When it comes to B2B marketing, you could be forgiven for thinking that you need to rip up the marketing rulebook to have even the slightest chance of success. And while it’s true that there are some important differences between B2B marketing and B2C marketing, they are subtle. And in all honesty that difference is usually drastically overblown. In fact, you can use almost all the core B2C marketing techniques to get yourself a nifty little advantage over other B2B businesses who are too scared to step outside the corporate playbook.
So let’s dig into what you need to know.
What’s the same?
People. The first thing that we see brands lose sight of in B2B marketing, is ironically the most important. There’s a tendency for B2B marketing to be watered down, vanilla and just plain dull. The reason? All too often businesses get trapped into thinking that because business decisions are serious, therefore the marketing should also be serious. The obvious risk is that by removing emotion from communication - we fail to connect. Even in huge life decisions that we make as consumers, we act irrationally and make choices based on emotion. So when creating B2B marketing campaigns, don’t forget the human touch.
The B2C Influence. There’s an unfortunate stereotype that business people leave their personal lives at the door and are not influenced by what they see at home before they sit down at their desk for a day of work. But studies have shown this is not true. If you see an advert for Salesforce when you are “off duty”, you might think that it had no impact on you. But if that awareness leads you to try the software in your work life, then a B2C ad changed how you behaved in your B2B life. The same is true of brands who have “two faces.” Your opinion of BT and their ability to give you a phone line and decent broadband will probably influence whether you want them to do your cyber security at work.
Brand. Regardless of whether you are in B2C or B2B; the value of the brand to the business is significant. But in B2B that value is reduced as smaller businesses don’t trade on brand awareness as much. There are outliers here, for example IBM is the biggest B2B brand you most likely know but will never buy from directly. There are some B2C markets like fashion and FMCG where it’s nigh on impossible to succeed without significant brand strength of some kind. B2B is not that simple. This doesn’t mean brand is not useful. It's just that it's a slightly less powerful tool than in B2C.
The marketing funnel. Ignore anyone who tries to tell you otherwise - the marketing funnel is still extremely important. And that still stands for B2B and B2C. The big difference is that if you're in B2B, you'll already know the buying cycle can be much longer than in B2C. But this doesn’t mean switching gears and using specialist approaches like ABM. If you build a custom marketing funnel via research, you will be able to map all your potential clients onto it. From there you can take advantage of classic marketing techniques like targeting, segmentation and positioning. These all play the same role as they do in B2C, but B2B marketing just uses those tools in a different way. Speaking of different…
What’s different?
While there are more similarities than meet the eye, there are some subtle differences between B2C and B2B marketing. Knowing what they are can keep you on the straight and narrow so that you can enjoy fusing the best of B2C marketing in a B2B approach.
Research. One advantage B2C marketing has over B2B is in how limited the scope of research can be. In B2C marketing, the ease of access to decision makers (aka: people) though panels, surveys and focus groups mean that it’s relatively easy to build a picture of the market. In B2B market research we have to be a bit more rugged in our approach. This is mainly because getting a large enough sample of decision makers is often difficult. Here we need to use surveys to our own customers (and realise that they are biased) as well as secondary segmentation (and realise that it won’t be perfect.) B2B market research is different, but the good news is, it’s typically quicker and cheaper to do.
Targeting. In B2C, more often than not you are targeting a specific person. With B2B more often than not you’re targeting a company. Once you target that company, you might find for example that you have 2 decision makers with equal power (eg:the CFO and the Sales Director.) It’s true that in most businesses, there is one ultimate decision maker. But if you have 2 equal decision makers then it's best to branch out and have different positioning strategies & executions to both groups. And to bring it back to our earlier point, we always need to do this with the goal of showing how your thing solves their problem.
The sales team. Your sales team (either real or virtual) are a critical data point in B2B marketing. Sales and marketing have to work together while recognising their unique strengths and differences to make the most of things for a company. It’s important that B2B marketers speak to the needs of the sales force and recognise their closeness to the target customer. This will likely including articulating why marketing will help them achieve their aims and supporting them through the creation of materials. But while sales teams have an innate sense of what is happening in on the ground, and how that translates into results, marketers are better at sensing what those hard data points mean for the future of the brand.
So there you have it. B2B marketing is a lot like B2C marketing. All you need to do is work out which bits of it are different, and adapt your approach where needed. But for the overwhelming majority of it - applying B2C marketing practices to B2B marketing can actually be an advantage over the competition.
