What would you do to overcome these barriers to marketing?

If all of the marketing routes below have barriers, how would you overcome them to reach potential customers in 2023?

There’s a lot of information online about the end of B2B cold calling as an effective practice. Even remaining advocates of cold calling acknowledge that it is annoying for the person being called. Why risk annoying a potential customer?

LinkedIn is promoted as a place to identify new prospects by properly researching them using their profile, group memberships and the content of their posts or articles. But, the majority of groups on LinkedIn ban any type of product promotion or obvious marketing or attempts to sell. The received wisdom on LinkedIn is to make connections first and introduce what you offer later. But if the connections you want are all in groups that prohibit describing what you sell, you’d need to make random connections with strangers not in groups to increase your number of contacts. You then need to find out if they may be interested in what you sell, and then eventually, after a long wait, actually tell them what it is you do sell.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is offered at a steep monthly fee as a prospecting, lead generation and cold outreach contacting tool. But LinkedIn restricts the number of people you can contact using this tool to a maximum of 100 per month. With the average marketing success rate, that could result in 2 qualified lead contacts per month.

Trying cold emailing is probably a more rapid way to damage reputation than cold telephone calling because it can easily and quickly get your domain name and business labelled as a spammer. Who enjoys receiving an unsolicited email anyway?

Buying email lists of supposed targeted contacts from one of the main sources online is going to be nothing other than sending even larger amounts of unsolicited email – because you won’t know the people on the list and they have not asked you to send them anything.

Neil Patel emphasises the importance of very large amounts of high quality content and SEO as a way of generating interest in your offering. His own content articles tend to rank high on Google in a week. But he has 633,971 backlinks and a domain score of 94.

Does content really correlate to an intent to purchase? Are content readers not simply interested in reading whatever you’ve spent hours writing, rather than actually buying anything? Are you in business to write content, or are you in business to create and promote a great product that people are happy to pay for? You probably don’t have time to do both.

If I were buying something online, I’d find testimonials from real, arms-length happy customers (not the site owner’s friends) much more persuasive than any article. But to get testimonials, we first of all need some sales.

Neil Patel speaks about the need for backlinks, but he also says in a video on LinkedIn today: “Avoid buying backlinks … you’ll get penalized”.

We’re told B2B buyers are increasingly shifting their buying process to their own research and comparison, ignoring traditional marketing messages. So listing a product on G2, Capterra, Software Advice and Get App sounds like it should be useful. My product (launched in early November) had more than 3,000 views for its free listing on Capterra in November. That’s it. Nothing more than views. Similar from G2.

Unique daily visitors to my product website (6 weeks after launch) now average around 25 a day. No free trial signups. No paid signups.

I’ve used Google advertising and Bing advertising in the past and found both methods were a very rapid drain on cash with no useful results.

LinkedIn advertising and Twitter advertising could be useful. I don’t know – I haven’t used them. But I can’t see why the outcome would be different to Google and Bing.

My target customer personas are not employees of tech start-ups, they are mostly mainstream business managers, so have probably never heard of Product Hunt, which is why I’ve not considered that as a relevant part of my marketing.

All of this sounds like trying to do business with at least one hand tied behind your back.

What B2B marketing mix approach do you think is best to take in 2023?