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.

B2B’s double hard-sell: internal, external

Most B2B marketers have to wear two sales hats: one for their colleagues and one for the market.  With only a few exceptions, I’ve had to sell the marketing function to every senior exec I’ve worked alongside, whether they’re a consulting client, a fellow employee or working for an external vendor or partner. 

I’m not talking about selling them new ideas for a particular marketing activity, I mean selling them the entire concept of B2B marketing: what it achieves for the bottom line and how it does that. If you take them through a formal presentation of the function and its objectives, they’re usually happy to acknowledge that getting the right caps for a golf day and arranging the Christmas party ain’t top of your list. 

Everyone’s a marketer…

When it comes to marketing, it seems everyone’s got an opinion that they’re keen to share – even those who’ve never even met a customer, let alone dealt with a buying decision maker. This is because some of our outputs are such a visible representation of the people we work with and the ‘commentators’ are motivated by a desire to see the organisation thrive. Surely, that’s it? 

But sometimes it’s a matter of letting the baker do what the baker does best and marketers often need to be very firm on this. I wouldn’t dream of questioning someone’s choice of accounting software or suggesting that we shouldn’t use that type of robot welder. Why? Not my field of expertise and I know zip about it. Now, what was it you wanted to tell me? 

Selling to the C-Suite: know your competition

Stubbs’ target market is relatively small and commercially sophisticated. Within current and prospective end-users of outsourced supply chain management, it’s a typical C-suite audience and their attention is in demand from direct competitors plus a whole host of unrelated vendors selling everything from ICT solutions to environmental consulting. 

The audience’s attention is being fought for by so many vendors simply because big buying decisions lie in their hands.

B2B marketers really do need to be aware of this and to recognise that what we are really competing for is the C-suite’s time and their focus.

The big question then becomes: how do we get that time and focus? 

Know what you’re selling

Kate says that Barloworld Logistics are selling the application of original thinking based on a sound understanding of supply chain management: “We sell our thinking, particularly in terms of problem-solving within our field of expertise. We consider ourselves to be real thought leaders and innovators. It’s what defines our whole approach to managing your supply chain. As a marketer, it’s my job to engage buying decision makers on that basis.” 

I was so impressed by how Stubb’s does this that I featured an example on The Long Hello last year. The ‘Puzzles’ campaign with direct marketing agency, Wunderman, struck me as being really arresting, innovative and motivating. 

What really impressed me was that a B2B company had taken such a radically different approach to positioning their brand. I thought at the time that I would’ve loved to be a fly-on-the-wall when the concept was presented internally. Hold on to yer hats, boys! 

Stubbs says, “It certainly raised some eyebrows.” I bet it did …

Relevance and creativity

Anyone who reads the specialist trade and business press is aware of just how dull a lot of its B2B advertising can be. And yet these advertisers are all competing for the same thing: the time and focus of the C-suite in other businesses. 

It’s not that this audience doesn’t have time to focus on things that will contribute to the continued success of their organisation – that’s the very essence of their jobs. 

What they don’t have time for is stuff that they perceive as having no relevance to aiding that success. Big difference. And one which is overlooked by many B2B marketers: why should I take time to focus on you? 

Stubbs is not one of those marketers: “The whole puzzles campaign was driven by the imperative of making you stop, think and respond. As problem-solving innovators, we need to get decision makers focused on our thinking and encourage contact.” 

Campaign results have been outstanding, motivating high levels of direct, executive response. Stubbs says, “It initiated C-Suite contact on two levels. Many executives and their colleagues, friends and families were so intrigued that they wanted the puzzles’ answers or to know they’d got them right. Professionally, it opened doors for our experts to interact with executives who had a highly positive perception of the brand.” 

Building brand relationships

Long sales cycles are commonplace in B2B and Stubbs says that her company typically works with cycles of 18 months. “For our market, managing the supply chain is a critical component of their business. Making changes to existing processes or switching supplier are high-impact decisions which require careful planning and consideration. This takes time.” 

