In marketing, especially in the B2B world, it can be difficult to differentiate yourself from competitors because often you are trying to sell similar products to the same audience.
So how would you go about making yourself stand out from the crowd? In our most recent podcast episode Britt Mulder, Marketing and Digital Manager at Eatron lets us into the tips and tricks that she has picked up throughout her short, yet wildly successful career in marketing. As a self-taught marketeer, Britt has been exposed to every element of marketing from ad design and content creation all the way to strategising whole campaigns.
Here is the advice that Britt has to offer:
Stay In Between Your Audience And Your Business: Don’t Lose Sight Of Your Audience
‘I think as a marketeer you are in between your audience and the company you work for. I think that if you know too much about the company, for example, if you know what screw number goes where on what table. Then you start to lose sight of the curious audience member who doesn’t know it all. Whereas, if you stay in the middle and you know the big picture of what your company is trying to do and you understand the audience too then you can kind of pull them together.’
In A Selfish World Make People FEEL Something
‘I think we are moving more into a selfish world where people want to know what’s in it for them. So telling people what year you were founded, how much investment you have etc. isn’t going to turn heads. But if you make your audience feel something then you’re on the right track.’
Don’t State Facts, Ask Questions.
‘If I can raise a question and then back it up with data it’s like a different way to what all of the competitors are doing – I didn’t make claims, I made hypotheses which helped to make people more curious about what I had to say. And then you can refer the audience member to a white paper written by professionals so that they get all of the data that their team will want.’
Read, A Lot.
‘Where I started was to be able to understand the audience and read the people I’m talking to, I read Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson. It literally puts down on paper who is who and what you need to do to convince this person of your messaging. Then I read The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier which helped me with branding. And lastly, because I believe that mindset has a lot to do with how far you will get, I listen to Diary of a CEO by Steven Bartlett which is just magical to me.’
Be Open to Criticism
‘Stay open to criticism, like you should be happy to love your work but if someone didn’t like it, change it. Don’t be like ‘Oh no, but I like it because it’s not for you it’s for someone else. So I think put all of your passion and love into something that you create, but be able to detach yourself from it so you can create the best that you possibly can.’
There is no one answer to succeeding in the marketing industry but one overarching theme to all of these tips is that knowledge is power. As a marketeer, you have to be able to empathise with your audience and understand what troubles they face on a day-to-day basis so that you can present them with a solution – your company’s solution. Also in this digital age where your audience is bombarded with thousands of marketing messages a day you want to be the one that makes them feel something.
