Build a ToB market operation system from 0 to 1!

Editor's note: In previous articles, the author of this article had a brief discussion on ToB market operations . The core of ToB market operation is: "Make customers more proactive", which actually means acquiring customers. In the past, the expansion of ToB business was mainly relationship-driven, sales-oriented, and the channels were relatively single. Now in some areas, marketing plays an increasingly important role, especially in enhancing customer awareness and narrowing the distance between customers and sales. Today, the author of this article will discuss with us how to build a ToB market operation system from 0 to 1.

Disclaimer: This article is only based on personal experience and should be considered as useful information. If there are any omissions, please feel free to give me your advice. I hope we can make progress together.

The process from 0 to 1 is both complicated and simple. The complexity lies in the fact that we will face a lot of problems that need to be solved urgently, and some of them may even be urgent and important, which make us busy and not know where to start.

The simplicity lies in the fact that although things are complicated, there is always a source for all the myriad threads. Once we find the breakthrough point, it will be relatively easy to solve certain imminent problems.

Of course, before we can grasp this so-called breaking point, we still need to have an understanding of the entire market operation system so that we can think clearly about how to break through.

So, when is it appropriate for ToB companies to start building a market operation system?

The answer is simple. We start from scratch. From the very beginning of the project, we must start to consider the construction of the market operation system.

Some people may ask: What are we building if we don’t even have a product?

In fact, this is not the case. We may all have a misunderstanding that market operations must require a dedicated person or department to be responsible for it. Isn’t it a waste of cost to build or join this department too early?

But we may have overlooked that at the very beginning of the product project, someone was already considering market issues.

For ToB products, the market is a group of potential corporate customers with the same needs. They are willing to pay us in exchange for the products or services we provide to meet their needs and solve their problems.

In other words, when the ToB product project was launched, someone was already considering what our product was. What problems can it solve for enterprises? Who are our target customers? What is the positioning of the product or brand? Maybe these things are not so clear and complete at the beginning, but this is the starting point for building a market operation system.

Let me give you an example that I often use: DingTalk first appeared before us as an enterprise communication tool that solves the problem of efficient enterprise communication. From the beginning, DingTalk has always emphasized that it is a tool for China's 43 million small and medium-sized enterprises, and its product positioning is "a new generation of team communication method." It then gradually evolved into "a way of working", "enterprise digital operating system", and then to the launch of customized "exclusive DingTalk" for large enterprises. These are changes that occurred with the continuous evolution of the business.

Therefore, we must start building a market operation system from the very beginning, even though we may not have a marketing department yet.

So what exactly are we going to build?

1. Construction of basic business architecture

The business architecture referred to here is not the technical basic business architecture, but refers to the position and role of the marketing operations department in the entire business process.

In Internet terms, it means defining boundaries.

We need to think clearly about what the marketing operations department should do in our project. Different companies and teams will naturally have different ideas, but today we might as well take marketing operations more seriously.

We said earlier that the core of ToB market operations is "making customers more proactive", so how can we build the basic business architecture around this core?

I divide the construction of the market operation system into three layers: infrastructure construction, tool construction, and bottom-level construction.

Among these three layers, except for the infrastructure construction which may require our priority, there is actually no order of priority for tool construction and underlying construction. Where to start and how to start requires us to make a comprehensive assessment based on the company's business situation.

Next, let’s talk about it in detail.

2. First layer: infrastructure

The infrastructure here mainly refers to the basic content information needed by sales and business colleagues, including company profile, product profile, official website, product manual, service manual, etc. Of course, this is not all, and the same thing still needs to be done based on a comprehensive assessment of the company's business situation.

Someone may ask, aren’t what you said the most basic things? Which company doesn’t have them?

It is true that every normal company has company information of one kind or another, but in my past work experience, I often encounter a situation.

Sales colleagues sometimes need to provide customers with a product introduction, or when writing product proposals, they often need a concise and clear product introduction or company introduction. However, the versions provided by the company are either too many or not suitable for the current scenario and cannot highlight the advantages of the company or product. This situation especially occurs when new businesses or new products are launched, because our original company or product introduction does not take this aspect into account. What should we do?

Of course, we need to re-examine the basic content. A better solution may be to have different versions of introductions for different customers and different business scenarios, and to communicate them clearly to sales colleagues to avoid using outdated information, which will lead to inconsistent external content and cause doubts among customers.

