Having a Fortune 500 company on your resume would be great wouldn’t it? And large corporations can afford to pay freelance B2B copywriters what they are worth. But how do you find that perfect B2B prospect in such a large company?
After all, you can’t just pick up the phone and ask to speak to the person in charge of hiring freelance copywriters. With hundreds of people in the marketing department, how do you go about establishing relationships that will get you hired?
Brian Whitaker draws on his experience as a corporate marketing senior manager to help you find your way through the maze of marketers at a Fortune 500 company to your best B2B prospect.
Using Brian’s strategy of finding a niche within a niche, you’ll know exactly where to find your ideal B2B prospect and how to market your services as a freelance B2B copywriter to them.
Don’t be intimidated by the size of the company – Fortune 500 companies need your services and hire B2B copywriters every day to give them fresh perspective and help them handle the huge volume of copy they generate to market their products and services.
Here’s Brian…
[Editor]
“There just can’t be 4,100 marketers at your company!” she said, aghast.
Sounds like a line from a bad novel, doesn’t it? But over and over again, when I talk to copywriters about marketing at Dell, I hear some variation on that theme.
Since I’m a marketing senior manager, it’s normal for me. I live in that environment every day.
So I can only imagine just how exciting – and daunting – that number sounds to a new copywriter.
On the one hand, we have thousands of people who need your help. With hundreds of products, from phones and tablets to printers, notebooks, data center switches, and storage, if you’re interested in technology marketing, there’s probably a niche for you. You could stay busy forever just working with a large corporation like Dell.
But on the other hand, it’s harder to sell yourself when there are so many people who might hire you.
After all, Dell doesn’t publish a marketing team directory or org chart. Finding a good prospect at Dell has to feel like trying to hit a target with your eyes closed.
How you could possibly succeed?
If you want to break into a Fortune 500 corporation, you can do it. Regardless of your niche, regardless of your experience, you can deliver value for a large corporation – as long as you connect to the right person.
I want to see you connect, and there’s a first step to connecting. Limit your choices.
That sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? After all, more impressions, more clicks, more eyes are supposed to lead to more sales. That’s what Marketing 101 teaches you.
Let me make the point another way. If you’re at a large party that lasts five hours, you can easily make contacts with dozens of people by only spending a minute with each person.
But how valuable are those contacts? How deep are the relationships? Honestly, not very deep. Easily forgettable.
And that’s because those people have a very limited understanding of you and your capabilities. What you can do doesn’t resonate. That’s exactly the problem with broad, scatter-shot marketing.
But what would happen if you could solve the problems of ten people at the party?
You’d talk to fewer people. But you’d be able to go deeper with each person. You’d find common ground, shared experiences, and make stronger connections.
And you did that by limiting your choices by only talking with people you could help. There’s the second step to connecting – you must understand their needs and solve their problems.
With a big corporation, you can identify a small group and learn to help them. Big companies structure marketing activity into groups of people, and different groups have different needs. You can limit your efforts, aim at a particular marketing group, and have better results.
Doesn’t AWAI teach you to find a niche? They suggest that you focus on a B2B deliverable niche, like social media or autoresponders. Or they suggest you find an industry niche, like tires for big rigs or wellness programs for schools. I propose that you find a particular kind of marketer – and only target them.
No major corporation has thousands of marketers working on a single product. Most big companies have dozens or hundreds of products, so they have many marketing teams, each with a particular specialization.
So your goal is to become an expert in a particular marketing specialty. That way, when you begin conversations with your prospects, you’ll know EXACTLY what to talk about.
For B2B freelancers, there’s one easily overlooked marketing group that gets little attention, holds huge opportunity, and behaves largely the same regardless of what industry they’re in.
They’re called product marketers.
What’s a product marketer? They specialize in making sure a product launches into the marketplace with a huge splash so that it quickly generates sales. They often disengage from marketing the product shortly after it launches.
Product marketing managers have a consistent suite of tools they use for every launch. Most of these are bread-and-butter B2B marketing pieces. Web content, spec sheets, brochures, presentations, videos, blog posts, press releases – you name it, product marketing managers do it.
Product marketers have a universal problem – they live in a publish-or-perish mentality. Many of them are graded on the number or complexity of the tools, collateral, and deliverables they create for a product launch. Creating content is their key metric – and often taking time for strategy just doesn’t happen thanks to the constant pressure of collateral.
If you specialize in helping product marketers, you won’t have any trouble finding prospects because you will be the most valuable person at the party.
It’s very easy to become knowledgeable about product marketing because of all the specialties, it’s the most public.
Pragmatic Marketing is a great place to start, with endless free information. Pragmatic Marketing certification is becoming a de facto standard for product marketers because it’s effective, clear-cut, and based on worldwide best practices. Go and explore their site.
You can join associations like aipmm.com, The Association of International Product Marketing and Management. This organization not only will help you understand product marketers, but it will also help you network with product marketers.
If you start becoming familiar with what those two sites offer you, you’ll be in a much better position to understand what product marketers need and limit your prospecting to those who will value what you do.
As you work to become a specialist in copywriting for product launches, here are a few tips:
- Product marketers need help with the tedious collateral. Spec sheets are a great place to start, as they’re somewhat boring, not very important to product marketers, but must be done for every launch. Demonstrating a spec sheet specialty would get you attention.
- If you have a sales background, talk to your prospects about how you could help with sales enablement. Training sales to sell a new product is a hidden copywriting market with dozens of opportunities, and product marketers often don’t understand what sales teams need.
- Try rewriting a competitor’s existing web copy to show how your skills make things better.
And then you can start searching for product marketers using Google, LinkedIn, or YouTube.
