Marketing in the right direction: Barloworld Logistics
Kate Stubbs deals with some big challenges as marketing manager for Barloworld Logistics. To start with, she’s marketing an intangible: supply chain management doesn’t come in a box with a part number and a price tag. She’s also working in an industry dominated by solid, practical men who know the nuts-and-bolts of freighting stuff from A to B on time and undamaged by land, air and sea.
I talked to her in March about her approach to B2B marketing and how she has delivered some of SA’s most innovative and arresting B2B marcoms, positioning her company as a real thought leader in its field and generating unprecedented positive response from her market.
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Is your B2B website building the bottom line? Part 3
Galen de Young of leading B2B marketing agency, Proteus, recommends six steps to check how effective your B2B website is at pulling people in and keeping them engaged.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools for B2B marketers, most of whom likely have content development as a substantial part of their 2010 marketing plans.
But before you get started with developing more content marketing assets, take a step back to assess your efforts to date.
Below are six steps to help you do that. While the list is not exhaustive, my hope is that these steps will help you improve the performance of existing assets and develop strong future content marketing efforts.
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Is your B2B website building the bottom line? Part 2
B2B Marketing Online suggests six steps to check how effective your B2B website is at pulling people in and keeping them engaged.
Breathe life into your site. B2B marketers have no excuse for failing to deliver a compelling customer experience online.
Alex Blyth presents six golden rules for improving and maintaining your website.
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Is your B2B website building the bottom line? Part 1
Social Media B2B suggests a four-step check on how effective your B2B website is at pulling people in and keeping them engaged.
As many websites have been around a while, they may not reflect your marketing initiatives and business strategies for this year. We offer the following suggestions to help guide your review of your site. Some of these may be small fixes to your site that can be easily accomplished. Others, however, may require you to shift your priorities and make a site redesign part of this year’s tasks.
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Direct marketing in B2B: integrated approach creates higher impact
Many thanks to Michelle Cavé for this insight into how one of the world’s top agencies implements a strategic approach to direct marketing.
When it comes to generating a return on investment from direct marketing campaigns, half the challenge often is just being heard. But getting the attention of business decision-makers isn’t about shouting the loudest. It’s possible to improve results with an integrated approach that puts a limited number of coordinated messages into the market.
Jonathan Perloe, Senior VP-strategic Marketing: Wunderman New York shared some insights with the global network that include four strategies to integrate B2B direct response communications campaigns to achieve greater impact:
- Avoid creating clutter
- Use multiple channels
- Be consistent
- Apply judicious measurements
B2B branding: a profit-pumping heart
This post first appeared as an online article in Marketing Mix, South Africa’s magazine for intelligent marketers.
Brands mean ownership
We can all recall an ad that lost its link with the brand: “Great! Clever, sharp, funny, hard-hitting. What company was it?” Or, even worse, ‘What was the product?’ No brand: no ownership.
In B2B marketing, branding is about saying: we own this product or service and, most of all, we own the positive contribution it makes to our customers’ success.
It may also be about saying: we own the outcomes produced by its reliability, its short lead-times, its quality, its support, its maintenance and its future development. All of these things are ours: this is what we represent.
B2B branding is the work of building associations between a company’s ownership of the brand and their ownership of what the brand represents. These associations are not created by logos or slogans. They are solely about the associations created in the market around ownership: who owns what and what it is they own.
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B2B customers: 50 things they wish you knew
Fifty things customers wish you knew about them:
about how they see you, and about your relationship.
Sonia Simone of Remarkable Communication recently posted this list on her blog. Thanks to B2B Social Media for highlighting it.
Sadly, the concept of customer focus or of being customer-centric has become badly tarnished.
A lot of the blame for this lies with marketers and comms agencies who produce ludicrous slogans that claim devotion to customer’s interests: just think about all the syrupy guff that comes out of the financial services sector.
For companies who want to cultivate customers – rather than harvest them – an understanding of what they want will always boost the bottom line.
Using Sonia’s list, I reckon there’s a really useful exercise here for anyone involved with customers:
- divide the list into five sets of ten
- rank each set of ten in their order of importance
- act accordingly…
B2B marketing: what’s the story in South Africa?
This post first appeared as an online article in Marketing Mix, South Africa’s magazine for intelligent marketers.
Based on the content of SA’s marketing press, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there is only one type of marketing happening across the country: B2C.
Perhaps this is because marketing peeps don’t get the concept of B2B and choose not to play there. Can it be that B2B just isn’t that well understood by a broad enough range of marketers?
Or, is it because B2B companies themselves don’t see the value of marketing as a profit-generating function and therefore don’t pay it much attention? That view was endorsed for me a few weeks ago when a highly intelligent MD – with a postgrad degree in marketing, noch al – asked me what B2B meant. Er, well, it means Business-to-Business, as opposed to Business-to-Consumer…
There’s also a view among many marketers and agencies that B2B is boring. That it’s somehow more fun, interesting and challenging to be marketing washing powder or fast food rather than autoparts or earthmovers.
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Mapping audiences in B2B markets: building a marcoms strategy
B2B markets are complex structures consisting of different audiences that influence customers’ buying decisions. Marketers need to understand who these audiences are, how they influence one another and the significance of their influence on buying decisions.
Mapping audiences and their connectivity within a ‘sphere of influence’ is the first step in creating a marcoms strategy that gets the right messages to the right people
B2B Marketing for Dummies
IAS b2b Marketing, winner of Agency of the Year at the UK’s B2B Marketing Awards 2009, has created a concise guide that highlights how to deliver the right B2B messages to the right people at the right time.
The minibook addresses key issues that anyone working in marketing may face with B2B brands. It’s easy to understand and uses clear examples of the challenges and solutions in a logical order.
B2B Marketing for Dummies ends with Ten Top Tips for success in B2B marketing:
Be patient. Remember that people in business don’t buy on impulse – they carefully consider purchases and consult multiple stakeholders.
Consider your Web of Influence. Always create a map of your market to help you make the best B2B marketing decisions.
Be thoroughly strategic. Establish how your brand distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack with a brand planning process that leaves no question unanswered.
Be focused. Create a strategic proposition that makes your brand irresistible over the competition.
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