Three Questions to Change the Way You Market B2B Apps
When you’re marketing a B2B app, you need to make two things clear.
1. Who the app is intended for.
2. What problem it solves for them.
Where apps (and arguably all businesses) get into trouble is when they fail to do these two things.
If you’re currently trying to market your app and aren’t getting the traction you need, ask yourself these 3 questions:
1. What is the ideal company we’re targeting?
Note: If your answer is “every company!” you need to take a step back and really consider your market. Not only is every company unlikely to adopt your solution, no matter how clever, it’s also really hard to market to everyone.
If your answer is healthcare companies, you’re getting warmer. But consider the range of services that fall under that umbrella: doctors, hospitals, medical software companies, PR agencies that focus exclusively on healthcare, insurance companies, retirement homes, MedTech, pharma. Once again, we’re confronted with the reality that all of these segments are unlikely to share the same urgent problem.
If you can further narrow down your list and say “MedTech and Adaptive Technologies are our two segments within healthcare,” you’ve just done the necessary work to move to the next step.
Force yourself to niche down until you arrive at a description that’s a real recognizable company (or type of company).
2. What is the problem that we solve for them?
Your app creation process probably looked something like this:
- You got to know a market.
- You identified a problem in that market.
- You went looking for a solution.
- Either you didn’t find it, or the solutions you found weren’t that good.
- Your entrepreneurial drive kicked in, and you created that solution yourself.
Once you’ve gotten clear on point #2 - be sure that you’re articulating this clearly. What is the problem? What issues is it causing for the business? Losses in productivity, revenue, or staff retention?
Get to the heart of the problem, and show your prospective customer that you really, really get their pain. This helps lend credibility to the solution you propose.
3. How can you prove the benefits of your app?
You’ve identified your customer with a laser focus. You’ve honed in on their biggest (or at least a critical) pain point for them.
Now you’re coming forward with a solution.
A rookie mistake is to list all the features of your offer without explaining the benefits.
A better approach is to show how your solution provides the answer to their problem, and underscore that with individual benefits that are the components of that solution.
The best approach is to give them as much proof as you can - in the form of case studies, facts, figures, and more - that your solution delivers on it’s promise. Be very clear about how it solves the problem, and what makes it the best choice.
Many app marketers are flying by the seats of their pants. It’s a crazy industry, and things are evolving fast.
Invest the time in laying out what you already intuitively need to understand to develop an effective app, and reflect that in your copy. You’ll be well on your way to topping the charts for business and productivity apps.