To sell a complex product in B2B, you need to convince the financial director, the head of the company and the user. But these people have different goals and motives. A business that understands this and takes this into account in marketing earns more. Margarita Bolshakova, a client project marketer, explains how to effectively collect information to create a relevant USP.

Content
Why Create a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
How to identify target audience types
Sales Department Calls
Quantitative surveys
Focus group

What to do with the information received

Why Create a Unique Selling Proposition (USP )
A typical story goes like this: A company launches online advertising that targets those who might be clients based on gender, age, and interests. This approach is ineffective: it wastes an unreasonable amount of resources. The result is a disproportionately high cost of leads with extremely low conversion .

There may be many advantages of a product. But not all of them are convincing. For example, a company sells a service for automating HR processes. The advantages of the product can be easily conveyed on the landing page to several target audiences at once: the CEO, the HR director, and the HR manager (the user of the product).

But it is easier to increase conversion into an application , and then into a sale, with the help of a USP – a targeted offer.

A USP is the reason why a user will first look at your product and then buy it based on their own motives.

Here’s how we work at Aktion Marketing :

We are working on B2B target audience segments .
We identify types.
We roll out a relevant offer formulated in several USPs. We deliver advertising to users using various personalization tools: email newsletters, online advertising , and others .
We hit the key motives and pain points of the audience, generating interest.
We increase customer conversion into applications and sales.
Read more about the stages of developing a USP in this article .

In this article, we will focus on how exactly to identify types – micro-segments within the target audience .

When segmenting the audience, Aktion Marketing does not use Yandex targeting, but systematizes the audience from its own database of over 15 million contacts from 4.5 million organizations. The effectiveness of the USP thus increases several times.

Find out how the technology will work on your business during a free consultation . For a substantive and useful dialogue, we recommend filling out the brief . A media plan following the meeting is a gift.

How to identify target audience types

The main enemy when preparing a USP is imagination.

You can’t invent motives, pain points and audience portraits. You need reliable facts based on real experience of interaction with the client.

I will list three ways to obtain objective data.

Sales Department Calls
Listen to recordings of B2B sales managers’ conversations : 15-20 are enough to group typical objections .

Next, organize their pre-processing in all channels where you convey the value of the product to the client: on the landing page, in email newsletters, various content, online advertising, at offline events and even in non-traditional advertising channels .

Call analysis, among other things, helps to identify the real type of target audience with a specific motivation: one accountant wants the boss not to scold him, another wants all reporting to be prepared in accordance with the requirements of the law.

Depending on the motive, you will find the key to how your product solves the problem of a specific type .

We recommend testing the collected types (usually there are five to seven of them) on sellers – they have something to add to the portraits.

Quantitative surveys

To improve a product, you can simply ask. Surveys are easy to do in literally 10 minutes using Yandex or Google forms.

Current and potential clients can be involved in the research. A gift for participation in the survey can serve as motivation.

Sample questions:

What criteria do you use to select a product to solve a problem?
Rank these criteria in order of priority.
For potential customers: What’s stopping you from buying the product right now?
For users: what are you missing in the product? Etc.
Focus group
Unlike quantitative surveys, focus groups are a qualitative, in-depth study of the needs of each type.

A full-fledged interview requires people who understand both the target audience and the product well. Qualitative research is best done together with the company’s employees.

For example, for a very complex product – a plot of land in a private special economic zone (SEZ) – the questions can be formulated as follows:

What is your priority: tax incentives for business or inexpensive labor?
When choosing between a state and private SEZ, which one would you prefer? Why?
Is the possibility of buying out a plot of land as your own important to you?
Business hack . Focus groups can be used to selectively grow the loyalty of your B2B target audience . When talking to a decision maker , mention how much you value their expertise and authoritative opinion and invite them to an interview. This way, you can even arrange a meeting with a representative of a market leader who is otherwise inaccessible.

If you have not yet formed the target audience types, i.e. the advertising offers are of a general nature,

Aktion Marketing specialists can:

connect and listen to calls, and then identify user types – with the client’s participation;

conduct a survey of the selected target audience using the resources of the Aktion media holding – for example, among subscribers of specialized publications, as well as in the Telegram channel, etc.

for a focus group – to form a pool of potential research participants based on our constantly updated database and provide you with their contacts if they have shown interest in your product.

What to do with the information received

After you have collected the audience’s motives and identified the qualitative characteristics that influence the choice of product, distribute the target audience by type.

Business hack . In large companies, types are given code names: “Ivan Demidov”, “Maria Ivanovna”, etc. This simplifies the work of salespeople – sooner or later, specialists are identified according to types, it is easier to pass clients to each other for follow-up, etc.

Audience segmentation will provide material for dividing marketing activities and will help in positioning . For example, it is reasonable to invite a young business owner to a webinar through advertising in the Telegram community, and an older CEO through an email newsletter.

Attracting leads through targeted USPs is more effective: the user knows that you will help him cope with his urgent problem. This is more effective than “catching” leads through targeted advertising to members of VK groups.