Why industry-focused marketing?

Critical part of any business planning is to determine the markets to address. For B2B companies in tech or professional services market segmentation starts with industry verticals. Business development and marketing strategies follow the industry focus. Very few companies in the world could serve any industry and even then they have industry priorities. So, why should not SMEs and startups with much less resources be as focused as the IBMs and Deloittes?

B2B companies need to ground their brand positioning on common brand values of trust and credibility. Customers need to trust you that you know their pain points and believe that you will deliver on your value promise. Trust begins with proof of customer’s industry understanding. Different industries have different structures and companies in different industries face different challenges, which require highly targeted solutions or differentiated messaging and brand positioning. Customers need to recognize that you understand their industry and its pain points. Only then they could trust you with addressing their organization’s challenges.

However, although trust and credibility are emotional brand elements, too often B2B marketing is led by focus on functional benefits. Or what the brand management guru Aaker calls “the product-attribute fixation trap”. In B2B people are not completely “rational”. Instead, they look for brand personality attributes like innovative, trustful, reliable, innovative, knowledgeable.

So, how should B2B companies strategically plan for brand differentiation by addressing complexity of marketing to different industries?

Companies should strategically plan and build their marketing communications and thought leadership by: prioritizing industries, positioning thought leaders, building resources for industry positioning, and industry channels planning.

Put your priority industries out and front

First, and most critical, stage is to determine your business’ priority industries. These priority industries guide your marketing planning and also tell your prospects and leads that you are the expert in their sectors.

For startups or SMEs, these are the industries where you have competitive advantage, where your offering is credible, which are part of the history of the organization, and where your business has been successful. Importantly, you need to have strong proof points for consistently strong solutions delivery in these industries.

You could start with industries where you already have had completed projects and extrapolate from there. Determine your priority industries after analysis of industry health and your strength and weaknesses – you need to be able to make money in the industry and be confident that could deliver quality solutions.

These industries must be visible and usually prominent for web site visitors. When visiting a corporate web site during the brand consideration stage, consumers would like to see their industry available and check on your credentials and available content for their industry.

Usually, I recommend positioning prominently up to six core industries. This number is not fixed, but you should be careful not to have too many as every industry requires marketing resources but also not too few in order to have appropriate in size addressable market.

Carefully choose your thought leaders

Usually, I suggest to have three thought leaders roles: the visionary, the tech, or subject matter, guru, and the industry expert. These thought leaders, together with the sales team, play complementary roles during the nurturing stage and all contribute driving the lead to purchase.

If you want to differentiate your brand through personality traits, make sure you choose personalities for brand ambassadors.

The visionary usually is high level executive with extensive experience in the industry and with active participation in formulating vision for industry’s future; they position the company as industry leader. Visionaries articulate the message how our solutions and technologies are related to societal challenges. Visionaries are first point of contact with high level media, they underwrite highest level thought leadership pieces like research reports. Visionaries are the corporate brand spear – they need to support corporate brand messaging and bring highest visibility to the company’s thought leadership. Visionaries could engage with highest level of executives from clients and establish rapport with client’s most senior management team.

Very few companies have visionaries and even less work strategically to position them.