One way that Barloworld Logistics encourages long-term interaction with the brand is through an annual survey that examines industry trends, challenges and influences. Conducted by Frost & Sullivan, this year’s supplychainforesight focuses on ‘Growth in Adversity’ and addresses the role of supply chain strategy in enabling recovery from recession. 

Almost half of the nearly 400 respondents were CEO’s or senior execs and 23% of the companies surveyed were multinationals with revenues of over R5 billion. It’s real C-suite stuff and is treated accordingly by both respondents and readers. Stubbs sees it as, “An integral part of the brand that positions us as an authority in the minds of senior executives within our market.” 

Brand relationships are a living thing

Stubbs releases the survey with a media briefing just prior to its national launch. “We then host breakfasts in Durban, Cape Town and JHB on three consecutive days. Respondents and the market in general are invited and we arrange for industry leaders to give us their view on supply chains in SA as well as their interpretation of the results.” 

“We support this with reports on our site plus a dedicated site at www.supplychainforesight.com” 

Once the main launch is complete, Stubbs runs industry-specific launches. “This year we had an FMCG & Retail breakfast and an Automotive evening session. These are more focused interactions and typically result in good engagement and discussion. Once again, we invite industry leaders to voice their opinion on the survey results and to give us their view on what is happening in supply chains in SA.” 

Positive response to the brand

Barloworld Logistics received a special merit award at the Logistics Achiever Awards for the survey’s contribution to the industry. Stubbs says, “Even competitors quote the survey and it is frequently used internationally to benchmark the industry. We receive emails and calls thanking us and requests to focus on specific topics in the next survey. We encourage this type of response so that we can include common focus areas in the next survey.” 

Reinforce your relevance

The company hosts breakfast meetings with execs from the same discipline – HR, Finance, Operations – as well as after-hours sessions to introduce new service offerings or ideas for very targeted audiences. Stubbs’ goal here is to strengthen industry networks and brand relationships by facilitating knowledge sharing and engagement on topical issues.

The road ahead?

Stubbs sees it like this: “Continually finding new and relevant ways to engage our audiences. We must understand clients’ needs thoroughly in order to create relevant, interesting messages that break through the clutter. Messages also need to be simple and clear. Find creative ways to facilitate engagement and relationship building that is commercially beneficial for both parties. Focus and relevance is key. And make sure it’s enjoyable for everyone involved.” 

Way to go, Kate.

Wunderman, Johannesburg:
Debi Loftie-Eaton, Managing Director. debi_loftie_eaton@za.wunderman.com

Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

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. 

1. Map site content to the buying cycle

Some people segment the buying cycle into three or four stages. B2B Marketing Strategist Ardath Albee segments it into seven stages. However you choose to define it, analyze your buying cycle and make sure you have substantial, valuable content that speaks to each stage. Prospects have questions at each stage in the buying process. Each question represents an opportunity for content. Think about what should be free and what should be gated (Chris Koch and Michele Linn had good posts on this recently).

Also remember people have different learning styles, and consider having multiple media available for each style. Analyze the effectiveness of your existing content vis-à-vis your buying cycle, determine the gaps in your content marketing strategy, and develop a plan to round out your content.

2. Reduce friction on gated content

Review registration pages for items that reduce conversion rate. Yes, this includes how much information you’re asking for, but it also includes many other things.

Ask yourself, is the page design and intent clear, or do you have many other things potentially distracting visitors from taking the desired action or perhaps even obscuring the desired action? Have you reduced the anxiety of registering? Are the benefits of doing so clearly stated? Have you illustrated credibility, e.g., are there recognized third-party endorsements on the page? Have you told visitors what you’re going to do with their information?

Todd Miechiels had a great post on reducing site visitors’ anxiety last year, and Ben Hanna gave some strong, practical examples of ways to improve B2B conversion rates by reducing buyer risk.

