. Successful B2B demand generation cannot be executed with stand-alone tactics. Success now requires expert strategy, proven processes, the right tech stack and disciplined execution of integrated tactics to produce a sustained flow of well-educated “sales ready” leads.

Successful Sales and Marketing Starts with a Shared Mission

Mission: Your marketing team, sales team and company need to share the singular mission of making your marketing and sales process, easy, convenient and frictionless so it’s easy for your buyer to buy.

Objectives:

1 – Sellers need to leverage digital content in a frictionless process to replace many of the historical tasks the Sales Development Rep. This creates quality time in a Buyer’s In-Box and Social Feed well beyond initial lead generation.

2 – Sellers need to provide and enable Buyers with the automation technologies, process, ability and option to drive their own pre-sales journey so as Sellers we can win more business.

Demand generation, lead nurturing and sales automation are longer optional for sellers. They are now requirements driven by your buyers.

The Impact of B2B Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing (4 min video)

This short video details why lead generation is only the first step in successful sales and marketing operations

The Challenges Many B2B Sellers Face

If you are struggling to make this transition and cultural shift you are not alone. Most businesses, and especially small to mid-sized companies, are struggling to keep up with this digital first transformation operationally:

Marketing has initial lead generations programs in place, but that program is not producing the results it used to, or it’s not producing to expectations.
Most leads are not turning it sales opportunities
In many cases, businesses struggle to craft a solid strategy deeper into the sales funnel/buyers journey, or they’re flying blind with scattered digital marketing tactics.
Business owners and sales leaders lack the access to the data or the strategic bandwidth, analysis and insights they need to make decisions around the right marketing tactics, messages and sales tech to leverage.
Marketing organizations lack the talent and resources to create quality content on a consistent basis.

And beyond the operational challenges and the primary need to drive a sustained flow of sales ready leads with budget constraints, the two greatest challenges companies now face according to Salesforce, Drift and HubSpot are:

Hiring talent with experience and expertise
Training staff in the technologies required for success

With all of this stated – there are seven definitive ways outsourced B2B Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing with Digital Demand Center™ may be the right solution to help you grow your sales funnel, your team, your expertise and your revenue.

Why Outsource Lead Nurturing — The Top Reasons for Outsourcing Your B2B Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing

Outsourcing your B2B demand gen and lead nurturing immediately provides your business with the team, tactics, technology and tools you need for sustained success.

1 – You Can Quickly Craft a Proven and Tested Go-To-Market Strategy

As we have already mentioned above a digital marketing strategy is no longer as simple as writing blogs, posting on social media, sending standalone emails and running Pay-Per-Click campaigns. An effective digital marketing strategy that produces consistent results involves leveraging several tactics to tell your powerful sales story, episodically, for a sustained period of time. This requires:

A proven marketing strategy to create brand awareness to generate the lead
Sales story expertise to systematically move that buyer through you sales funnel in a methodical way leveraging content
Experience implementing automation technologies
Experience building and managing proven workflows to get the most from that technology to score and prioritize leads for you sales team

Outsourcing B2B demand generation provides you with both sales and marketing strategy expertise simultaneously. This experience allows you to craft a long-term strategic road map including:

Targeting and building your ideal customer profile database
Content for every stage of your funnel
Lead gen, lead nurturing and lead conversion campaign playbooks
Technology stack implementation and optimization
Lead scoring and CRM optimization

2 – Immediate Access to a Team of Sales and Marketing Operations Experts

If you don’t already have someone in house or a vendor, most companies can find resources to build awareness or generate your initial leads. The market is currently overwhelmed with vendors selling stand-alone solutions and tactics. Exiting the pandemic, initial lead generation is now a commodity.

But it’s hard to find proven B2B lead nurturing and demand gen experts because this type of expertise requires both sales and marketing operations experience. Consequentially most of these experts are well compensated, sitting inside of larger companies.

Additionally, it’s harder (if not impossible) to hire and train these experts (especially if you are not an enterprise company with deep financial resources). And finally, it’s even harder to build a team that works together seamlessly with the singular goal of making it easier for your buyer to buy with a frictionless process at every stage of your sales funnel.

