Hi, I'm Peter Spande, director with TechRepublic. In my lastwhiteboard video, I talked about the challenge of B2B marketing and generatingawareness, cultivating that awareness into interest and then finally leadingthose people who are interested in your solution to consider your solution ingreater depth, and ultimately, we hope, to make a purchase. Today, I'm going totalk a little bit more about how to fine-tune your messaging to map to thismarketing funnel.
So, at the very top of the funnel, we're talking to thebroadest number of people and at this point, we're really looking to create abig splash. Again, we're trying to tell people what they don't know they needto know and we need to do that through generating emotion. Typically, this willcome from advertising. Potentially it could come from a big PR announcement.
The second level, we're really looking to cultivate thatawareness and lead that into interest. Here we're all talking about educationalkinds of items and at this point, what we're looking to do is take thatawareness and hopefully we've piqued some of those people's curiosity and we'velead them down further, so they're saying, "tell me more about that."So you want to do just that. You want to provide case studies or productoverviews, other kinds of educational documents, market briefs, analystreports, that kind of thing, and then everyone who is interested in that willultimately go to consider your products.
So what we're looking to do though is to create that tippingpoint where someone takes that interest, that professional interest and thatleads them to say, "You know what I think, this is really a good solutionfor my business." At that point, you really need to work to driveconsideration. You do this through white papers, product specs, I mean, otherkinds of really detailed, often technical documents. Webcasts that are talkingspecifically about your products and how they map to the larger solution, allof those kinds of things. At this point, you're really looking to fill in theblanks. You're looking to eliminate as many questions that may still belingering in their heads and now they're looking to have help from your salesprofessionals and your engineers and other kinds of people, customizing this toyour business.
If you do a good job mapping your messaging to the entiremarketing funnel, you will very efficiently lead people from awareness throughto becoming a sales leader and becoming a person that's really ready to speakto your sales professionals. You will increase the number of leads you're givingyour sales people and ideally you're going to be creating more sales for yourcompany.
