We asked Bray Leino’s specialist B2B team for their best marketing #B2BLifeHacks. This is what they came up with:
Know your audience
Try to walk 50 steps in the shoes of your target audience. Whether it’s one of the c-suite, the individual with overall purchase responsibility or simply the lead. Understanding what motivates them, what their pain points are and where your product or service can enrich their day-to-day life gives you a massive head start when it comes to interrogating available insights.
Listen
Set up Google Alerts for all existing clients and prospects. You will receive instant updates when any of them are mentioned online.
Taking it one step further, you can also track industry themes/trends. You will then get notifications when anyone in the industry does anything around the subject.
Meanwhile, attending key industry trade shows gives invaluable insight and learnings about the industry. This is great because in B2B, it’s difficult to know what your clients’ competitors are doing. You can’t just walk into a shop and view their product range or packaging.
Efficient PR
Get to to grips with PR services Gorkana is a pretty good life hack. If you’re looking to place content or supercharge your PR plan around a certain event or issue, the budget or election for instance, these services already have ready-made lists of relevant media contacts prepared; saving you loads of time.
Accurate content
When you think you’ve finished that article, presentation or speech, just take a moment. Go away and make a cup of tea, chat to a colleague about their day, or check Facebook – something relatively mundane so your brain catches up with itself. With fresh eyes, and after a minimum of five minutes, come back to your masterpiece and re-read it. There will always be somewhere that you can tighten it up, improve its content, or fix a typo.
On the subject of typos, always get someone else to do a final proofread of your work. You cannot spot misspellings and grammar faults in your own work, as your brain automatically goes on auto-read and sees what you meant to write. Everybody makes spelling mistakes, they are (generally) not a sign of poor writing skills. There is, however, no excuse for typos in your final product.
Be realistic
This hack applies to many roles and industries; you have to learn to say no in a productive way, and to respond with solutions. The people who struggle are those who say yes to everything and don’t upwards manage.
