B2B marketing techniques

In my experience (selling millions of $ in B2B), it's all about solving the pain.

"Pain" can be thought of in various ways:

1. What keeps this person up at night?
2. How could this person lose their job, and can you prevent that?
3. What obviously (that's key) takes a ton of time that you can eliminate?
4. What jobs completely suck for someone?

In B2B the sale is more often pain than pleasure. In B2C it can be either, but often you're selling coolness, fun, or leisure, which isn't pain.

Notice this is all about people. Never think you're "selling to a company." No such thing, there's only people. People who work at a company, people who spent the company's money, but it's still people!

On a related note, there's good ways to not sell because you've put up a business barrier. Here's an article about how to avoid that.

Start a blog. Start creating content that is useful to your target market. Don't be overtly commercial in your efforts. Truly try to educate the market.

Start thinking a little bit about Search Engine Optimization. What words might your customers search on if they were looking for you? Who is ranking for these terms? What kind of search volume do those words get?

Start finding influencers in your target market. In any conceivable niche there are at least a handful of bloggers that right about the topic. Find these people. Read their content.

The key to effective inbound marketing (pulling people in, instead of pushing your message out) is to say/write something useful. Produce content will draw your target customer-base in. This works very well in a B2B context.

1. Try to find where your potential customers group together... Real Estates Developers Accociation??? Events??? Get / sponsor the organizers to send out a e-mailer or out a small article about your product in their regular newsletter. This will not be free but at least beats the cost of sending your agent on field without any confirmed leads.

2. Get involved in online forums / groups on sites like LinkedIn & start commenting on existing topics. I highly advice NOT to direct market your product by sending out a post to 1000s of people why they should buy your product. Build trust over time by getting yourself recognized & helping your potential customers.

I'm assuming you meant online B2B marketing, my feedback is limited to that. We have been doing this & it has worked quite well for us.

If feasible how about proposing the installation of your system for free or at a very low rate for a developer who is either constructing a new building or is renovating one. This will help you deploy a system and test it out in the real world and get your target segment to experience it first hand. This has several benefits:

1. It shows your customer where you are adding value. (The decreased cost of not having a doorman, not having to deal with attrition, higher level of security, something the developer can showcase as a novelty when pitching it to potential buyers).

2. Word of mouth. I have worked with a few developers and I know they are always looking into what the competition is doing and offering. If your system adds a substantial amount of value and helps create some buzz this will result in referrals.

3. Actual experience with a live deployment. No matter how much we test and think our product/service to be perfect the customer always will see it from a different angle. This broadens your scope and highlights area where you can improve on your product.

4. Case studies material. As for all business owners maximization of profits is an essential metric and nothing convinces them more than actual figures of what they actually are. Your pilot implementations can help you in this regard. This can be then further used as marketing collateral as well.

Hope that helps a bit.

Dharmesh has some great tips, but he is too humble to promote his company HubSpot. The information he touched on about inbound marketing can be found in more detail at blog.hubspot.com. It is the definitive resource for online B2B marketing.

Also, buy Dharmesh's new book "Inbound Marketing" co-written with HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan. It's due out soon, but I am almost finished reading an early copy of it. It's a great book that really spells out the inbound marketing plan you should implement for your company.

Sorry to make this post so promotional, but I really believe in inbound marketing and HubSpot's methodologies. They have worked for my clients and for HubSpot's 1600+ customers.

Just remember this - companies are made of people. People that read blogs and participate in social media work at companies. Once you find your target audience and produce great content for them, you're on to a great start.

Now I'll speak directly to your needs:

Since the product is to be sold to real estate developers, entrepreneurs, investors and management companies, rather then the tenants themselves (since its for high-rise buildings), then getting hype in twitter seems pointless. As a start-up, we have limited resources for marketing, so sending agents across the country is not an option.

Find blogs, news sites, and forums that these type of people might frequent. Make yourself known on there, provide advice, ask questions, and try to understand your target audience. Join relevant groups on LinkedIn. You might actually learn some things about your niche that will help you market better to them. Once you have a good feel for your audience, you can start writing good content on your blog and promote it on all the sites where you are a member and people know/trust you. This takes time and effort, but it works. Another book I would recommend about this is Chris Brogan's "Trust Agents".

You need a partner with a list. And you need to make an offer to this partner that makes sense, so that you can get access to that list to deliver a rock-solid proposal to commercial real estate owners.

Think, for instance, of a Commercial Real Estate Broker Association. You could argue that the bad economy is causing many commercial buildings to be left empty. You could minimize the expense of security maintenance by installing your biometric technology and this is something that their associates might want to learn about.

Propose to organize a series of on-site workshops or free teleseminars, as long as the association provides the guest list. Say that you will offer to sell nothing but only to educate attendees on all the benefits of biometric security and all that installation entails. The broker can keep any entry fees but you get to hand out and keep all business cards.

Have a web site ready to drive people to, and make sure you've posted a form to capture their information. Offer a free newsletter at the site and start building your own list. Then execute some direct B2B marketing campaigns using your list.

If you don't have enough names to make a campaign worthwhile, then analyze the people who registered to your events and newsletter. Talk to a B2B list broker and rent out additional names that look just like the ones that you have in your own list, and then execute your direct marketing campaign.

Survey your site visitors and find out what interests them about biometric security services. Write articles on the subject and publish them on your site, making sure that they are search engine optimized. Once you have modicum of traffic to your site, you can begin to ponder about leveraging Web 2.0. technology to generate even more.

Here's a link to 5 steps to B2B campaign management to give you an idea.