Buyers are controlling the buying process more than sellers are controlling the selling process, Forrester Research Inc. says in a new report. 74% of business-to-business buyers told Forrester they research half or more of their work purchases online before buying, leaving sellers with less of an opportunity to directly communicate their brand message to customers.
As such, it is more important than ever for companies to come at customers with a unified brand message across multiple channels, Forrester says.
But a brand message can easily get garbled, Forrester says in the report, “B2B Marketers Must Step Up to Message Management,” which was authored by Forrester analysts Lori Wizdo and Sheryl Pattek. A company’s sales can grow so fast that its brand has little time to catch up; a company might market various versions of content to specific buyers instead of marketing a single message to a specific market segment, leaving mixed messages among customers within that segment; and sales reps may create their own special spiel about a brand’s purpose, differing from the company’s intended message. And without a unified brand message, customers who were once interested in a company’s mission, innovation or quality will be left only interested in a product’s price, Forrester says.
The solution? Forrester recommends using a message map to direct and align customer brand communications. Brand messages should engage specific market segments—say, small business owners seeking an easier way to manage their finances; directly address the key decision makers in those organizations; clearly articulate the product or service a seller provides; and inspire action, or purchase, by the business owner.
Forrester stresses the importance of focusing on the “outcome message,” or the message that a company uses to effect an outcome in a targeted customer’s behavior.
“It is the outcome messaging that turns a target into a prospect. Your outcome messages need to resonate with very specific needs, pains and aspirations for a very specific target buyer,” Forrester says in the report. “Don’t say ‘improve performance’ if your buyer needs to ‘launch more programs,’ ‘increase sales conversion rates,”’ or “’improve application availability.’”
A message map can insure that a company’s brand is conveyed articulately, with consistency, and allows for fast content creation, Forrester says. But, because message maps are developed for specific market segments, companies could still end up with conflicting messages. To avoid a brand’s message getting lost in an overflow of maps, Forrester says all messages should be structured in the following order:
Align the corporate position to the brand promise.
Identify the market segment the message is being catered towards, and help the target segment grasp how you can solve its specific business problem.
Engage the key decision makers within the segment, and talk about their desired outcomes with the product.
Inspire the decision makers to act, or buy, through clearly articulated outcomes.
Finalize the message with capability messaging, or “trustworthy information tailored to build trust in your ability to deliver on your brand promise,” Forrester says.
Sign up for a free subscription to B2BecNews, a weekly newsletter that covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B e-commerce industry. B2BecNews is published by Vertical Web Media LLC, which also publishes the monthly trade magazine Internet Retailer. Follow Nona Tepper, associate editor for B2B e-commerce, on Twitter @ntepper90.