The old saying, “Don’t reinvent the wheel,” continues to carry a lot of wisdom. After all, wheels have been around for millennia and haven’t really changed much for one important reason: because they work.
So I’ll never totally understand why many marketers feel compelled to reinvent the wheel when it comes to their marketing strategies. Usually all it does is sidetrack them from what really matters, which is getting results. There’s a lot to be said for sticking with the basics.
In my new YouTube series, I look at six timeless B2B marketing principles I see as integral to building an effective marketing strategy. This blog is a high-level overview of the full set (watch the videos for more detail on each).
The 4 Ps
The 4Ps of Marketing (Product, Place, Price, Promotion) were identified by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960. Many people have tried to redefine them over the years — by adding more Ps (People, Process and Physical Evidence), changing them to Cs (Customer, Cost, Convenience, Communication), or coming up with alternatives (e.g., ‘SAVE’ — Solution, Access, Value, Education) — but none of those changes has added significant value or been all that radical in the end.
In my view, the traditional 4 Ps are still foundational building blocks for any marketing strategy, whether they’re ‘old school’ or not. Today’s products and places may be digital rather than physical, and pricing is more dynamic than it used to be, but they all still matter.
The traditional 4 Ps are still foundational building blocks for any marketing strategy, whether they’re ‘old school’ or not.
What many people don’t seem to understand is that the 4 Ps aren’t meant to work in isolation from each other. They’re all related, part of a holistic framework. Treating them that way will give you the basis for a successful plan — as I explain in my 4 Ps video, which you can watch now.
That said, the 4 Ps aren’t the only must-have of the B2B marketing principles to build your strategy. Audience is another fundamental consideration.
Segmentation
Segmentation is another oldie but a goodie. The idea goes back officially to Wendell R. Smith in the 1950s, though he was building on ideas that had been around for 30 years before then.
Segmentation is basically the process of dividing your total addressable market (TAM) into unique audience segments with shared characteristics. People today criticize it for not taking the dynamic nature of markets into account or missing key criteria — which may be so — but as a fundamental, segmentation endures because a single marketing mix can never speak to your whole market (nor can you sell to everyone).
Of course, 1950s-style segmentation isn’t exactly right today. For B2B marketing, classic demographic and psychographic characteristics are less important than firmographic and technographic ones. But the basic principles hold.
Segmentation is one part of the segmentation-targeting-positioning (STP) framework, so let’s look at the other two.
Targeting
Phillip Kotler, who many refer to as the Father of Modern Marketing, created the STP framework in the 1960s as a way of defining the target audience before using the 4 Ps to create a plan, which makes a lot of sense. Once you know your market segments, targeting comes into play: choosing which segments to focus on.
This can be easier said than done. Targeting multiple segments at once is tempting, but it can spread you thin — especially if you’ve done a good job of segmentation and need truly distinct marketing mixes for each audience. It’s always better, at least initially, to identify ONE segment to build your plan on. You can target additional segments later if you’re successful or pivot if you end up choosing the wrong one to start with.
It’s always better, at least initially, to identify ONE segment to build your plan on.
Related to targeting is defining an ideal customer profile (ICP) — a description of the accounts most likely to buy. (ICPs are different from buyer personas, which I’ll get to in a minute.) Pinpointing who is most likely to buy out of the total set of potential buyers is crucial for B2B companies.
Positioning
Positioning is the third step in the STP framework. Its origins are somewhat disputed, though it’s generally agreed that Al Ries and Jack Trout brought it to the foreground with a series of articles in the late 60s and early 70s, leading to the seminal Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind in 1981, one of the best-selling marketing books of all time.
While newer frameworks have been proposed by people such as April Dunford, positioning has not changed or been challenged nearly as much as some of the other marketing principles I’ve been exploring here. It has to do with how a company differentiates its product or service in the mind of a prospect. Every product needs a unique and clearly articulated value for a buyer: if you can’t tell prospects why they need your product more than the alternative, you won’t win. To me, positioning remains the most critical part of your marketing strategy.
Buyer personas
Alan Cooper introduced the concept of personas in the 1980s for software development but Angus Jenkinson is generally credited for bringing it to marketing when he talked about ‘customer prints’: fictional profiles that describe buyers in their real environment. Buyer personas have continued to evolve with concepts like Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) created by Tony Ulwick and popularized by Clayton Christensen in his book, The Innovator’s Solutions. JTBD looks to define the customer’s specific goal, or “job,” and what would lead that customer to “hire” a product to complete the job.
More recently, data-driven personas have become the norm, with algorithms producing personas via statistical data — an approach AI is taking one step further. Being data-driven makes it much easier to create personas but runs the risk of having too many and/or lacking key insights, the kind that can only be found by talking to potential buyers. So be careful not to rely on data- or AI-driven personas exclusively.
Being data-driven makes it much easier to create personas but runs the risk of having too many and/or lacking key insights, the kind that can only be found by talking to potential buyers.
In her book, Buyer Personas, Adelle Revella advocates for interviewing recent buyers as the best way to develop an authentic buyer persona and I agree. You’ll get a clear picture and many insights that just aren’t in the data. Adelle goes one step further and defines “5 Rings of Buyer Insights” across the buyer journey to help you drill down into what your buyers truly care about.
If the purpose of persona development is to give you a clear picture of the person you are selling to, then the evolutions from Ulrick, Christensen and Revella are critical to building the most helpful ones.
Buyer’s journey
The buyer’s journey is a newer concept than some of these others. It describes the stages a buyer goes through — from realizing they have a problem to selecting a solution. The journey is defined so many different ways that I have lost count of how many variations there are. (The journey is also often illustrated as the sales funnel.) For simplicity, I look at it from the buyer’s perspective across three stages: awareness, engagement and conversion.
More important than the specific framework and stages is to appreciate that the buyer’s journey is not linear, even though it is traditionally mapped that way. It’s also crucial to keep in mind that buyers are usually 60% to 75% of the way through their journey before they even talk to sales. Keeping both of these insights in mind will help you think about the journey from the buyer’s perspective instead of a sales perspective.
Some people dismiss the idea of the buyer’s journey because the reality is nonlinear and starts so far from the sales touchpoint, but I strongly believe that’s a mistake. Looking at buyer engagement through a ‘journey’ lens forces you to understand what’s going on with prospects whether you’re interacting with them or not. It also highlights what information they may want, the questions they need to answer and where they might find it. All of that is critical to a successful plan.
Which B2B marketing principles did I miss?
I’ll be releasing episodes for each of these B2B marketing principles over the coming weeks but am curious to know if you think I missed any ‘marketing classics’ that remain valid and important today? What do you rely on when building your marketing strategy? I’d also love to know if there are formerly popular concepts you think should never be used again.
You can check out The Principles of B2B Marketing on my YouTube channel and don’t forget to subscribe so you get the next episode when it’s released.
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