3. Review your content analytics

Analytics can be great, but too often we fail to actually learn from them. Take a look at last year’s numbers for the content on your site. What was the most popular content? What were your most popular landing pages? What were the sources of the visitors? Did those sources change over time? What organic keywords drove traffic to that content? What did these visitors do? What were the conversion rates? Where did they go next? What made those pages successful? Equally important to analyze is the content you thought would do well, but didn’t.

Compare and contrast the successes and the failures, and you’ll likely find strong clues to help you develop a best practices model. But don’t just use this information for prospective content. You can likely redeem some of your previously less-than-successful content by making improvements or repurposing and relaunching that content.

4. Capture the value of content

If your content is a web page, it’s pretty easy to track the results. But what if your content is a PDF or some other digital asset? These assets can drive readers and viewers back into your website. However, unless you’ve coded the links appropriately, these visits will show up as direct visits instead of being attributed to your content marketing assets. Obviously, you should ensure future content marketing assets have such links, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t make these changes to existing content as well.

5. Include sharing options with your content

White papers, eBooks, case studies, best practice guides can be powerful lead generation and lead nurturing tools. At the same time, they’re expensive to create. They’re also hard to get into the hands of the right people. You may get one of these assets into the hands of one of your contacts, but there are many other people at the prospect’s company who will influence the purchase decision.

Embedding social sharing options is a great way to help push the reach of great content, and modifying existing content marketing assets to include social sharing options is fairly painless.

6. Optimized content for search

Finally, optimize your content for search. While social media can play a big role in the visibility of good content marketing assets, SEO will help ensure online visibility over the long term. Make sure your content marketing assets and their related landing pages are optimized and aligned with the keyword strategy for the piece. This includes optimizing copy as well as other on- and off-page factors. While it does take a bit more work, you can optimize PDFs for search as well. 

Related posts:

Is your B2B website building the bottom line? Part 1     

Is your B2B website building the bottom Line? Part 2

Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

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. There can be few B2B marketers who remain unconvinced of the importance of the online channel.

As Catherine Lawford, MD of customer experience consultancy Seren, puts it, “Online is more than important. It is becoming – and will continue to be – the single most important tool in a marketer’s armoury. Bearing in mind that the vast majority of customers will decide whether to engage with a company by first looking at its Internet site, creating a poor online experience makes no business sense.” 

Yet, despite this – and despite the fact that most B2B marketers know exactly how much this matters – the B2B world is lagging some way behind its B2C counterparts in terms of online customer experience. 

Martina Schell, head of user engagement at marketing agency Archibald Ingall Stretton, says, “While B2B online experience has developed very little since the early buzz in the 1990s, consumer-facing online experiences have developed around user needs and technology.” 

She continues, “This has steeply raised expectations of business websites. Remember that all business customers are also consumers. Today the majority of B2B customer experiences seem clunky, poorly thought out and ill-matched to the complex demands of business customers. This is a great opportunity to lead in your category.” 

Part of the problem is that while much has been said and written about how companies should talk to their customers on the phone and how they should engage with them face-to-face, there are few hard and fast rules about what constitutes best practice online. 

By following these six rules most B2B marketers should be able to dramatically improve the online customer experience they offer, and so gain significant competitive advantage. 

1. Make your site easy to navigate 

“Still too many online experiences are damaged by the fundamentals not being in place,” says Darrel Worthington, director of information architecture at digital consultancy, Rufus Leonard. “Poor product and service categorisation, insufficient product detail and no online product support to fill the gaps. Poor search facilities and torturous navigation. This all leads to confusion, increased calls to the customer help desk, loss of sales and ultimately brand damage.” 

Simon Boydell, marketing manager for Retail Eyes, a provider of customer experience improvement programmes to sites such as O2 and William Hill, offers this advice on how to get it right, “Keep content succinct and to the point and use standard fonts; the best are Arial and Verdana as they are easier to read. And ensure your text has room to breathe, is well spaced and not squashed together. Don’t be tempted to try and cram too much information on one page as this will only turn off a visitor.” 

