NGR's Blog

B2B Marketers are trying to make everyone happy. The CEO needs revenue. The sales team needs qualified leads. Customers need information. Everyone is looking at marketing to make it happen. If you're a B2B marketer, you may feel like the success or failure of your company rests entirely on your shoulders.

So, how did B2B Marketing become responsible for everything, including sales? Is there a way to fix it?

We attempt to answer those questions by examining the evolution of modern marketing that has brought us to this point. Nothing happened overnight but here we are, feeling like we need to do more when in fact the solution may be doing less and spreading the responsibility. First, some background…

Understanding the needs and pain points of current customers and prospects is an important aspect for planning out B2B marketing campaigns. Traditionally, marketers would look to telephone and print surveys for needed marketing data. Depending on researchers to gather, input, compile and error check surveys results led to higher costs and missed marketing opportunities.

Today, B2B marketers have a new option for gathering this information – online surveys. The web provides exciting, flexible and social options for conducting surveys:  it’s just so much more efficient than traditional means. 

Are you wondering what’s happening to your customers? The truth is they maybe wondering what’s happened to you. Think of your customers as friends. You communicate with your friends regularly. Sometimes it’s just to keep in touch and other times it’s to let them know about something special that’s going on. But what happens when you don’t hear from your friends for a long time. You begin to wonder what’s going on.Why haven’t they called or emailed you? Are they still around? Maybe they have new friends and do not have time for you anymore. Maybe they haven’t heard from you in so long they think you’ve forgotten about them. In any case it’s important to keep the lines of communication open and stay in touch.

You need to be thinking of your customers with this same philosophy.Just because someone did business with you a year ago does not mean they will continue to think about you and remember you a year later when they need something else. If they don’t hear from you or see your promotions, chances are, they will forget about you and do business with another company who is maintaining some form of communication with them.

Experience-based marketing is not a new concept, as it has been around for a while and many B2C companies have had a lot of success implementing it. The challenge is for B2B companies to use such techniques to advertise and market. Experience marketing gives the target audience a first hand experience by giving the audience the ability to touch, feel, see and know your offering or product.

Max Lenderman, the author of "Experience the Message",  says engaging potential customers is more important than shoving advertisements into peoples' faces. With an attention span of 8 seconds which is equal to that of a goldfish, it is really hard to reach the target audience minds with one or two or even 10 instances of our marketing campaigns. I like two examples that Max Lenderman gave at the Art of Marketing event.

There are very few prominent B2B brands in the general market. A big reason is that many B2B organizations view marketing as a necessity for B2C firms and instead concentrate on personal selling for B2B relationships. In this neat article by Prof John Quelch, he says that Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and GE generate far more B2B revenues than sales to end consumers.

He further discusses why B2B firms should try to build brands.

B2B marketers have to address thousands of small businesses as well as enterprise customers. They cannot do so economically using the traditional direct sales force. Branding gets the word out and established share of mind. All this helps, when a potential prospect has a need that requires to be fulfilled quickly.