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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Strong brands build business

Marketers understand that brands are symbols, something which represents something else. Brands can evoke powerful associations and allegiances. In their most potent forms, we may love them or loathe them - think of national flags and sporting emblems.

Weak brands – those with little or no meaning - are particularly common in B2B as opposed to B2C marketing. When it comes to cans of baked beans, there’s one brand for me. I’ll go beanless rather than break that allegiance. But is the same true for a company buying a baked bean canning-plant?

The answer is yes: a B2B brand can generate such far-reaching, consistent associations of trust, fulfilled-expectations and satisfaction that customers simply won’t look anywhere else – won’t even consider another canning-plant supplier.

Trust, satisfaction and fulfilled-expectations. These are imperatives in your market’s relationship with your brand: that your products will match past experiences or proposed deliverables.

What is your brand?

Think of the brand as a reflection of your company in a mirror. You hold the brand up to the mirror and it reflects everything the company represents. You don’t see the brand staring back, you see the company.

When the CEO holds the brand up to this mirror, what do they see? Is the same image reflected when production, finance, sales, distribution and marketing look in the mirror? Rarely. In fact, very rarely.

There are probably as many different reflections in this mirror as there are people looking at it. The brand becomes such a confusion of images that it’s meaningless. No matter what the company is selling, the brand may as well be symbolised by a blue potato eating a camel. 

Market reflections: how B2B brands are created

In B2B, the overall market may include distributors and wholesalers; solution-providers; specialist consultancies; and support and service providers - as well as end-users. In addition, there may be financial analysts; commentators in the media; regulators; industry associations and user-groups.

Each of these represents a ‘market reflection’ – the way the brand is seen by individual audiences in the market. And it is these reflections that give a brand its identity. Unlike B2C, in B2B, a brand’s identity is created entirely by the market. Not by comms agencies or graphic designers, but by something much more in tune with commercial reality and its latest trends: the market. What it sees is all that matters. In B2B, the market gives you your brand.

B2B markets become confused and uncertain if the reflections are unclear and inconsistent. So people draw their own conclusions. They create their own associations, set their own expectations and decide for themselves how much they trust the brand and what it represents.

Consequence? Ownership of the brand is lost and your credibility is cut to shreds. Sales fall, margins get squeezed and market share shrinks. Bad. Very bad.

Weak brands build business barriers

This loss of brand-ownership and market-credibility is a formidable, ongoing obstacle to building sales, margins and loyalty. It consistently generates perceptions in the market that have no relation to what your company actually represents: ‘Oh? I never knew it could do that.’ ‘I didn’t realise you guys knew anything about this.’ ‘What? You mean you can handle this too? ‘Oh yes, I know XYZ Inc. They sell those potatoes that eat blue camels. Er, don’t they?’

Are they talking about us?

More than ever, market reflections - that diversity of associations made by the market with the brand – are what influences a company’s ability to increase sales, retain customers and protect margins. And this influence is increasing as more lanes keep getting added to the ‘information superhighway’.

For example, there is rapidly-growing interest in social media as a way for people to share their experiences about B2B suppliers and products. And this goes both ways, companies are joining the discussion on the likes of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in order to present their brand-messages and interact more directly with their markets.

So, it’s now more important then ever for B2B companies to ensure delivery of a credible, relevant and compelling reflection of the brand to each audience in their market. As B2B companies become more and more visible to their markets, it has to be true that the brand is your real business.

Be the brand. No, it’s not a cliché. It’s seriass: be the brand

Brand management is not the business of designers and communications agencies. Yup, you heard that one right. It’s not that designers and agencies produce poor or inappropriate work. Quite the reverse. It’s just that they have no influence over how clients build and maintain trust and satisfaction, or how they fulfil customers’ expectations. That’s not their job. As a B2B marketer, it’s yours.

In his book Ackoff’s Fables, the eminent management consultant, Russell Ackoff, describes a problem-solving process he calls ‘idealized redesign’. Although not specifically related to branding, the process is certainly relevant for a company that wants to ‘Be the Brand’:

“Assume that the entity (ie the brand) that has the problem was destroyed last night, but everything else remains the same. Redesign that entity so as to eliminate the problem that faces it. The redesign is subject to only two constraints: first it must be technologically feasible, and second, it must obey the same externally imposed constraints (eg the laws of the land) to which the current system is subject.”

“In addition, it should be designed so that it can 1. improve itself by learning from its own experience, 2. adapt to a changing environment, and 3. be improved by being redesigned again in the future.”