He adds, “Balance your text with images and good visuals to grab attention. Customers only read 25 per cent of the content on a page, so making your site visually appealing will help ensure customers stay longer. But make sure they are good quality images, reflecting the standard of your product or service, and don’t be tempted to use too many flashing images – two per page is the maximum.” 

Robert Barnes, operations director at web design agency Design UK, reports that law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner recently launched a redeveloped site with improved navigation and more interesting presentation. The outcome was was higher traffic numbers with the average visitor staying on the site approximately 50 per cent longer. One-page visits are down by a third, he says. 

2. Make information easy to find  

“Customers don’t have time to trawl through websites,” advises Tom Pelly, senior consultant at customer service software provider Transversal. “They want quick, comprehensive answers to their questions. 

Replace keyword search with natural language search that understands questions asked in plain English and provides the right information, quickly and in a format that meets B2B customer needs.” 

3. Ensure your site is fast and responsive  

“Avoiding slow levels of service online must be a top priority,” argues Graham Moore, e-retail specialist at infrastructure provider Zeus Technology. “Marketers must work with IT to ensure sites can cope with peaks in traffic. This is especially important when launching promotions online – as there’s nothing more frustrating than launching a campaign only to find that the website crashes.” 

This is also an important issue if you use a large amount of rich media. Neil Barton, director at web hosting company Hostway, says, “While multimedia content can be visually impressive it can also have a detrimental effect on website performance if not managed correctly. Traffic management solutions are now becoming so intelligent that businesses can start prioritising e-commerce traffic over visitors who are simply browsing, which again can help optimise the online experience.” 

4. Integrate with other channels 

Do not fall into the trap of seeing your website as an isolated channel. Your customers are not interested in the channel they use to contact you; they only care that you respond in a timely and effective way to their enquiries. 

So ensure you put in place all the resources and processes necessary to cope with online enquiries. Be clear on your site about response times and then ensure you deliver on that promise. 

In the same way, you should aim for a unified platform that gives you a single view of customers and prospects across all channels. 

Frank Lord, VP EMEA at e-commerce software provider ATG, explains why, “A unified platform is key to delivering a good online experience. B&Q has increased business-to-business sales using a single e-commerce platform. The platform runs across its website, more than 330 stores, transactional catalogues in showrooms and three call centres to provide cross-channel integration and a single customer view. A single unified platform enables B&Q to better understand customer behaviour and anticipate their needs. As a result, B&Q has increased online conversion rates by 40 per cent.” 

He continues, “AT&T has also used e-commerce to gain market share with its B2B customer base. It has rolled out more than 50,000 unique sites for its business customers, managed centrally from one ATG platform. Each site is tailored to a particular customer segment – offering B2B customers a personalised online experience, increased satisfaction and new customer acquisition rates. In fact, AT&T achieved a dramatic increase of nearly 100 per cent year-over-year in new customer additions, and it significantly reduced customer churn.” 

5. Provide genuinely useful information

More and more B2B marketers are using content marketing as a way of capturing prospect data, engaging potential customers and so generating leads. However, if you intend to request information from visitors to your site you must ensure that you give them something genuinely valuable in return. 

You may be surprised to discover what interests your visitors. In its recent ‘Turning the Corner’ campaign, Barclays Corporate set up a site to support its series of regional events and business clinics.

Kathryn Taylor, Barclays Corporate’s head of marketing, says, “We filled that site with a wealth of information on every aspect of leading a business out of recession. However, we found that visitors were much more interested in the information on finance than anything else. Looking back, that makes sense – as a bank we’re most credible on that topic. So, we refined our content strategy to provide more articles on financial matters. The site attracted 74,000 visitors with 51 per cent returning at least once.” 

