B2B Marketing Research: How to Get Reliable Information for

1. How to Get Reliable Information for Competitive Positioning B2B Marketing Research

2. B2B Marketing Research • B2B marketing research serves many purposes. One major function is to find the right competitive positioning. By doing so, you can ensure you’re communicating to the appropriate target market and are effectively differentiating your company from its competitors. But how do you go about deciding how to position your company’s brand against the competition?

3. B2B Marketing Research • Finding the right answer to this question can impact the success of your marketing programs. And with most marketplaces becoming increasingly competitive, your B2B marketing research has to be spot-on. Constant review and adjusting of your competitive positioning strategies need to become an established practice.

4. B2B Marketing Research How to Use B2B Marketing Research to Determine Competitive Positioning • To find the proper positioning of your brand against your competitors, you need to focus your research in three areas. First, you need to find out what’s important to your target market. What features do they value and what benefits are they looking to gain? What challenges are they facing today and may have to deal with in the future?

5. B2B Marketing Research • Next, your B2B marketing research must help you determine how your product or service stacks up against your prospects’ requirements. Do your product features meet or exceed what your prospects need? Do they produce the benefits they would expect to achieve? • Finally, you need to conduct B2B marketing research on your key competitors. Just as you compared your solution’s performance to prospect requirements, you need to do the same with your competitors’ products.

6. B2B Marketing Research • Answers to these questions can help you start fine-tuning a positioning strategy. Your research must produce as much detail as possible to draw meaningful conclusions. It’s a good idea to develop a framework for the information gathered. In other words, you want to organize your findings in a way that strengths and weaknesses surface for both you and your competitors’ products. • When your B2B marketing research highlights these findings, you can develop positioning strategies much easier. You’ve got very useful and valuable information to properly determine competitive positioning.

7. B2B Marketing Research • For example, does your solution do something your competitors’ does not? Is your service better? Do you have unique capabilities within your organization that your competitors can’t provide? Your B2B marketing research should generate the information you need to highlight how you are different from your competitors. • You want to develop your content around those differences. Highlighting your strengths not available from the competition should be a focus. And, any deficiency in your solution should be shored up and re-positioned in your messaging and value proposition.

8. B2B Marketing Research Some Considerations When Finding Your Competitive Position • Make sure you focus on what your prospective customers find important. Your B2B marketing research should provide this information and make it easy to identify. Some companies get misguided by developing their positioning based on a certain attribute prospects really don’t care that much about. Your company may be unique in one regard, but if it’s not important to prospects, your competitive positioning will be off.

9. B2B Marketing Research • Also, you want to bridge any gaps between what you think your prospects know about your capabilities. You want to determine your strengths your company has that are also important to your prospects. Then, you want to make sure your prospects see your company as having those strengths. • In some cases, a disconnect exists between how a company thinks its prospects see them. You want to make sure your competitive positioning is based on what you and your prospects know as your strengths. You need to promote your attributes to the market, especially if your competitors are deficient in this area.

10. B2B Marketing Research • The most important aspect of B2B marketing research when determining competitive positioning is to find an attribute your company can be associated with and rise to number one in terms of mind share. Think about some examples in the market today. Volvo is by-far the one automaker associated with safety and Google is the first company that comes to mind with search. • If your competitors do the same or better as you in your positioning attribute, then you haven’t successfully positioned your company. And if you don’t have the unique attribute, you need to create it.

11. About the Author • Larry Fleischman is Director of Marketing for Televerde, a leading B2B provider of sales pipeline development solutions. For more information about B2B Marketing Research , visit http://www.Televerde.com today.