As for the importance of a company’s official website, especially its importance in “acquiring customers”, there is no need to say more. We have also talked about it in previous articles.

See details: How is a ToB website designed?

In addition to the basic information mentioned above, some data and technology product service providers also need technical documentation, help and support content construction, operation manuals, template tools, etc. Of course, these contents are not entirely provided by the marketing operations department, and still require the efforts of the product and technology departments.

After that, how to use and present these contents is the responsibility of marketing and sales colleagues.

In addition, we mentioned something about the brand, which has been discussed in previous articles and will not be repeated here.

For details, see: When does a ToB company start to build a brand, and what exactly should a brand do?

3. The second layer: tool construction

The reason why they are called tools is that content, activities, advertising, and channels are essentially used as tools for acquiring customers and cultivating leads. We will discuss the specific operations in detail later.

1. Content Marketing System

1.1 Content Planning

This step mainly sorts out what kind of content we can produce. When conducting initial planning, we don’t need to consider our own resources and capabilities, but we need to let go of our usual thinking logic and think openly, without considering the difficulties in the implementation process. Open-mindedness is the most important thing.

Of course, there is logic to such planning.

Here are two examples:

Almost all the content produced by Sensors Data revolves around dimensions such as data analysis, data-driven, and growth. While teaching you how to achieve growth, it also cleverly integrates its own products into it.

The content presented by the Teambition collaboration tool in its official website solutions revolves around specific work scenarios, teaching you how to use Teambition to collaborate in various work scenarios and improve work efficiency.

You see, data services sell not only products but also growth methods, and collaborative tools sell not only products but also working methods. From introducing what our products are to letting customers know that we are experts and authorities in this field, so that customers can trust us, the ultimate goal of doing so is naturally to "make customers more proactive."

If our products are also suitable for development around related dimensions, we can also use this method, that is, to produce business-related dry goods to reach relevant business managers, increase product touchpoints and establish basic cognition.

But the content is definitely not limited to this one dimension. For example, customer success stories, industry perspectives, event reports, expert testimony, etc. are all dimensions we can enter. Of course, the same thing applies: it must be based on a comprehensive assessment of the company's business itself.

1.2 Content Production

There is actually not much to say about this part. How to select topics, how to organize materials, how to write content... is another topic.

But there is one principle: you must produce high-quality and valuable content, otherwise it will not only fail to help acquire customers, but may also damage the brand image.

1.3 Content Distribution

The initial content is basically on our own platform, and then we share the content through various other media to increase the reuse rate of the content and amplify the content effect.

If necessary, we can also promote and expose the core content through paid promotion.

1.4 Media Matrix—Content Channels

In addition to good content, we also need good content channels. The construction of a media matrix must be put on the agenda. In the early stages of the project, we can focus on the construction of our own media, and then we have to find a way to build the entire media matrix, including: paid media, cooperative media, enterprise service platforms, etc.

In the past, we may have focused on graphic and text content, but now short videos and live broadcasts may also be the content forms that ToB companies are beginning to pay more attention to.

To sum it up briefly: content construction is a long-term thing. It is difficult for us to expect to bring about a large increase in performance in a short period of time through content, but valuable content will definitely help to establish brand image and acquire customers in the long term. Accumulation is important, and continuous accumulation is even more important.

The reason why it can be called a system is that we must determine one thing at the beginning of the construction of the content marketing system, that is, "customer acquisition", that is, to let customers take the initiative. Therefore, all the content we produce must ultimately lead to something that can be used to acquire customers, which may be a product, some kind of benefit, or even just that customers may actively search after reading it. In other words, all content ends here, and naturally it will form something that can be called a system.

2. Construction of activity marketing system

If content marketing is to accumulate long-term value, then event marketing is more about obtaining short-term value.

In the past, ToB companies’ activities were online but mainly offline. However, after 2020, our mainstream activity scenarios have begun to shift more online.

2.1 Main Types of Event Marketing

Offline activities:

• Hosted activities: conferences, salons, courses, etc.
• Jointly organized events: mainly refers to various events jointly organized with other brands;
• Sponsorship activities: mainly sponsoring industry conferences to obtain various rights and interests such as on-site booths and industry exposure;

Online Activities:

• Content activities: conference live broadcast, open class sharing live broadcast, online product launch conference...
• Product activities: product experience, welfare collection, information collection...
• Marketing activities: festival activities, hot events, promotional activities, anniversary celebrations...

