Why you need to take a vertical approach to marketing strategy?

What is Vertical Marketing Strategy?

There are million jargons in the marketing language, here’s another addition to your dictionary! Vertical marketing is concentrating the marketing efforts around your businesses’ highest fitting customer segment to attract them into your sales radar as fresh leads and then convert them into paying customers. So, the reason of this marketing strategy being classified as vertical is, it focuses on targeting a niche, penetrating into the market rather than, enveloping the whole market in the market campaign, also called a horizontal marketing strategy.

What are the Vertical levels?

Vertical levels classify the otherwise vast, industry into a more specific structure. These levels depend on companies’ objectives, their customers and experience in the industry. Refining your research on the cluster of companies that your business would like to cater would well establish these vertical segments. Although your product or service offering might be applicable to each buyer in the industry, going with vertical segmentation would ease the process and release the complexity in generating sales.

Developing these vertical segments:

Here comes the research intensive part of developing a marketing strategy. Once you have gathered data on all the components of the industry you are working in, the first step is understanding your customer base and the total market that qualifies into becoming buyers. After this, a thorough analysis can be conducted to determine these segments. The segmentation can be done on the basis of the buyers’ performance attributes in the industry like, sales, revenue, brand market share, etc. Or the segmentation can be done grouping buyers on their similar needs from the product or service, etc. With all the data, we need to start prioritizing which segment would give us the highest profit and which of these would incur us the least opportunity cost. Another important point is, how convenient it is to maintain sound after sales and servicing relations with each of these segments.

Following these steps will result in creation of a successful vertical segmentation for your marketing strategy.

After forming enough foundation on what vertical approach to marketing is and how it can be done, we start to look at why companies actually need to integrate this approach into their marketing strategies. Firstly, vertical marketing gives your content better credibility and exposure. When your content is designed to cater to a vertical segment, the customers get important signals from your business that drive them towards converting them into customers. These signals could be: Deep knowledge about the industry, convincing them to trust you with their needs. Addressing to specific needs, personalization always does the trick! When the customer realizes that their needs are addressed uniquely, they tend to trust you more. Experience in the industry, every company is not very experimental with their purchases, customers are likely to purchase from someone who is experienced and has been working in the field for long. Fixed glitches that might arise in the initial time of engagement with the business. When you as a business, constantly thrive to better the experience of a customer from the time they are leads, customers are much more satisfied with the business. Nothing beats a seamless and convenient purchase process in the B2B industry. These indicators prove to be extremely positive when incorporated into your marketing content.

While using the horizontal approach it is not possible that these factors are inculcated to drive each and every company in the industry to become a customer. The approach in horizontal marketing is more generalized and wider while vertical marketing is much more concise in its form. An industry that has been running for years and has achieved its peak growth tends to become very saturated in the long run. When levels of saturation hit, competition is extremely high and is innovation. You need to come up with a strategy that is truly unique which isn’t possible each time. That’s when vertical marketing comes to your rescue. The more you target the better are conversions.

Vertical marketing could also be the next step for your marketing journey. If your marketing team has efficiently landed marketing campaigns with a horizontal approach in the industry then vertical approach can be the next sensible step. Horizontal marketing gives you a broad exposure in the industry while vertical marketing works at providing your marketing material to the right audience in the industry. Another scenario for vertical marketing to be your next calling is when the business is willing to experiment. Horizontal marketing being very common, if you are looking to do something new and experiment with your marketing initiatives then vertical marketing can prove to be a valid choice. This was all about companies that serve a larger audience, but if you are a company that thrives on providing to a niche market segment, vertical marketing could be the only viable option.

So, it all depends on perspectives and the needs of your business and your customers. The size of your business determines all the limitations you have to employ and exploit the resources that you possess. But in both cases, vertical marketing can be a very good option to salvage your potential customers or leads from getting into the loop of another broad-spectrum marketing strategy that doesn’t consider their needs fully. Unravel solutions to market your brand with the best marketing strategies in a saturated B2B market. Click to read now!