Here’s some food for thought: 57% of B2B marketers say their biggest challenge is getting targeted prospects to engage.1
We see this as good news and bad news. The good news is these companies know who their targeted prospects are (identifying your buyer personas should be one of the first activities you engage in). The bad news is that if your audience isn’t engaging with your business, you’re probably missing a few pieces in your overall strategy.
Don’t worry: you’re about to get those four missing pieces below. These strategies are required for smart marketing for telecom companies that want to successfully engage – and convert – prospects.
1. Know Your Audience
Your marketing strategy depends on who your audience is, so let’s make sure you understand who you’re trying to engage.
- Targeting businesses means your marketing strategy should be built around specific pain points that your target audience shares. Are your prospects collectively struggling to manage remote and hybrid work environments, for instance? Your messaging should explain how your offering helps manage those challenges.
- If you’re a supplier targeting partners or resellers, you need to understand the problems they are trying to solve for their own customers – in addition to the partners’ pain points. As an example, many agents are burnt out on carriers who don’t offer the support they need in order to properly service their customers once a solution has been purchased. Your marketing should make it clear that you offer superior support/expertise/experience when compared to your competition.
2. Address Pain Points in Your Marketing
Notice a theme, no matter who your audience is? Marketing for telecom companies should always demonstrate an ability to provide direct solutions to problems.
How to Identify Pain Points
Thoroughly understanding the problems your customers are facing requires taking time to brainstorm and consider what those challenges are. Ask yourself these questions so that your messaging can speak directly to the answers:
- What are the common problems your customers face?
- What external factors impact your customers (e.g. the pandemic)?
- What internal conflicts might your decision makers have to deal with?
- What are the philosophical challenges your target customer might go through?
How to Map Pain Points Directly to Your Solutions
Completing an exercise in identifying pain points is just the first step – now you need to decide, and articulate how your solutions solve those specific problems.
- What’s the essence of your customers’ struggles? Your unique selling proposition should include language that touches on that directly. Going back to the remote and hybrid work example – you could include statements like “our UCaaS solution improves remote worker productivity and helps you save on costs” in your messaging.
- Your customers will also have secondary and tertiary pain points. These should be considered as you craft your content to give your solution a little more weight and offer the impression that what you provide is all-encompassing. If you have an offering that meets a need, make sure your marketing makes that known.
Side note: if you have customer success stories that prove your ability to solve common problems, use them! Sharing testimonials builds trust in your brand – and makes it known that your product, solution, or service actually has the positive impact you claim it does.
3. Measure, Measure, Measure
You know your audience (check), you’ve mapped your messaging to their pain points (check) – now you can just sit back and relax, right? (Nope, there’s more!)
Effective marketing for telecom companies involves measuring the success of your program. This involves a series of steps to ensure the marketing decisions you’re making are data-driven.
- Closed-loop marketing refers to a process of continuously building on digital brand and inbound marketing funnel strategies that move users through the buyer’s journey.
- The next phase is to engage in closed-loop analytics: the method for attributing, extracting, and segmenting marketing and sales data using measurements from the entire customer lifecycle. This data can be leveraged to create reports that allow for analysis and insight into your targets’ behavior patterns.
- The final stage is closed-loop reporting – and this is what enhances your decision-making process. Organize your data for visualization in charts, graphs, and tables to make it easier to derive meaningful insights. You can then implement tests (like A/B testing) that optimize your marketing and sales results.
4. Build and Utilize a Robust Content Library
Here’s where it all comes together: take the data you’ve analyzed and the results of any testing you’ve conducted and use them to build a library of content that addresses the specific pain of your target audience. The more robust and relevant the content, the better.
Here are some examples of content formats that we recommend for telecom marketing:
Blogs
Blogging, when done right, can both generate leads and help position you as an industry thought leader. Returning once more to our example of remote work: if your target audience is struggling to decide on the right mix of cloud technologies to make their arrangement effective, you can create a blog (or series of blogs) on the subject “making the cloud work for remote workers” (or whatever keyword will best help your SEO).
Premium Content
The word “premium” might bring to mind the word “paid” – but what we’re addressing here is premium as in top-quality, valuable content that your target audience needs to see. In addition to publishing thoughtful, relevant blogs, you’ll want to create other forms of content as well:
- White papers are in-depth guides on a particular subject and are an excellent way to demonstrate thought leadership. Significantly longer than a blog (at least 1500 words, minimum) and typically written in a more academic style, these longer pieces of content give you an opportunity to showcase expertise and provide educational value to your audience.
- Infographics are on the opposite end of the spectrum from white papers. Numbers-driven and image-heavy, these shorter pieces of content should provide highly specific information and pack a visual punch to get your point across.
- Webinars allow you to showcase not just your expertise, but your experts themselves. Get your subject-matter person on UCaaS to host a session on communication tools for remote work, for instance, then post the webinar recording on your website where it can be available for viewing at the user’s convenience.
Video
Over half of your audience prefers video over all other forms of content (54%, in fact) – deliver your message via the format they want! Using video in your marketing:
- Keeps brand in front of your customers and prospects
- Helps your website attract and convert leads
- Keeps you discoverable online and boosts your SEO
- Helps you concisely articulate your value
One (Okay, Two) Last Big Tip(s)
What sets you apart from your competition? We briefly touched on the idea of your unique selling proposition, but knowing what truly differentiates you from your competitors is the final ingredient in creating powerful marketing for telecom companies. You’re not just creating messaging that addresses your audience’s pain points; that messaging should also make clear how your brand specifically can do a better job of solving their problems than anyone else in the market.
Which leads us to our final piece of advice: if marketing feels too overwhelming to manage on your own, don’t do it alone! Since 2010, Mojenta has powered the growth of nearly 300 B2B technology organizations like yours with data-driven, results-focused marketing for telecom companies. We’re the experts that will prioritize your success and treat your business like our own. Ready for the right help? Contact us today.
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