6. Test continually

“Conversion rates on websites are very often five per cent,” says Andy Budd, MD at user experience company Clearleft. “By testing not just for the usability of a site but also its desirability we are frequently able to improve that by 100 per cent or even 200 per cent. The simplest way of doing this is to watch people using it. This will show you where they tend to struggle. Very often they won’t complain – they won’t even realise something hasn’t been as good as it could be. Typically we’ll find 20 to 30 problems by doing just this type of testing. It’s the low hanging fruit that a company can solve very rapidly and produce an immediate uplift in conversion.” 

Boydell at consumer experience experts Retail Eyes concludes with this advice, “Once your site is up, don’t abandon it. Ensure your website is maintained and updated consistently, in-line with or even before the rest of your business to ensure it always reflects your brand and changing customer needs. Continuous investment in your website is one of the best investments you could make. Neglect it and it could be one of the most costly mistakes you make.” 

Related post: Is your B2B website building the bottom line? Part 1

Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

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.

 1. Home Page: clarity and functionality

When prospects arrive at your home page, is it clear what products or services your company offers? 

Objectively review your home page and view it as a first time visitor, whether your primary offerings have changed or not this year. You may have optimized your search results to drive great traffic, but if people can’t tell what you do at a glance, they are not sticking around. 

And by the way, if you have an animated flash landing-page or autoplaying music or video, remove it today. These outdated and slow-loading bits of media only slow down your site and make it more likely that visitors will leave without taking action. 

Check your analytics to see what sites people came from or what keywords they searched to understand who stays on your site and who leaves. 

2. Clear path to information

Prospects and customers arrive at your home page and they know they are in the right place, but can they find what they are looking for? As web sites have gotten fancier and technology more advanced, gadgets, widgets and sliding navigation have made it harder to find what your site visitors are looking for. 

Make sure your site has a clear path to get people to the information they need, whether it is product specs, customer service or finding a distributor. Again, your analytics tell you what pages people go to after your home page.

3. Call to action

Is your site generating leads for your sales force? Are you trying to get new subscribers to content via RSS or to an email newsletter? Are you selling products directly from the web or passing all these prospects to a distributor? 

Whatever your call to action on your site is, make sure it is on every relevant page and customers and prospects know what to do. And make sure this is all trackable so you can match this up to your objectives. 

Review these numbers on a regular basis so you are not surprised by either success or failure. Your website is a living entity that should be easy to change to make it more effective. 

If you are constantly fighting with your IT department or a web vendor to make changes, you need to re-evaluate that relationship.

Your company’s success cannot be held back by technical limitations or the whims of your internal or external partners. 

4. Social Media profiles

Last year you started a blog, joined Twitter and created a Facebook fan page. Now is the time to get those social presences to the home page of your site. You want to grow these social communities and burying their existence on your ‘about page’, ‘contact page’ or some random page that no one can find is not the way to do it.

Realted post: Is your B2B website building the bottom Line? Part 2

 Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

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

Avoid creating clutter

The first strategy is to avoid creating clutter, especially within a multiple business unit company where each has a portfolio of products, services and marketing communication needs. The clutter often happens when product managers independently create standalone, product-centric marketing campaigns. 

To prevent this, Wunderman suggests creating an annual campaign architecture for each key market segment; one that identifies the broad themes to be promoted and aligned with the value propositions of the company’s offerings. It’s important that the direct response demand-generation activities are supported by the brand-level messages that are also in market. 

This will help avoid once-off tactics and allow for a consistent set of messages that establishes and reinforces what the brand stands for and what drives revenue. 

Companies that are just starting out need to take a structured approach that documents the capabilities, functional benefits and higher-level business value of each product or service offering. Common business-level themes should be identified and used to build a limited set of benefit-oriented direct-marketing campaigns that address the targets’ needs. 

Use multiple channels

Once a well-defined campaign architecture is in place, the next step should be to identify effective ways to reach the audience. While budget and marketing objectives will dictate the reach and frequency of a campaign, Wunderman suggests using more than one channel. Placement in multiple direct-response channels creates the impression of having a greater presence. 