B2B marketers can use ‘idealized redesign’ to define how their brand should be reflected in the market. They can start the process by asking the (rather long) question: what market reflections will attract and retain customers and maintain margins?

The answers will provide a stimulating roadmap for your company’s development as we move deeper into 2010 and a period of slow, cautious growth in B2B markets. The economy may be improving but negative memories of recession will definitely remain and strongly influence B2B buying-decisions.

For marketers, this means it’s essential to generate brand reflections that are not only credible, relevant and compelling but also highly reassuring to each audience in their overall market.

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

More on brands and branding:

Brands build business      Outcomes make the difference      The Long Hello: building brand-relationships

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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.

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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

Relevance, Synergy and Creativity should be key components of B2B marketing in 2010

Generally, marketers can get more bangs for their bucks during a recession because as marketing-spend falls, suppliers are increasingly pressured to cut prices in order to make sales. To capitalise on these opportunities, marketers need to be focused on:

• highly-relevant messages that are accurately-targeted
• increased synergy with their company’s other core functions
• more creativity to ensure ‘front-of-mind’ positioning in the market

Perhaps surprisingly, B2B marketers are aided by a recession in a number of ways: cheaper advertising rates and opportunities to move up a level in terms of premium media; less noise and clutter coming from the competition; and cut-price everything – from printing and photography, to exhibitions and promotional ’swag’. 

RELEVANCE: creating results-driven marcoms 

Although elements of the world economy are coming out of recession, 2010 will probably be a very cautious year for B2B – the lingering memories of the worst times will strongly influence buying motivators as markets either remain static or only begin to recover slowly.

Marketers need to be sure about the clarity of their messages and that these messages are serving marketing’s two, bottom line objectives: cultivating consistent customers and preventing price pressure – CCC and PPP. Messages need to be relevant to all components of the market and they also need to be relevant in terms of increasing sales, margins and customer loyalty. 

To achieve this two-fold relevance, marketers need to be particularly clear about the type of responses that are needed from their various audiences. 

It might sound obvious, but the starting point for creating relevant messages is to identify the results that are needed for CCC & PPP and then to tailor the messages accordingly for each audience. Equally, it’s important to understand the composition of the market – who your audiences are – and what will motivate their positive influence on buying decisions.

Read more about creating results-driven marcoms:

Using funnels to create relevance and accurate positioning      Leveraging B2B’s buying motivators

Recession marketing: no such thing?      Building brand relationships: ‘The Long Hello’ 

Getting real in B2B markets      Mapping audiences in B2B markets

SYNERGY: harnessing marketing with other core functions

No man is an island. And, in the same way that we are interconnected as people, marketers need to be sure that they are fully-connected with all aspects of ‘customer management’ – typically including sales and support, production, finance and distribution.

The purpose of these connections is to ensure that customer-expectations are matched by customer-experiences. It’s a common complaint among marketers that the brand gets let-down at various points of contact with customers.

There may be many reasons for this, but my gut-feel is that too many marketers inhabit an ivory tower that has no relationship with the day-to-day activities of working with customers – in essence, they create expectations that the business cannot fulfil. 

The solution to this problem? Marketers must spend time with customers and experience the interactions for themselves. And having made this a habitual process, it’s no good trying to drive square pegs into round holes: if the business really cannot deliver on the expectations created by marketing, then marketing better change its messages… 

Read more about marketing’s synergy with other functions: 

Marketing united      Marketing and sales: bridging the divide

CREATIVITY: innovate to differentiate

Given the diversity of audiences within B2B markets, you could argue that there are more opportunities for creativity in B2B than there are in B2C. For me, these opportunities are extended even further by the diversity of outcomes produced for the overall market by B2B products and services.

Once marketers understand what their messages are for each audience, creativity is important in formulating those messages in ways that are relevant, arresting and compelling.

And it’s not just about creativity in terms of design: creativity is also needed in targeting and the mechanisms that marketers use to deliver their messages.

The commercial goal that should motivate this creativity is to forge brand-perceptions that assist in positioning your products and services as being the most likely to contribute to customers’ success.  

This positioning needs to be front-of-mind across the market. It needs to cut through all the sameness and clutter and to clearly and continuously highlight what sets you apart from the competition.  

Read more about the commercial importance of creativity:

Creativity in B2B marketing: are you serious?      Brand positioning: a quick case study

Sappi pays the ref: World Cup 2010 

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