There’s a popular dichotomy in marketing between using a shotgun or rifle approach to target your customers. At a basic level, you use shotgun marketing to reach people you don’t know, while a rifle is used to target individuals you do know to persuade them to buy.
Shotgun marketing, also known as ‘spray and pray’, involves reaching as many people as possible without a high level of confidence that these people are interested in your product or service, are ready to buy, or are even in your category. Think of classic mass marketing, also known as ‘above the line’ or traditional advertising.
The rifle approach on the other hand is extremely targeted to an audience of one. Consider classic direct marketing or email marketing, where you can get a specific message to a specific person to encourage them to consider or buy your product or service.
Which approach is best? Spoiler alert – it’s a bit of both.
Buyers of B2B products and services can be difficult to categorise on traditional demographic criteria. What prospects typically have in common is a problem to be solved, or an opportunity to be explored. Combine that with relatively lengthy purchase cycles, and B2B marketers have a problem.
You can generally narrow target audiences down to job titles or areas of responsibility, but there are many other factors at play before you can pinpoint someone as interested or ready to buy. So you are left with the task of reaching far and wide, or loading up that shotgun and putting your message out there to as many prospects as possible.
The trick is to encourage some of those people who receive your message to put their hands up, express interest in what you have to say, or even tell you they are ready to buy. And be aware that will take a few shots to achieve both reach and frequency.
Then you can pick up your rifle.
With a list of prospects who have engaged with your organisation via marketing communications and content, you can start refining your messages and get them to specific people. You may or may not know all their names at this point, but thanks to the sophistication of digital marketing and media platforms, you know what content they have seen and engaged with.
As these prospects go through the purchase consideration or buying cycle, you can refine your messages more and more to help guide them through awareness, interest, desire and action.
Research shows that as many as four out of five B2B buyers go through this entire cycle without directly engaging a salesperson, and only do so when they are ready to buy.
So keep serving up that content.
B2B marketers don’t have the luxury of deciding when to pick up a shotgun or a rifle. Truth be told, you have to be armed with both a shotgun and a rifle all the time, because you are managing a constantly evolving cycle of new people entering your orbit, getting closer to you, and eventually buying (or exiting).
The upshot is you will always have your hands full, so you might like to take some of the load off your plate (and mind). We can help with consistent, high quality content marketing that gets the right people in your sights and keeps them there until they buy.