95% of your market is not looking to buy

I have 5 updates for you this week.

1. On my mind

A mental model for how to think about setting up your B2B marketing machine:

Only about 5% are actively in the market, and you use direct response to capture that demand.

However since ~95% of the target buyers are currently not looking for you, your efforts should focus on:

1. Building mental availability, so they think of you when they need X

This starts with raising awareness of you: what is it, what do you use it for (X), when.

If the space you're in is very crowded, take a fundamentally differentiated position in the market (different JTBD, etc). Aim to be maximumly visible for all category buyers.

A mental model for how to think about setting up your B2B marketing machine:

Only about 5% are actively in the market, and you use direct response to capture that demand.

However since ~95% of the target buyers are currently not looking for you, your efforts should focus on:

That means be active on organic social, do various forms of content marketing, brand ads, events, and so on - all the things you already know you should be doing. Quality matters here - producing mediocrity will do very little. If you can do quality, then the more aggressive/ambitious, the better.

2. Engineering more triggers to remind people they need X

When do people think that they might need to do X?

For instance, a typical trigger for thinking of Wynter is when a company is re-doing its website or changing its positioning. That's great, but that doesn't happen too often.

So I need to focus on getting people to think of Wynter also when they're launching that webinar registration page, when they deploy those new PPC landing pages where they drive a lot of $$$ traffic to, when they're optimizing their sales funnel, and so on.

First, make a list of 'events' that happen in your target customers' life where they might/should think of you. Then, develop marketing campaigns/efforts to raise awareness that your company should be used for those things.

A great example of this is what everyone's favorite media company Profitwell is doing with their content: essentially they have a 'show' for each of their use cases. So they're reaching category buyers AND educating the market about their use cases through edutainment.

Follow me on LinkedIn for more thoughts on strategy, messaging and optimization.

2. New product launch plan: what to do during pre-launch, launch, and post-launch

In the iPhone 13’s first quarter, it generated $71.6 billion in revenue (despite parts shortages and a global pandemic).

You don’t have to create Apple-level hype to see a successful new product launch. Trading app Robinhood launched with almost one million users thanks to a pinpointed market need and waitlist pre-launch campaign.

Unfortunately, many product launches take a “build it and they will come approach,” failing to gain traction and eventually fizzling out. These launches lack the key component of promotion and acquisition.

In this article, you’ll learn how to design an effective new product launch plan to avoid this pitfall and generate demand.

Read the entire article here.

3. CXL job board

Some great new job offers on CXL’s Job Board this week. There’s more here.

If you want top brands to reach out to you, sign up for CXL Talent Pool. It's free.

And if you're a company looking to directly access the best marketing talent and skip all the spammy applicants, apply here.

4. You asked for a community, so we've built one

CXL Playbooks project started as a huge library of step by step instructions for doing 90% of all marketing tasks. Then we got your feedback and your requests looked like this.

The top 2 requests asked for user-generated-content and community. So we pivoted the whole product and started building a one.

We're launching it at the end of the month, so stay tuned.

5. The bridge between raw data and actionable insights

In his latest article, Speero Managing Director Ben Labay provides a step-by-step guide in codifying data using tried and tested methodologies, and how to find patterns and connections that inform your hypotheses to drive better user experience.

Read the full article here.