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4 ways to reach your target audience

Your clients are busy – and not just busy, but crazy busy. If you think they’re spending months of careful exploration, downloading white papers, comparing options and analyzing the impact of their buying decisions, think again.

In most cases, your prospects are putting out the immediate fires in their department or their lives. They aren’t looking for your solutions unless they need them right now – or yesterday. Unless it’s a pressing need, it’s off their plate and off their mind.

When they enter with this mindset and under these circumstances, how do you make sure you’re connecting with them so you’re the right choice when the time comes?

For busy B2B buyers, your best bet is to create multiple resources around the same topic, target your distribution and be consistent. It keeps you in their periphery as a helpful, consistent presence. That way when your solution can put out their current fire, they reach out and buy from you.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Develop specific marketing personas – and figure out their biggest problems.
    You can’t market to everyone, so developing personas can help. Who is making the buying decisions about your product or service? Is it a middle manager? A department head? An executive? Knowing who they are can help you uncover their biggest problem and create a targeted marketing approach around that problem.
  2. Figure out where they are hanging out.
    Where do they spend their time online? Which social networks are full of your ideal clients? For most B2B companies, the answer is going to be LinkedIn. But Twitter, Google+ and even Facebook can be strong contenders for your B2B social media marketing.
  3. See what competitors are publishing about the same topic.
    If you’re looking to solve a common problem in your clients’ industry, your competitors may be publishing resources on that very same idea. It will pay off to take a look at what the competition is publishing. This way, you can position your resources in a fresh, new way.
  4. Develop your idea and re-use it.
    You need to create multiple resources – but you don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time. If you have created a great white paper on a particular problem for your target market, reuse it. Chop it up into a series of blog posts, create an infographic or put together a presentation. Get as much mileage out of your ideas as possible.

Be there – be in several places – and you’ll be the right choice when the time comes.