B2B marketing expert, MJ Peters, gives us an insight into her process for launching into a new customer segment. From research to marketing strategy optimisation.
This week, I interviewed the marketing superstar MJ Peters, VP of Marketing at the manufacturing firm, Firetrace.
We looked at how you can break into new customer/product segments.
MJ walked us through her iterative method of customer discovery and marketing experimentation that ensures you have a successful demand generation formula that can be scaled up to win you market share.
Before we jump into MJ's formula for generating demand in a new segment, let's put the interview in context:
Interviewee background:
MJ has worked in manufacturing companies her whole career across roles in product and marketing. She’s mostly a self-taught marketing leader, and she’s a pro in marketing strategy and inbound demand generation.
MJ also leads the product team at Firetrace. She says doing both can be really valuable because both jobs require an intimate knowledge of your customer. Whether it's product lifecycle management (is X product really adding enough value to our customer for it to be continued?) or generating inbound leads, customer interviews and analysis is paramount.
Having worked with inbound demand generation pro, Chris Walker, and Firetrace being his first client upon setting up Refine Labs, she has a ton of insight on driving revenue through marketing.
Company background:
Firetrace manufactures an innovative fire suppression system for use in auto-extinguishing fires in machinery, wind turbines, and many more places.
Everybody is marketing to humans, so the foundations are the same.
This interview was particularly interesting because of the 'marketing in manufacturing' angle. MJ is a big believer in bringing over the innovative marketing methods used by software companies, and experimenting with them in manufacturing.
Breaking into new market segments: hypothesizing a go-to-market strategy & developing marketing materials
The Research and Strategy Behind Entering a New Market Segment
Every customer segment has unique features. So when breaking into a new segment, it's essential to focus on strategy before jumping straight in.
Your business model could be completely wrong, for example, MJ noted that in one of the segments there are just 50 customers in the whole of the US, whereas, in another, there are 2,000 in California alone. Very different tactics work in a consolidated market vs an unconsolidated one, and you must adapt your approach.
Here are the main steps to follow when entering a new market:
Step 1: Research your customer
Getting to know your customer intimately is always crucial to marketing. Here's how:
- Cold call anyone working in that segment
- Ask them for 20 minutes of their time to discuss things like their job role, the industry, where things are heading, what their pain points are and what's going well for them at the moment.
- Take a blank word document and write down WHAT you want to learn from this person and WHAT you plan to do with that information. This will help you maintain a focus.
- Repeat for 10-20 stakeholders across the industry
- Uncover trends among them
Step 2: Analyse your results
Based on your customer insight, you must ask yourself:
- Does my existing business model make sense?
- Does my existing go-to-market strategy make sense?
- Does my existing product solve their problems entirely?
- Are they aware of the problem we solve yet, or will education be needed?
- What is the customer's worldview? And, how is it different from my other segments?
- What is important to stakeholders in this segment?
Step 3: Hypothesise your new marketing strategy
Understanding the way the new segments buys product usually is key to your new business model. MJ noted that using a reseller network made sense in an unconsolidated industry, but less so when there's only 50 customers.
Make changes like these based on the insight
- Make necessary modifications to the product
- Make changes to your positioning, so you're comparing against your true competitor for this customer. (Learn more on product positioning in our interview with April Dunford)
- Work out your messaging: what do you need to say about the product to resonate with your new segment?
- Work closely with your sales team to design a centric sales process. MJ suggests getting their discovery solid (are they asking the right questions? Do they have the right facts to answer customer questions in the right way?)
Hypothesize how you can generate demand using digital marketing techniques
- What content do you think will work with this audience?
- Do they value long-form articles, data insights, short articles, podcasts, video?
- Do they need content to build their awareness of the problem you solve, or are they fully aware and need to know more about the solution?
- Where is this segment most reachable? Don't hesitate to brainstorm a 'strategy' for every channel that may be a growth avenue.
Experimenting and Testing Your New Marketing Strategy
Whatever approach you're using, starting with small experiments is important. You don't want to blow your marketing budget on one channel to realise much later than you've generated zero inbound deals.
One approach I came across recently was The Bullseye Framework. You can use the framework to hone in on the most effective growth channels.
With MJ we talked about experimentation across two variables:
One: Audience experimentation
- On most social media, you can tailor-make an audience based on factors like job title, interests, gender, location, and more.
- Try building different audiences within your segment and see which work best to get leads.
- MJ warned us to look at audience expansion. The Facebook algorithm finds more relevant people based on the first few people who engage with your advert. If you've done your targeting correctly, expansion works well. However, if your content is interesting to just 50% of the customer segment, then that 50% irrelevancy will get multiplied by the algorithm. Read more about audience expansion on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Two: Content type experimentation
- Try multiple types of content (video, podcasts, long/ short articles) and see what gets the most engagement.
Final Note: Don't forget to measure
Marketing is very intuitive. You get to know your customer well, and you begin to feel what they like. However, the best intuition is backed up with data.
Qualitative: two important qualitative measures of content success are comments and page dwell time.
- In the comments, you can make judgments based on factors like whether they are positive or negative, and WHO is leaving those comments.
- Using Google Analytics, you can look at the average time spent on the page by a visitor. Are your visitors there long enough to read the full article, or do they bounce after 10 seconds? Either way will indicate whether the content was well targeted (or if it was not interesting).
Quantitative
- There is a ton of quantitative measures you can analyze. But the most important will always be the revenue generated thanks to your marketing. It's also good to look at time-to-close and deal size by source so that you can double down on the most effective channels.
