The 6 Principles of Deliberate Marketing: Intention vs. Attention - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #181
Does your sales team ignore the majority of leads marketing passes on? Marketers must develop a more intimate understanding of their target customer and the market that customer serves to generate qualified buyers that Sales won’t ignore. Marketers must align their efforts with the Sales organization and streamline the Marketing and Sales funnel to accelerate the rate at which leads move through their funnel.
Deliberate Marketing is a proven strategy for putting more qualified buyers directly into the Marketing and Sales funnel to generate faster ROI. It is especially effective in the B2B Marketing space which is characterized by defined target markets, long sales cycles and complex buyer-seller relationships. Over the next few weeks, I will be covering The 6 Principles of Deliberate Marketing in hopes of helping B2B Marketers start off the new year with a new approach to drive more successes.
Principle #1: Intention vs. Attention
Do you know if your marketing programs are gathering intention or attention? Intention means you have hit the right audience with the right message and they have responded to your call to action. Attention means they looked at your message but they may not have been your buyer and there was no call to action. By focusing on intention vs. attention, you may have fewer leads to pass onto sales but those leads will be more qualified.
Deliberate Marketing involves researching your customers in order to build insight into their pain points and the medium through which they respond best to marketing messages. This research enables Marketers to deliver laser-focused messages and programs that convert buyer interest to buyer intent. It is not about spreading high level marketing messages to a broad audience via advertising or public relations hoping to garner attention for a product or company.
Rather, Deliberate Marketing is focused on converting a targeted segment of prospects into qualified buyers with an interest in purchasing a product or service. This involves knowing far more about your target audience than any list buy, database or telemarketing firm can ever provide.
3 Responses to “The 6 Principles of Deliberate Marketing: Intention vs. Attention - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #181”
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December 19th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Great post Suaad. Agreed that intent is a great outcome, but how do you suggest thinking about, or analyzing marketing campaigns that are designed to target only attention? General market awareness, setting evaluation criteria, solution category education, etc, are all valuable in B2B marketing, but are much more difficult to measure as they do not result in the creation of leads at that exact moment. Perhaps only months or quarters later. Still valuable though, or we wouldn’t all be blogging… Thoughts?
December 19th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Good principle. I like to think of a marketing funnel as preceding the sales funnel instead of one big shared one.
The marketing funnel marches the prospects along step-by-step until they’re sales-ready.
December 19th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Steve - thanks for your comment. I agree that there are campaigns that are only to grab attention and build awareness, in fact if the audience is correct, you keep the dialog with those targets and when they have intension, they raise their hands. THE important point here is that you have to be DELIBERATE in selecting the target audience (as in not spray and pray via unknown or sketchy lists). Having said that, I find that marketers often count “impressions” in e-mail marketing even if they are targeting the an unknown audience that target will never convert as it’s just wrong no matter how long you target them in your process.