Don’t overlook the power of search and social marketing tactics. Informative, relevant content – such as a white paper, a best practices guide, a webcast demo or customer success stories – can be posted online and used to drive a response that will begin a conversation with prospects by getting them to register and provide contact information. The content can be seeded through search marketing and by joining conversations in relevant online forums. 

Utilise the different strengths of each channel to tell the brand story in different levels of detail, letting the messages build on each other. 

Be consistent

The third strategy is to ensure that all tactics carry a consistent set of messages delivered via a common visual idea. 

First express the brand story in a compelling manner; in a way that connects with the target audience. Then, ensure the key visual and headline(s) are carried consistently through all the tactics that comprise the campaign. Don’t shy away from repetition; it’s a key principle of advertising. Saying and showing the same message more than once is one way to break through the noise, especially if it’s expressed in a customer-centric, benefit-oriented way. 

Apply judicious measurements

The final strategy is effective measurement applied judiciously. This is especially true in direct marketing, where the link between marketing activities and results is easier to establish than with perception-changing communications. 

There are two categories of metrics:

• First are measures of overall campaign performance: account for and determine how much it costs to deliver qualified leads or sales. Using the potential value of a lead and sales conversion rates, question if the campaign delivered an acceptable return on investment. 
• If not, the second category of metrics can help explain why. These are diagnostic measurements such as response and click-through rates, registration rates and lead-conversion rates. They outline which tactics were most effective at engaging the audience.

Use these metrics to fine-tune elements of the campaign and optimise across direct-response channels. But use metrics wisely, because with integrated marketing, all communications work together to drive sales. This is true even though it may look like just one tactic drove the sale, such as a particular email blast or a banner ad.

Wunderman SA’s MD, Debi Loftie-Eaton guarantees that together, these four strategies will guide companies from strategic campaign planning through to post-execution measurement. 

She says, “When followed, this approach can lift a set of disconnected, competing, tactical communications into a focused, insightful story that drives sales more effectively while also building a brand.” 

Michelle Cavé, Group PR Director, Young & Rubicam Brands SA

Tel (+2711) 797 6318/00    Email michelle_cave@za.yr.com

Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

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.

B2B and B2C: what’s the difference?

This type of thinking – that somehow B2C is dead sexy and B2B is dead boring – strikes me as odd.

Fact is, business marketing is certainly very different to consumer marketing. For me, there are two Big Differences that make B2B much more fun, interesting and challenging than B2C. 

The first Big Difference comes from this pretty accurate generalisation: B2C deals with frequent, low-price purchases; high volumes; simple products; and rapid sales cycles. 

For the vast majority of our purchases, when you and I buy things there’s not a lot at stake and we don’t give it much thought. A recent minibook, B2B Marketing for Dummies sums this up very neatly: 

 “You don’t bring in a consultant to help you choose the right toothpaste; you make a decision in seconds and go for it – I’m backing crystals over stripes and blast the consequences! Consumer marketing experts contend with that level of customer involvement in a world full of fast-moving consumer goods and we wish them well.”

In complete contrast, B2B generally deals with infrequent, high-price purchases; low volumes; complex products; and long sales cycles. 

A global car manufacturer doesn’t say ‘These brakes from StopQuik are really neat – we’ll buy ‘em for every car we make.’ (Well, hang on, maybe Toyota did…) 

If you’re buying four earthmovers at R25m a piece, you’ll go through a much more involved process than, say, when buying your next car. And there will be many more people in the decision making process. 

The second Big Difference: the fact that many more people will influence the buying decision. In B2B, end-users – the people who buy and use your products – are only one part of an overall market that may contain many different elements: distributors and wholesalers; solution-providers; specialist consultancies or professions; support and service providers; financial analysts; commentators in the media; standards boards and statutory regulators; industry associations; user-groups; and the general public. 

Because the B2B marketing function is targeting companies as opposed to individual consumers, there are also different influences within an end-user’s organisation, each with their own distinct requirements that need to be fulfilled by your products and services. 

