How to become a savvy attention seeker in B2B tech

By Nick Hall

There are two burning questions that regularly challenge those marketing B2B tech.

1. How do I keep earning and maintaining prospects’ attention in an increasingly attention deficient economy?

2. How do I sustain this along the funnel within existing budgets and without excessive effort?

Traditional thinking says you must invest heavily to earn attention and then make it pay.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are highly effective methods that won’t cost the earth.

First, complete the crucial groundwork of identifying those prospects that care most about what you do best.

Do this well, and you’ve already saved vast amounts of marketing and senior stakeholder effort, cost and time.

Once you know precisely who you need to gain the attention of, it’s all about understanding how to earn it, sustain it – and stir them into action.

There’s lots of great insights from psychologists and marketing gurus. Over time, I’ve been learning and applying it, here’s the essence in smart actionable steps.

Understand your competitors

To stand the faintest chance of earning attention, it’s about remembering what you are competing with. While there are many things to consider, here’s 4 big ones to cut through.

Mind clutter - there are hundreds of more important priorities for prospects than your amazing tech offering. Think of what’s buzzing around inside your own head, inside and outside of work, to get the picture.

Noise - remember that prospects are bombarded and fatigued with disengaging marketing messages at increasingly unsustainable levels. Most are irrelevant and ineffective. Bland torrents of stuff made for everyone but moving no-one.

Hostility - many prospects are negatively geared and naturally guarded, burnt by the broken promises of slick sellers.

Inertia - you are facing prospects’ money saving imperatives, which in economic climates like ours, are front and centre. You are grappling with immovability and inaction.

Simply address what prospects aren’t telling you

To pique and sustain their interest, it’s about understanding the stories your prospects tell themselves. It’s also about delivering interesting, hyper-relevant, answers to the questions they’re not verbalising. We’ll get to these shortly.

But first, what underpins everything, is providing answers via well told story arcs that shock prospects into action. Confident, helpful, entertaining stories with attitude, energy and integrity are the best way to earn attention.

Pivotal to all storytelling, is making your core message compact, compelling, clear and memorable. Lawyers, politicians and journalists excel at this.

It means stripping out good ideas, relentlessly prioritising to reveal the one that’s most profound and resonant with your prospects.

Successful core messages never include anything claimed better by others. They discard anything requiring effort and analysis to prove. They eliminate anything at odds with prospects’ perceptions.

Challenge yourself with this question: why would my company be missed if we suddenly disappeared?

Answer it in a few sentences, embed it in all your comms, then drive it repeatedly into audiences’ minds.

Make what you say and when matter

Next up, here are the key prospect questions that you must address and some highly effective response strategies.

To work harmoniously with prospects’ decision-making processes, these questions must also be answered in the right order. This way, you’ll fight off confusion and melt resistance.

• Who on earth are you? Why are you wasting my time? Do I really have to see this?

This is the reality of marketing and prospect relationships. Never assume prospects welcome your advances. Most don’t and won’t. Minds are highly resistant to change.

Disrupt their norms by saying and / or visualising something intriguing and interesting to gain a flicker of attention.

Say and do the unexpected. Grab attention and keep interest flowing with something that’s counterintuitive contrary or candid.

To sustain prospects’ interest and curiosity, open and fill gaps in their knowledge. It’s about tapping into the emotion of surprise that increases alertness and maintains focus.

Communicate what your offering means and why it matters to them now. Keep prospects guessing by posing intriguing questions and providing satisfying answers.

It’s what the best teachers and movie writers do brilliantly.

• What can you do for me that’s different? Why should I care now? Why do I need it now?

Here, your answers must be relevant and crystal clear, while signalling empathy and urgency. It’s the stuff you do that best solves the pressing problems prospects think and stress about.

It could be about helping them uniquely remove risks or gain from new opportunities. Ultimately, it’s how you help them save money or make money faster, while highlighting the cost of inaction.

Prospects must also understand and care about the things you say. So, explain things using non-ambiguous, non-abstract, human actions and sensory information.

Never assume that your prospects know what you know, but don't state the obvious either. Don't tell them stuff they already know.

Make prospects care more by helping them form distinctive associations between what they don’t yet care about and what they already do.

Make them feel something by humanising what you are saying. People care more for individuals rather than the collective. Remember this when infusing empathy into your stories.

• Why should I believe you? Will I mess up? Will I miss out? Where’s proof that it works?

This is about managing the tension between fear versus opportunity. It’s about helping prospects believe, so they act confidently in your favour.

Making them true believers is always hard-won, as most B2B tech buyers have been burned.

Your credentials must ooze credibility to dispel doubt. Prove it. Demonstrate why what you say is true and show how you deliver on it.

Signal credibility by providing compelling evidence, including research, media and analyst endorsement, customer lists, testimonials, case studies and more.

Testable credentials are also effective to reduce decision risks, so use variations of try before you buy.

While there’s the obvious external validation and accessible statistics, simply providing a few vivid convincing details may be just as persuasive.

Final thoughts

I appreciate that none of what I’ve discussed is easy, especially in our crowded, commoditised, hyper-analysed markets. It’s a continuous journey of experimenting and learning.

Yes, there’s still lots of white boarding, sweat and applied creativity required. But earning and sustaining attention is achievable without budget busting costs and endless effort.

Hopefully, by using these actionable insights as a basic framework, you can focus on enjoying the process of attention seeking and sharing in the glory of the gains.