B2B Marketing – 5 Ways to Discover Your Audience

You might be thinking “I already know my audience, thank you very much.” But do you really? Have you done all the research possible to know everything about them and what they are thinking? You might know the demographics of your B2B target audience, but do you know how the employees feel? How the buyers feel about your product and your company? If you aren’t too sure, read on for 5 ways to get to know your audience – for real.

1. Get friendly with sales reps of trade publications. Sales reps and editors of trade magazines and newsletters often have much more knowledge about their target audience – your target audience – than you can imagine. Many trade pubs conduct surveys of their readers and invite readers to comment on their Web sites – invaluable info for you. Asking an editor or sales reps what their biggest stories are or what topics are requested by readers can give you insight into what the readers’ problems are. And you can provide just the solution they need.

2. Be a trade association member. MarketingSherpa’s 2008 B-to-B Lead Generation Handbook reports that there are over 3,000 trade associations in the United States alone. That’s a lot of people coming together in a lot of niches. If you aren’t a member of a trade association, sign up now. You’ll get insider news and you can attend conferences to find out what the newest trends are in an industry, or you could even sponsor a conference or man a booth at a trade show.

Trade association events are perfect for fostering new business relationships and finding out what prospects think of your company and product.

3. Research prospects online. Most businesses have a Web site nowadays, and that can be a goldmine for digging out prospects. Download white papers. Download newsletters. Find out as much about the company as you can. By getting to know the company, you’ll figure out where you can fit in and how you can help the company. If you’re trying to break in to a new industry and you don’t know the jargon of the Web site, enter “define: [word]” into Google for Web sites that have that term’s definition.

4. Monitor blogs, product review sites and forums. Get to know your prospects and customers on a more intimate level. See what people are saying about you, uncensored, on these sites. Dell got a wake-up call about its customer service when blogger Jeff Jarvis pubbed a “Dell Hell” post in 2005. Ever since then, Dell has been improving customer service, according to the Boston Globe.

5. Ask customer service reps for feedback. Ask reps to jot down customer concerns and then do something to change the concerns that are universal. If you get 20 calls a day saying the instructions on your packaging is confusing, then revamp the instructions. Try to rewrite the instructions in a few different ways and post these on your Web site. Ask for feedback from customers about which directions are most clear. If you have the budget, you could experiment with your packaging and use the different sets of instructions with a focus group and see which group has the least amount of trouble following the instructions. This can help you understand how your customers think and can help you with packaging in the future.