When outsourcing your B2B Demand Generation you get immediate access a blended team of professionals with the appropriate area of process expertise you need, when you need it, at a fraction of the time and cost of building that team on your own. This blended team of both sales and marketing talent will include:

Database Managers
Senior Strategists
Marketing Operations Director/Analyst
Marketing Manager and Campaign Specialists
Automation and CRM Tech Specialist
Social Media Manager (if necessary)
Video Production (if necessary)
Writers (if necessary)
Designers (if necessary)

3 – Smarter, Faster, Cheaper and More Effective Marketing Automation and CRM Tech Stack Selection and Implementation

According to Gartner, most large companies fail to get marketing automation right on their first attempt. And most larger companies take over 18 months to begin to become satisfied with their implementation. Consequentially, small and mid-sized businesses, which usually need marketing automation the most, struggle to compete. They lack the experience, time and budget to select, implement and optimize their tech stack. Most overspend and many buy features they don’t need.

Outsourcing your B2B Demand Generation and Lead Nurturing helps you:

Select the right tech stack
Get the implementation right the first time
Get the technology at the right price (plus often avoiding annual fees)

Getting it right the first time saves you time, money and increases your productivity in the market by as much as 3X.

Digital Demand Center™ eliminates this challenge. After over 150 implementations of dozens of tools, we have selected a proven stack for quick, affordable deployment and most importantly effective lead scoring and prioritization. Our stack delivers all the capabilities you need for seamless campaign management, sales automation, lead scoring and easy to understand dashboards that integrate seamlessly with Salesforce and other leading CRMs. And most importantly you own the system with no hidden fees or costs.

4 – Immediate Support for Full Funnel Content Production

Most companies know they need “awareness” content to generate leads, which includes: short explainer videos, blogs and social media clips to generate awareness and initial leads. But as discussed and illustrated above, this is no longer enough. Successful sellers need to create content that stewards buyers through their entire buyer’s journey. They need to digitally clone the pre-sales education process to replace many of the historical tasks of a Sales Development Rep.

Lead Scoring with Predictive Content Engagement

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A B2B outsourcer with proven domain and sales process expertise (and their access to an assortment of creatives) will be able to manage and/or support your content production to motivate buyers deeper and deeper into the sales funnel.

When you work with Digital Demand Center™ we will be able to provide access to Gabriel Sales’ (our parent company’s) deep reservoir of production expertise with a focus on both lead nurturing videos link and videos that are crucial for lead scoring link.

5 – A Disciplined Focus on producing “Sales Ready” Leads…Not Unqualified Leads

Most conventional marketers and even most digital agencies have a singular focus on generating more leads. And more leads is great but it’s no longer enough.

A team that understands the difference between lead generation vs. demand generation is now critical to your success. A company that specializes in demand generation will understand how to generate awareness. They will also understand how to create demand by nurturing leads until they are ready to buy.

Most importantly they will understand how to score those leads so your sales team never misses a qualified sales opportunity.

How Lead Scoring Works -Digital Demand Center™ in Action (3 min demo)

This short video shows you how DDC™’s tech stack scores leads to predict when a buyer is ready to talk to sales.

6 – Outsourcing May Help You Avoid Costly Errors

Building, hiring, training and managing your own team takes time and money. And after all that investment there is no guarantee that team will:

Understand and execute the day to day grind of managing a funnel
How to leverage the tech
What tactics work at different stages in the buying cycle
How to score leads
How to transition leads
Understand what metrics matter and what metrics don’t

7- Outsourcing Lowers Risk

When you hire demand gen outsourcers you get a blended team of part time professionals with specific areas of experience and expertise. They have already worked together as a team so they have already:

Proven they know how to work well together
Proven they know how to support sales
Implemented multiple technologies, multiple times
Experimented with tactics
Been obsessed with the latest trends for years
Worked with the data so they understand what metrics matter and what metrics don’t

Proven teamwork and specialists allow you build a highly productive marketing program from the ground up – so you get it right the first time.

8 – Outsourcing Ensures Continuous Optimization and Increases Sales Funnel Production

More experience also means insights. An outsourcer can provide more guidance and better analysis faster. An outsourced solution provider will be able to build and deliver:

Relevant executive level dashboards
Reports and analysis to explain the data
Benchmarks against other programs so you know what the data means
Compare and contrast your results with competitive benchmarks

This allows your business and your outsourced team to continuously optimize your messages, campaigns and budget allocations.

9 – Marketing and Sales Operations Experts Produce Faster Results at a Lower Cost and Superior ROI

As discussed above, outsourcing with a proven demand generation and lead nurturing solution will dramatically impact your marketing operations to ensure you:

Increase your speed to market by as much as 3X
Help you avoid the costly mistakes and the pitfalls of building on your own
Ensure you get it right the first time

To learn more about the Return on Investment you can expect we invite you to watch the OnDemand video webcast below. This video is part three of our of four part of our OnDemand Educational Seminar The Digital First Transformation and Sales Automation.

