B2B marketing: throw away the begging bowl
Time and again, I hear about B2B marketers continously having to justify their existence within the organisation.
During the past 18 months or so, this demand has risen to painfully loud levels and has been accompanied by huge cuts in marketing-spend.
At a time when margins and market share need to be heavily protected – let alone increased – many organisations are actively reducing their ability to do so.
Cutting marketing-spend now is like having your head removed because you want to lose weight…
Marketers need to end this absurdity by demonstrating that the B2B marketing function is a profit-generator, not a cost-centre. And they need to be wary of trying to squeeze more from less by using alternative channels for their marcoms – particularly in the ‘cheaper’ world of online.
If it wasn’t working offline, why will it somehow work better online?
Because it’s cheaper. Ok. That will certainly produce results in terms of cutting costs, but will it get any other results? Will it serve B2B marketing’s two objectives: to cultivate consistent customers and prevent price pressure?
SEO, website optimisation, lead-generation, lead-nurturing and Social Media all received massively-heightened attention throughout 2009. They also received a lot more of the world’s marketing budget as ‘traditional’ comms media experienced big cut-backs:
“Facebook, at 350 million users worldwide, is the premier (social media) destination for marketers in the US and many worldwide markets. It will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010. In total, marketers will spend $2.2 billion to advertise on social networks worldwide in 2009, with $1.2 billion in spending in the US. In 2010, Facebook will account for nearly one-quarter of all social network ad spending worldwide, up from 20% in 2009.”
That’s from e-Marketer and is endorsed by similar reports appearing across the marketing media: a mass-migration from offline to online that is being prompted by cuts in marketing budgets:
In a recent NY Times article, TNS Media Intelligence, part of WPP, reckoned that US ad-spend fell 15.3 percent in the third quarter of 2009 compared with the same period a year ago, and for the first three quarters ad spending declined 14.7 percent compared with the same period in 2008.
Having closed it’s print version, SA’s Maverick magazine resurfaced online as The Daily Maverick and reported recently that 2009 was a truly dreadful year for US magazines:
“A total of 428 titles closed, and almost 60,000 less advertising pages were sold against 2008… advertising revenue for full-year 2009 closed at $19,450,949,762 — posting a 18.1% decline against the previous year…”
Locally, SA lost publications ranging from stalwarts like Computing, to ‘quality’ newcomers like The Weekender.
So, forget the ‘trad ad’ because online is obviously the way to go – it’s clearly a panacea for all marketing’s ills. I think not.
The pie has certainly got smaller. So, compete harder and smarter.
Marketers recognise the power of the web as a communications tool. But do we use it to encourage and maintain dialogue with the market? Of all the B2B websites that were out there in the middle of 2008, what percentage were, say, optimising the site for visitor feedback; tracking activity from page-to-page and monitoring keyword usage? Were the sites at all interactive, or had they just become dusty shop windows with so-called news pieces being at least a year old? And was anyone doing any research into what each of the audiences in the market thought of the site and how it helped them?
Rather than rushing to embrace new ‘cure-all’ channels – Facebook and Twitter for example – shouldn’t we be making sure that we are leveraging the best possible results from the stuff that’s tried-and-tested?
Going live, five-by-five
For example, live events like trade exhibitions, conferences, focus-days and roadshows are the surest way for everyone involved in customer management to connect personally with the full spectrum of an overall B2B market. They can be used to guarantee that your messages are being received five-by-five amongst distributors and wholesalers; solution-providers; specialist consultancies or professions; support and service providers; user-groups; financial analysts; industry associations; commentators in the media and the general public – as well as end-users.
Sure, live events cost a lot more than tweeting – and require much greater effort in planning and successful execution – but they certainly do generate accurately-qualified leads and accelerate sales-cycles. And they do this particularly well if the competition isn’t doing these things because it’s too busy removing its own head…
But, they do not work if they lack the innovation that’s essential to differentiate your brand and sustain that difference in the market’s eyes.
I experienced a shocking example of this lack of differentiation at the biggest trade-show I visited last year. Combined with an almost universal disregard for how customers benefit from what they buy, it was essentially one enormous features-list, a sort of zombie version of the dull mediocrity that characterises so much B2B advertising: zero appeal to the market’s buying motivators.
As the saying goes: keep on doing what you keep on doing and you’ll keep on getting what you keep on getting…
Better-managed traditional media
Marketers might also need to rejuvenate how they work with the media. Is the right message being delivered to the right people at the right time? Are we leveraging all the comms opportunities these suppliers offer – online and offline? Perhaps more importantly, are we looking to work in partnership with them – not merely as buyers – but as innovators looking to break some new ground together.
It’s not always instinctive for media sales people to be motivated by how they can contribute to your continued success and they might need to be actively encouraged to do so. And the same goes for those people who determine and produce content: their objectives are not the same as yours. This means it’s important to find some common ground where both sets of objectives are being served.
And the only way to do this is by talking to these people: take the initiative, start innovating, kick some ideas around, get the ball rolling in terms of building partnerships.
The right stuff: getting back to basics
Several posts on the Long Hello have looked at the fact that, in B2B marketing, fundamentals don’t change:
cultivate consistent customers and prevent price pressure by delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.
So, junk the begging bowl and demonstrate to the market that, in comparison to the competition, your business is clearly more capable of making a positive contribution to customers’ success.
And to do that, marketers need to harness all the support they can. What they don’t need is to have it removed – either by others within the business, or by diluting the impact of their messages in an attempt to cut the costs of delivering them.
Related posts:
Cultivate consistent customers, prevent price pressure - CCC & PPP: B2B’s two objectives
Don’t trample the rules - the importance of fundamentals in B2B marketing
Relevance and accuracy - creating the right messages for the right people at the right time
Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
