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. Customers. People. Y’know - humans. There’s a tendency for B2B marketing to be watered down, vanilla and just plain dull. The reason? All too often businesses get caught in the trap that because business decisions can be serious, therefore the marketing should also be serious. The obvious risk here is that by removing emotion from communication, that we fail to connect. Even in huge life decisions that we make as consumers, we act irrationally and make decisions 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 as a 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 an advert served to you as a consumer has impacted your decision making in the workplace. The same is true of brands who have “two faces.” Your opinion of British Telecom and their ability to deliver you a phone line and decent broadband will likely influence your thinking when you’re assessing which cyber security provider to use for your corporate offices.
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. There are outliers here, for example IBM is the B2B brand you most likely know but will never buy from directly. So we need to keep in mind that our B2C experiences influence our decisions in the B2B world. (but still a significant asset nonetheless.) Some businesses 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, and awareness of some form with your target audience still plays an important role, but maybe on a smaller scale.
The marketing funnel. Ignore anyone who tries to tell you otherwise - the marketing funnel is extremely important. And that goes for B2B and B2C. The big difference is that B2B buying cycles can be much longer than those in B2C and so keeping track of all your potential leads in a CRM system of some sort is often pivotal. 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 and take the benefits of all the great tools of consumer marketing. Research, targeting, segmentation and positioning 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, and track that over time. 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 this can also be true. But 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. Let’s say you need to convince the CFO and the Sales Director. It’s true that in most businesses, there is one ultimate decision maker, which is another way of helping us target your marketing at those people. But if you do have 2 equal decision makers then that would suggest you need 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 addressing their unique challenges, and relate that back to 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.