Of course, the above may not include all activities. We may be able to list all types of activities after careful sorting, so how do we make it a system?

Like content marketing, the main purpose of organizing events is to “acquire customers”, and event marketing is more about obtaining short-term value. How to use events to acquire customers in the long term has become the key to building an event marketing system.

2.2 Specific practices of event marketing

2.2.1 Sort out existing resources and plan activity content

As the saying goes, "know yourself and know your enemy, and you will never be defeated in a hundred battles." In addition to knowing who our customer groups are, we also need to know what resources we have, market conditions, content we excel at, channel resources, event budgets, personnel inventory, etc. Only by sorting out our resources can we plan what activities to do, what activities can be done well, and judge the frequency of activities.

2.2.2 Establishing regular activities

Since event marketing is about obtaining short-term value, wouldn’t it be better if we just make the events cyclical?

Thoughtworks has established a periodic online live broadcast activity based on its WeChat service account. There are several online live broadcasts every month. If you want to watch the live broadcast or obtain information, you naturally have to leave your personal information, which is what we call sales leads.

Of course, if you need to enter the regional market, you can also arrange periodic offline lectures in various regions to attract local customers to participate.

2.2.3 Plan quarterly or annual major time node activities in advance

This needs no elaboration, for example: new product launches, industry conferences, anniversary events, etc.

2.2.4 Formulate a lead conversion plan

The content of each activity is different, and customers are interested in different things, so the strategies we need when taking on leads are also different.

For example, we organized a salon on how to improve enterprise collaboration efficiency and obtained 200 sales leads. Then the sales staff recommended the "Alibaba Cloud" products to customers, which naturally made it difficult to generate conversions.

Of course, this is just a somewhat ridiculous example. The actual situation is that the activities we organize are often related to our products or services. So when sales take over sales leads, although they all recommend the same product or service, the entry points may be different. This entry point is best to cater to the content of our event. The content of the event revolves around the product solving a certain business problem. Sales should use this business problem as the entry point to communicate with customers, and the conversion rate will be relatively high. After all, it is content that customers are interested in.

Such a basic event marketing system has been built, but we still need to constantly judge whether there is room for optimization of the current strategy based on data feedback. With the development of the business and the evolution of the organizational scale, we will be able to do more and more activities and develop in more directions. At this time, how to judge the value of the activities and how to make choices becomes another problem for us.

3. Push Marketing

Whether it is content marketing or event marketing, the construction of an advertising operation system belongs to the category of "inbound marketing", while advertising is a typical "push marketing".

Here is a quote from the book "Customer Acquisition" on the comparison between push marketing and inbound marketing.

Although the overall click-through rate of advertisements has been declining year by year, the huge base of Internet users still attracts many companies, and many ToB companies are also happy with it.

So how do we build an advertising operation system?

3.1 Assessing business and product development stages

The main source of customers for most ToB companies in the early stages of their business may be the founder's reputation, followed by the introduction of a sales team, and then a marketing operations team. Unless there are strong supporters, due to funding and resource constraints, few companies will place large-scale advertisements from the beginning.

Generally speaking, only when we have a sales team of a certain size and the number of leads obtained by the original customer acquisition method cannot meet the needs of the sales team and cannot support rapid performance growth, can we consider using advertising to expand the customer base reached by the product and enhance its influence.

Of course, there is another situation. If the application level and audience group of our product itself are relatively broad, and large-scale user growth can be achieved through advertising, we can consider using advertising as a booster to accelerate expansion in advance, such as DingTalk, Enterprise WeChat and other collaborative tools, but we still need to have a certain user scale and user awareness in the early stage.

There are also some ToB businesses that may not be suitable for large-scale advertising promotion at all. For example, for industrial robot manufacturers, there is not much point in advertising all over the Internet because the audience is too small and most of the people reached are invalid.

3.2 Choose advertising channels and formats

This is actually a matter of personal opinion.

Different advertising channels also have different advertising forms. The advertising industry has developed into a diverse field today. We choose appropriate channels and advertising forms based on our own business, and then evaluate feedback based on data. Otherwise, it is difficult for us to say which platform is more effective.

3.3 Plan advertising tools and develop sales conversion plans

We have repeatedly emphasized before that all kinds of market operation work are for acquiring customers. How to select appropriate means to improve customer acquisition efficiency and how to take over sales leads are things we must consider. We have also briefly discussed this in previous articles, so we will not elaborate on it here.

Author: Zixiu

Source: ToB Operation Club