Effective business to business (B2B) marketing relies on a couple of key principles. From a strategic perspective, before you start figuring out your marketing mix you start with segmentation, targeting, and positioning. I’ll explain what a marketing mix is in a different post. In this blog I’m going to touch on one component of positioning that can be difficult to accomplish: messaging.
Marketing is all about creating conversations. Messaging describes the guidelines that marketers use to define what we’re going to say. Messaging builds on top of the foundation of your brand and is designed to engage a potential buyer in a way that helps them understand the value of your service and importantly why they should consider buying it.
Developing messaging is difficult. You need to understand what your prospects are trying to do; what is the job they need to accomplish? You need to know how they accomplish this task now. What are your competitors telling them, why should they do anything differently and why should they talk with you?
One of the simplest tools to use to develop messaging is known as FUD – Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. FUD sounds something like this: “The other guy’s products are really bad, because they don’t have everything we have”. Here’s an example of FUD in action:
So why didn’t this work? The reason FUD isn’t an effective B2B messaging tactic is that it fails to explain why the prospect should talk to you.
Consider the messaging in the video. It explains why working with multiple carriers still leaves the business open to an outage. Outages are bad, and many businesses fail if they have a significant outage. The video is full of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There is a short call to action at the end of the video that says how we could help but it’s simply not strong enough. While the medium and delivery are interesting the basic message is “you should listen to me, or bad things will happen…”. Here are three reasons you avoid FUD:
- Think about the job your buyers are trying to do. B2B decision makers are looking for ways to grow their businesses. Their goals are “Grow the revenues by 20%”, not “Don’t let the business fail”
- Business leaders manage risks. They don’t manage failures. Good leaders balance risks vs. rewards. They know that risks exist, you don’t have to tell them. What they need to know is what reward counter-balances the risk.
- The biggest issue is “So What!”. FUD doesn’t speak directly to the buyer. It assumes that the buyer is ignorant about the FUD you’re peddling. What if they aren’t? Instead of starting a conversation, too much FUD can close the dialog before it ever has a chance to start.
In the example I shared the messaging would have been easily improved by shifting the dialog. At the time we were assembling that story the focus was on why change and that is a critical message to relay. But what we failed to explain thoroughly enough in the video is why us. In my defense, the messaging framework did explain why us, we just didn’t put it into that video, and as a result while the video did get a decent number of views, because we promoted it using a good marketing mix, it didn’t achieve a great conversion rate.
So, FUD is easy and is effective is some circumstances, think about the business to consumer (B2C) insurance space where the messaging is literally about avoiding financial ruin, but in B2B FUD will fail to create conversations with the decision makers that you want to reach. Just say “no” to FUD.