Business to Business (B2B) marketing is an area of increasing interest, not least because the size of the B2B market outweighs its Business to Consumer (B2C) sibling, by some margin. At the time of writing the fastest growing companies are those with a B2B focus. However, many marketers still see B2B as the poor cousin of B2C, as both less creative and less interesting. This has led to a lack of fundamental skills in the space, with many teams forgoing formal training, which in turn undermines the importance of the full suite of expertise itself. Marketers, across the board, are at the coalface of change and must continue to shift and change as buyers are disrupted, whilst also embracing the technologies and tools that are being built to leverage the transformative power of the current waves of disruption.
To thrive B2B marketers must continue to perform today contributing to short term revenue whilst also transforming for tomorrow, driving the long-term brand growth that will set their businesses up for future success. No easy task when we see budgets falling, anxiety peaking and cannibalization of marketing teams by other functions.
The B2B marketing toolbox is fundamentally the same as that in B2C – particularly where straightforward sales are the aim. Selling tangible widgets to businesses through ecommerce platforms operates in a similar way to selling tangible products to people online. Targeting the right message to the right buyer at the right time stands as an absolute. Where it starts to get more complicated is when you are selling intangible services or looking for large-scale enterprise level sales. When you move from selling to an individual to a buyer group, or buying committee, you need to also ensure your marketing follows the full suite of buyers and influencers. This is where B2B starts to need a more nuanced marketing approach.
B2B marketers need to go back to the fundamentals
The sole purpose of marketing is to get more people to buy more of your product more often, for more money. You need to understand what differentiates your products and services, what is the customer or client need that only you can solve and then build and drive a continuous association with your brand to ensure that you remain top of any buyers’ shortlist.
The four key areas to understand:
- Understand your business objectives. Speak the language of the business… define your marketing KPIs in line with performance so you are seen as a growth lever.
- Find the human insight. What do your buyers need? What is the buyer’s issue that your product can solve?
- Connect to your brand truth. Your differentiator. What is it that you do that others can’t?
- Execute, measure, test and learn. Get your plans live. Stop procrastinating and test theories in the wild. Optimize based on results.
The brand you build in B2B can be more important than in a B2C environment – your buyers are personally more motivated to make the most right, or in many cases least wrong, choice for their provider, due in part to the amount their career is tied to the choices they need to make. This means that the rational foundational drivers of any decision are much less important than the emotional ones.
No one gets fired for buying the wrong toothpaste!
Kate Mackie EY
As an example, if you buy the incorrect brand of toothpaste your family might get a bit miffed, but it will unlikely go any further, however if you make the wrong choice on an enterprise level your job, and therefore all that relies on your salary, could be at risk. This makes a B2B purchase a highly emotive one. It is also what underpins the old adage of ‘no-one gets fired for buying IBM’.
The least wrong choice of a trusted brand
The high level emotions tied to a B2B purchase are much more fundamental than those in fmcg. The fear of failure that is aligned with the buying decision you make when deciding on an enterprise level supplier is critical. There is a higher level of importance placed on buying from a brand that is well-known from all around the boardroom table, so that the individual decision maker cannot fall foul of ‘buyer’s remorse’.
The goal is therefore to become the equivalent in your space, so that you are the trusted choice for your buyers. Trust will have different drivers depending on the sector you operate in and the buyers you are targeting, but it is fundamental to understand these drivers so you can build and maintain brand trust with your target audience. This emotional alignment can be built through the communication of your purpose, the highest level reason for your brand to exist.
Aligning your brand to the needs of your audience and going back to Kotler’s 4Ps will help you ensure that this brand truth is driven through all the elements of the marketing mix that you, as a marketer, can influence.
Kotler’s 4Ps
The Product
The product must align to the needs of your audience with the features and benefits clearly communicated.
The Place
The Place aligns to the method of distribution to the customer and can be physical shelf space or online placements.
The Price
The Price is a lever that can drive demand, perception and be optimized to drive towards the business objectives.
The Promotion
Promotion is the element marketers are most closely aligned with and needs to represent the brand and product through all channels and forms of communication, taking the right message to the right buyer at the right time.
All elements of the marketing mix need to play together so that you can build the brand trust with your audience and provide easy paths to purchase. What Byron Sharp refers to as both mental and physical availability – making your product or service both ‘easy to mind and easy to find’ .
B2B = B2C’s more difficult cousin
What makes B2B more complicated is the number of buyers and influencers involved in the purchase decision at any one time. This means that you need to target multiple messages at multiple individuals within an organization through the buying process. Add in the fact that large-scale B2B sales are now taking longer to close and we can see that the task for marketers is getting increasingly difficult.
In the last few years, we have seen the advent of marketing technology focused on solving this specific problem in its entirety allowing marketers to drive an increased focused on buyers at an account level as well as at an individual one – with data signals able to be aggregated to show grouped movement through a purchase cycle towards a sale. Aligned with the power of account -based marketing, where an account is treated as a market in its own right, and marketing is well placed to help drive revenue and optimize value.
One of the challenges of marketing is that of optimization. With so much data and so many buying signals being demonstrated all at once, driving real efficiency is hard. Ensuring you are focused on the right signs to enable the right decision making is often a case of trial and error, testing and learning as you go. For instance, as new channels become available knowing the relevant messaging to use is built on an understanding of what the audience needs from that channel and through testing, understanding what works to drive the individual to the next best action. Enabling this understanding at speed across multiple buyers is being unlocked through the use of new types of technology including marketing focused AI – building a multiplicity of assets at speed, deploying them and optimizing them based on a continuously updated understanding.
So, where to start?
- Understand your business’ objectives, both the organization and the individual stakeholders you work with. What is within marketing’s gift to solve?
- Think about the problem you are trying to solve for your buyers. Where can you remove the friction in the buying process? How might marketing help contribute to the buying journey?
- Think about your positioning through the traditional SWOT model and Kotlers’ 4Ps. Where can you differentiate?
- Consider the traditional funnel – are you selling to individuals or buying demand units?
- Think about your audience in terms of an NPS model… Who are your supporters, detractors and neutrals? What might you need to do to convince them to buy from you?
- What can you do today that will help drive revenue but also drive long term growth? The balance of short vs long is one you need to understand. Depending on how mature your sector is, and your brand within that sector you may need to invest in awareness driving communication in order to ensure that your brand is ‘easy to mind (recall)’ at the point of need.
As a marketer who has worked across both B2C and B2B, across multiple sectors and buyers I can see that it is a compelling time to be in B2B. The disruptive forces at play, the increased sophistication of data and technology alongside the closer focus on purpose all align with an amplified need for differentiation. This puts power in the hands of the marketer. We must wield it wisely and drive both the future of our function and our organizations forward.
Sharp, B (2011) How Brands Grow: What marketers don’t know, Oxford University Press, UK
Authored by Kate Mackie EY, Partner Global Marketing Lead
