Metrics and analytics are the ties that tightly bind marketing to training. Being able to analyze and distill your customer database into its finer components yields marketing collateral that is more contextually relevant and high impact. In short, your customer database is the key to enabling focused, solution driven marketing when used effectively.

A large facet of solution driven marketing is its ability to enable contextual 1:1 (or what seem like 1:1) conversations with your prospects and customers. Their challenges are the focal point of these conversations. Likewise, the most effective conversations begin with an identification of what their business issues are. Often times, this means helping the audience to articulate a problem they didn’t know they had. This is referred to as, ‘the discovery of latent pain’. It’s good practice to leverage anecdotal stories to further align your capabilities to the discovered challenges. This process leads to the proof point that you can successfully address the challenges they are facing. If you’ve executed this process correctly they’ll be enthusiastically asking you for the solution.

Being able to conduct these investigative conversations face-to-face to a receptive audience is not always possible. This is precisely where your database of customer contacts, leads and prospects comes into play. The list below is a general guideline of the refinement I’m referring to.

• Position in the buying cycle
• Industry Vertical
• Geography
• Company Size
• Revenue
• Products of yours they currently own

The aforementioned segments help in determining how to position marketing resources and collateral. Case in point, the business issues faced by a manufacturer can be quite different than those experienced by pharmaceutical organizations. In some cases the businesses’ issues align closely. In either case the marketing and communications aligned with either situation need to be articulated using the correct industry specific vernacular. Using pharmaceutical language or case studies with manufacturers or vice versa, regardless of how close their issues are, is a sure fire recipe for failure.

The opportunity to communicate your subject matter expertise via this type of marketing is boundless, or at least more so than in traditional marketing.  Traditional marketing paints with broader strokes, whereas database, solution based marketing lives in the details. The latter of the two creates an opportunity for you to shine as a marketer, I mean educator (or do I mean marketer?). The education you’re instilling is 100% focused on the prospect and their needs. It culminates with you providing them with the tools to verify that your product and services do what you say they can do. Execution of this order requires you to build training disguised as marketing, which succinctly helps to insert your product in the prospect’s environment for the sole purpose of solving an issue they knew they had or you helped them uncover.

To keep the prospect focused and intrigued, the associated training must be delivered in bite-sized, easy to consume, multidimensional formats. In addition, topics need to be condensed into their core elements and delivered via videos, podcasts, and smart landing pages. Automated follow-up emails should be incorporated to renew interest as well as pass along contextual tips and tricks where appropriate.

Interweaving training with marketing handily aligns outbound communications with the needs of the prospect. Addressing their leads in a fashion that puts their challenges first makes you more relevant, your marketing more effective and positions you as a business consultant.

Posted by Amin on 04.05.2010 at 8:44am   Tags: strategy, training
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