Free OnDemand Webcast – The ROI of Lead Nurturing and Demand Generation

This 20 Minute On Demand Webinar does a deep dive into the ROI of lead nurturing and demand generation

Conclusion

The world has changed. Sellers that enable buyers to engage with digital content instead of depending on sales reps to learn about the seller’s solution:

Increase their number of sales opportunities by 451% (Annuitas Group)
Close 2X the amount of deals (McKinsey)
And lead nurturing produces 17% to 47% more revenue per deal (Annuitas Group)

Outsourcing your B2B lead nurturing can help you transform your sales and marketing process/operations faster and more cost effectively so your business grows faster at a lower cost.

About Digital Demand Center™ and Gabriel Sales™

After Gabriel Sales helped build, launch and deploy more than 150 sales and marketing engines for companies ranging from the Fortune 100 to start ups, Digital Demand Center™ was developed as a turnkey demand generation and lead nurturing solution designed specifically for small a mid-sized B2B sales organizations with multi-step sales process. We are passionate about helping our clients compete for and win more business. You can learn more about how and why we designed this solution on our About Us page.

Digital Demand Center’s™ parent company Gabriel Sales continues to help companies of all shapes and sizes grow and flourish in this digital first environment with:

Marketing Automation and Salesforce Implementations and Optimization
OnDemand and Custom Pardot, Salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Training
Go-to-Market Strategy Consulting
Marketing and Sales Operations as a Managed Service
Sales Automation and Deep Funnel Content Production

You can learn more about Gabriel Sales’™ team and our approach to help you grow sales and improved marketing operations on our About Us page. You can learn more about our services at www.gabrielsales.com

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How to Log Calls in Salesforce – Sales Tech Tutorial

by Carol Springer | May 11, 2024

In this 2-minute video we teach a business development and/or sales reps how to log calls in Salesforce and best practices for capturing data to ensure recall, accurate tracking and reporting.

(Video Length 2:00)

Topics Discussed in How to Log Calls in Salesforce

In this quick use case video we help reps find where to find their activity and how log calls in Salesforce to ensure reps are recording information accurately. When information is captured correctly, they can find that information in the future to help move deals forward. It also ensures their activity so reps and managers can run accurate “Activity Tracking” reports.

What You Will Learn:

Where to locate your leads
Where to log activity
Best practices for recall and reporting activity
Where to add notes
How to ensure information was saved
How to edit after saved

About The Presenter

Carol Springer

Founder Gabriel Sales

Carol has been working with the Salesforce platform since 2004 and Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) since 2012. She has launched over 100 successful Salesforce and Pardot implementations. Carol and her team hold multiple Salesforce Certifications including: Salesforce Administrator, Pardot (Account Engagment) Specialist, Sales Cloud, Salesforce Developer and Service Cloud Consultant.

Carol spent her early career at Gabriel Sales as a front line executive and sales professional launching, hiring, managing and then transitioning sales and marketing operations for dozens of B2B companies so she understands how these technologies and systems can be leveraged to produce real sales results for business and P&L owners. Carol started her professional sales career as both an inside sales and enterprise sales rep for several Silicon Valley Start Ups. She founded Gabriel Sales in 2004 and shifted her focus to managing day-to-day sales and marketing operations for B2B companies of all shapes and sizes.

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Salesforce and Salesforce Account Engagement Pardot Training YouTube Channel

Visit Gabriel Sales’ YouTube Channel – “Sales Tech”

Visit our YouTube Channel for additional basic training for Salesforce and Salesforce Account Engagement users just getting started. These short training videos will help users just getting started get more out of their systems faster.

Visit "Sales Tech by Gabriel Sales" our FREE YouTube Tutorial Channel

How to Create Leads in Salesforce – Sales Tech Tutorial

by Carol Springer | May 11, 2024

Business Development Ops and Sales reps will learn how to correctly add a new lead to Salesforce (if the lead is not already in the system).

In this 2:00 minute video we teach business development ops and/or sales rep how to create leads in Salesforce.

(Video Length 2:00)

Topics Discussed in How to Create Leads in Salesforce

In this quick, use case video we demonstrate how a rep can add new leads into the system (e.g. a referral or inbound call that is new to the database).