How many in your target audience are in the market right now? Or even within this quarter? Not many. It might be 2, 5, or 12%.
The point is that you obviously can’t expect to get into a sales dialogue with everyone in the target audience. For the vast majority, you simply can’t sell them anything. The remaining 98, 95, or 88% might only want to buy a solution, product, or service next quarter – or in three years.
Conversely, it’s hugely interesting to have a strategy so you can sell to the roughly 5% who actually want to buy from you now.
Your marketing strategy should reflect that, so you both mature the market over time and deliver the warm leads that salespeople are asking for right now. That means the focus should be both on converting, nurturing, and educating decision-makers who will invest in the longer term (95) – and identifying and reaching out to those who need to buy now (5). In other words, a 95/5 strategy.
The strategy is divided into two methods that work extremely well for these two objectives: Inbound Marketing and Intent Marketing.
Inbound Marketing: Educating and nurturing potential leads.
This method is, of course, aimed at the roughly 95% who aren’t ready to buy anything now, but will be over time – especially if they’re prompted by good content that inspires and educates decision-makers, typically through an email and display nurturing program.
Good examples of effective Inbound Marketing are, for instance, the campaigns we’ve developed for Codeex, VENZO, SEC Datacom, timengo, and Cibicom.
These are typically campaigns where strong content attracts decision-makers and gets them to convert – among other things by promising more of the same. That makes it possible to work with the 95% who won’t be in the market until later.
Intent Marketing: Sell to those who want to buy now.
This method focuses on the companies that are right at the bottom of the funnel and have an intention to make a purchase within a short timeframe. Here, the content should be more specific about the solution or product and doesn’t necessarily need to inspire or educate as much. The target audience has already made a decision and is therefore more focused on finding the right supplier.
A big part of the task in Intent Marketing is listening for intent signals and identifying the companies that want to buy now – and then reaching out to them to start the sales dialogue as quickly and simply as possible.
We succeeded to a large extent with this at Unit-IT, timengo, and Fellowmind, where, for example, with an Insight & Leads campaign we effectively identified the roughly 48% of the target audience that needed to get started with AI and had allocated budget for it.
The interplay between Inbound and Intent Marketing:
If you run a 95/5 strategy and therefore work with both Inbound and Intent Marketing, you cover the entire market – both future and current hot leads. In addition, Inbound Marketing can also be a source of intent signals that can trigger the next phase in the form of intent campaigns. The intent signal will be the lead score that monitors a company’s level of activity.
ICP and ABM
The foundation of the strategy is Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP), because it’s important to only spend resources on the companies that are the best fit for you. That’s why Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is also needed, ensuring that you target campaigns toward specific, named companies – for example, those showing intent signals.
Ready to get started with a 95/5 strategy?
It almost goes without saying that a campaign program that continuously captures both future and currently sales-ready leads is highly effective. If you’re interested in hearing how you can build such a marketing program, feel free to contact me.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Rolf Carlsen
Director, b2b.agency
Phone: +45 2249 2089
