Marketing Your Complex Products
PART 1: Simplify Your Message

For the past 20 years, the Knowmad team has helped a wide variety of industrial clients promote their offerings, address different marketplace challenges, and establish their organizations as leaders in their field. We've helped our clients succeed online by building lead generating websites and creating search marketing strategies that reach their specific buyers. Bottom line: we know a thing or two about how to market complex solutions. If you find yourself challenged by marketing your products or services, given the complexity of your business, this webinar series was created for you! We hope that you find it educational and helpful to meeting your business goals.

Challenges to Marketing a Complex Product or Service

During a recent webinar, we polled our participants to find out what they view as the most challenging part of marketing a complex product or service. For the most part, everyone agreed that the biggest obstacle they have to overcome is making a boring, confusing product seem interesting and understandable. It’s no secret that trying to present a membrane sealing spacer as an exciting product is difficult. 

Simply listing the chemical properties of this product can put a reader to sleep, so it’s our job as marketing professionals to transform dry, technical information into an enticing pitch that turns casual shoppers into dedicated customers. 

Make Your Message Simple and Add a Spark  

To ensure that your promotion reaches and captivates your audience, you need to simplify your messaging. You take a complicated product with a million different specifications or a highly specialized service, and your job is to communicate the information in the most simple, effective manner possible. Whether you’re promoting the offering via social media, long-form content like blogs and white papers, or graphics, you need to boil down the information into the basic necessities, while taking the time to jazz up the phrasing and create excitement. 

Make sure to incorporate colorful adjectives that will add some flavor to your message. Otherwise, it can come off as uninteresting. Once your message is clear, it just makes everything easier, whether that’s on the business side or on the marketing side. You're able to have a filter to look through everything to make decisions better and easier. 

Define and Target Your Audience

Whether you’re marketing a complex or a simple offering, an important step is defining your audience and most importantly, your ideal buyer. You should look for specific demographics, whether that’s job titles or companies, in addition to behaviors.

• Who needs your product or service?
• Who can benefit most from your offerings? How do your customers behave?
• How do they approach the buying process? 

Once you’re able to navigate all the different personas that you've identified as potential customers, you have a good starting point for who to target and what each facet of your market is looking for. With this information, you can craft each of your marketing messages with expert efficiency because you know what each person is looking for. You can find the common themes across all customer groups and identify what’s most important to them and what motivates them to make a purchase. 

Use Brand Messaging to Help Your Audience Solve Their Problems

There are countless products and services out there designed to help industrial companies achieve their goals, but there’s only one of you. Show them what’s so special about your business and your offerings via your website, social media platforms, blogs, white papers, and the list goes on. Paint your customers a picture of what you can do for them but most importantly, paint them this picture based on their persona. You should consider each customer group as a different character and spend time crafting messages that suit the unique needs of that character. We call this brand messaging!

Additionally, instead of focusing on the nitty-gritty of your products and/or services, you should focus on providing customers with a vision for the future. What problems can you help them resolve and how can you improve their bottom line? Answer these two important questions in an engaging, authentic way and you’ll land a new client.

Show Your Expertise 

When marketing complex, highly specialized offerings, you need to communicate your authority and expertise. If you’re going to be their guide, you have to prove that you’ve done it right before for other customers and that you have the experience to back up your recommendations. You need to express that you’ve talked to people just like them, that you understand the problems they’re facing, and that you know how to navigate through these issues. When a customer needs a complex solution, it’s likely that their challenge is complex, too. 

Daunting, complicated problems aren’t solved overnight and they require careful recommendations from an expert in the field. As a result, giving your prospect a step-by-step plan for solving the problem is an essential part of acquiring their business. At the end of this plan, you need to include a clear, simple call-to-action (CTA) that prompts them to make a purchase. Effective CTAs are quick, clear, and promote a sense of urgency. 

Use Design to Paint Your Story

Do you know that old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words? It’s an accurate statement and you should use it to you advantage when marketing complex products. Instead of overloading prospects with pages and pages worth of written content describing the specifications of each offering, display the same information in a more creative, engaging way by incorporating stunning graphics. It all starts with your branding, including your logo, color scheme, and website aesthetic, but it needs to be consistent across all of your marketing deliverables, from product brochures to email campaigns. 

To enhance your graphics, try utilizing free stock photos from websites like Unsplash and Pexels. However, if you have the funds and/or time to create original photography, this is always the best option. All of your visuals should convey the same clear message and guide potential customers to complete your desired action.

Solutions for Marketers of Complex Products and Services

As you well know, marketing complex products and services can very difficult. Fortunately, we’re here to help. Our team of skilled web designers, content developers, strategists, and digital marketing experts will help to communicate your unique value proposition with expert precision. We offer a wide variety of marketing solutions designed to create measurable growth for your business:

• SEO
• Web design 
• Brand messaging
• Pay-per-click advertising 
• Marketing automation 
• Content creation 
• Inbound marketing

If you’re ready to experience the benefits of having a strong partner that specializes in industrial product and service marketing, talk to one of our digital marketing experts today! We’ll take the time to get to know your organization’s needs and objectives so that we can craft solutions that will satisfy on all accounts.