In B2B, each component of the overall market is an audience for marketing’s messages. The diversity of the audiences means that you can’t have catchy, one-size-fits-all brand messages. ‘Brighter than bright’ may work for BriteRite washing powder in supermarkets, but ‘Just dig it’ won’t help you sell earthmovers in the world of mining or civil engineering. 

B2B brands have to work harder, accomplish more than B2C brands

A B2B brand has to build positive perceptions across the full range of audiences who influence business buying decisions. This is a complex task. You need a clear understanding of the market’s composition and you need to create and deliver messages that are relevant to each audience in the market. At the same time, the brand has to be cohesive, it has to have unity. 

Even though there needs to be a variety of relevant messages, they need to be perceived as part of a single brand. To do this, B2B marketers typically create a few Core Brand Messages that concisely highlight the key features of their products and services. 

A product or service has a fixed set of features. Until the product or service is altered, the feature-set stays the same – and so do the core brand messages. But what does change are the outcomes produced by the features for different audiences. B2B marketers look at how these features translate into outcomes that are relevant for each audience within the market. 

Influencing market perceptions: relevance, relevance, relevance

Having defined the market’s audiences, B2B marketers need to ask some questions in the market: 

• how does the brand reflect itself to each component of the market?
• how relevant are your marcoms to these individual components?
• what needs to change in order to achieve a consistent, positive perception of the brand? 

Relevance is crucial because it builds credibility and confidence. And relevance is all about outcomes - the outcomes that are produced for each component of the market: what does this brand do for me?  

For example, high levels of reliability that cut your earthmovers’ downtime is a message for a sales director at a road-builder – we can do the job quicker and at a lower cost than our competitors. But reliability is also a message for the road-builder’s FD – lower cost-of-ownership and higher ROI (return on investment). 

Earthmovers with low carbon emissions might not be a compelling message for the operations director, but will sit really well with the environmental media and the consultants conducting an environmental impact study on that proposed new superhighway. And so it goes on: matching messages to audiences by creating the right message for the right people. 

B2B marketers: much closer to the market?

For me, this is another of B2B’s big attractions: there is a real need – and practical opportunity – for on-going contact with people from different audiences within the market. Discovering how they benefit from a product or service is real hands on, person-to-person stuff and it gives B2B marketing a breadth of appeal that is perhaps absent from B2C.

Visit Marketing Mix – South Africa’s magazine for intelligent marketers.

Straight to your inbox?
Get them when I post them. Subscribe to the free RSS feed – on the top right of this page. Simple.

Back to The Long Hello - making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

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 

Using the sphere to motivate buyers 

Marketers can use the sphere of influence to target the bullseye – the centre of the market that contains buying decision makers – BDMs. 

Our goal is to ensure that each audience has a positive influence on the centre, that their opinions will confirm the validity of our brand messages and motivate consistent buying decisions. 

It’s about driving accurate perceptions of the brand into the place they matter most: the world of BDMs. 

Populating the sphere 

The graphic highlights some of the audiences typically found in B2B markets. It could certainly contain others, such as wholesalers and agents; the general public; and special interest groups or lobbies. 

Any audience within the overall market that influences the centre – either directly or indirectly via another audience – should be included within your sphere. 

Having populated the sphere, it’s useful to look at how the audiences are connected and how they might influence one another. 

Assessing the significance of the influence 

To understand this, marketers need to be talking to the centre – the BDMs within the customer base. As mentioned in other posts on The Long Hello, marketers need to get out and about amongst these people and find out who is influencing their decisions and why this matters. 

This is important because customers are not identical – buying motivators will vary from one customer to the next. There will certainly be some generic, commercial influences in terms of the Five Factors of Value, but there will also be some (surprising) variations in the degrees of influence exerted by different audiences within the overall market. 

All of this information can be mapped-out on the sphere. You may find that individual customers warrant their own sphere – a dedicated map that details how buying decisions are influenced and made within that particular company. 

Who’s influencing the audiences? 

Just as marketers need to know who’s influencing BDMs, we also need to know how brand perceptions are being created within individual audiences. There’s more ‘fieldwork’ for marketers here in terms of meeting these people and building an ongoing understanding of how they relate to the brand. 

In particular, marketers need to be alert to any variance between brand perceptions and brand messages. If the two are not aligned, then you need to act in order to adjust this imbalance by using the appropriate tools in marketing’s portfolio. And these soundings and adjustments need to be taken on a continual basis in order to ensure that perceptions in the overall market are in line with the brand messages you are delivering.

Related posts:

Managing brand perceptions

Brands build business

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

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. 

Prioritise your market. Use the Web of Influence to pinpoint the decision makers who’ll give you the best return for your marketing investment. 

Be choosy. Don’t waste time and money on marketing placed in the wrong channels. 

Be positively different. Show people their working world in a way they’ve never seen, and they’ll want to know more. 

Have multi-dimensional ideas. Remember that you need to satisfy many different stakeholders, so you need creative ideas that are flexible. 

Make the most of your website. Ensure that your site caters for all of your customers and tracks their activity so you can use that information for constant improvement. 

Tap into social media. Don’t get left behind – use social media networks to influence your markets! 

B2B Marketing for Dummies was produced by IAS b2b Marketing and John Wiley & Sons, publishers of the ‘For Dummies’ guides. Download a copy at http://www.b2bfordummies.com/

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line

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

This means it’s essential to generate brand messages that are not only credible, relevant and compelling, but also highly reassuring to each component of your overall market.

The following extract is from an article by Cees Bruggemans, Chief Economist of First National Bank. Register for his free e-mail articles on www.fnb.co.za/economics

The outlook for 2010 should production-wise see a steady recovery in manufacturing activity, probably increasing at a pace of 5% plus. Domestic motor vehicle sales are projected to grow by 7%, with subsidiary parts of the motor trade (used cars, parts and accessories) showing even firmer recovery.

Car exports should gain 30% and total vehicle production should grow by 17% in 2010, importantly supporting manufacturing output gains. 

Mining, retail sales, building activity and electricity are more difficult to call. Given global recovery trends, mining volumes should rise strongly unless held back by sector-specific reasons. Electricity output should follow in its wake. But it is not obvious how strong these tendencies may prove to be. 

Residential building activity should show some gains off very low base levels, even as non-residential activity for now keeps tailing off. Construction should benefit from large turnkey projects (power stations, road building) but one wonders about political tensions at local government level further disrupting activity levels as the political cycle moves from one set of elections to the next.   

Along with steady gains in government employment levels, and a more modest revival in private service activity generally, household incomes should be rising this year. This should underwrite an upturn in retail sales volumes, even if mostly jobless growth for now may remain a drag on non-durable consumption recovery. 

Overall, one is pressed to assume growth modesty, if only because there is so much to be modest about. 

A more vigorous recovery profile would require a quicker uptake in business risk-taking, a greater appetite among banks to grant credit and for consumers to increase their debt uptake, and a faster revival in job growth, with fewer sector-specific (mining, construction) drags. 

Yet such renewed vigour is to be shown rather than assumed, even if the typical cyclical turn from recession to recovery is with us. And thus we do well to allow for a slow GDP growth coach in the 1.5%-2.5% range, until ‘surprised’ by greater vigour. Hopefully it won’t keep us waiting too long. But then again who can say? 

It perhaps does create scope for some more policy support, provided some growth sacrifice isn’t deliberate policy in order to keep the private debt bulge, import bill and inflation bias contained longer term within more acceptable ranges than encountered during 2004-2007.

Then again the economy looks far from entering another outperformance binge shortly, and at least the debt bulge and import bills should remain naturally contained for the time being while the ‘new’ credit and consumption disciplines and fixed investment hesitancy prevail.

Back to The Long Hello: making B2B marketing work for the bottom line