Business to business marketing
Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is very different to marketing directly to the consumer. First, by definition, you are marketing to organisations rather than individuals. This means that, rather than selling to thousands of potential customers, you are selling to a relatively smaller number of potential clients.
While consumers may be dispersed over a wide geographical area, industries tend to operate in geographical clusters. You are thus likely to be selling to clients in a well-defined eographical area. Think of the Motorsport Valley of Britain, for example, which combines the South East, East, East and West Midlands regions and the way high-performance engineering and motorsport companies cluster in that area. Or the way industries such as banking & finance cluster in London, requiring a range of B2B support products and services.
This has a number of implications for marketing. For one, it means you won’t go looking for customers in the way that retailers do. Retailers carry out market research on many thousands of potential customers, in the hope of identifying a particular demographic that will favour their goods and services. They analyse potential buyers in terms of age, gender, profession, lifestyle preferences and so on.
A B2B marketer knows that clients are in a limited range of businesses and probably confined to a certain geographical area. Web searches, business directories and trade shows can give a clue as to who those clients are. Having identified potential buyers, the B2B marketer will then focus on starting, building and maintaining relationships. Where retailers may mount an advertising campaign, B2B marketers will look for a way to start some kind of conversation with their clients.
B2B relationships are usually closer than relationships with customers. Where relationships are effective, clients will call their suppliers in for early consultation when they’re designing a new product or designing a new range of services. They see their suppliers as business partners.
As its name suggests, business-to-business marketing is more professionally focused than consumer marketing. B2B clients will not buy on impulse. They’ll want to consider things rationally and in detail. So while you may get a consumer to buy retail goods with a single advertisement, you’ll often need several face-to-face meetings to make a B2B sale.
If you're thinking about attracting B2B clients, be wary of using advertising tactics that work in the consumer market. If you were trying to tempt consumers with a car, it probably wouldn't hurt to advertise it with a family using the car to go on a holiday. However, if you were trying to lease out vehicles to corporate fleets, the same tactic could look pretty silly.
Business buyers focus on criteria that are professional, rather than personal. That’s partly because they don’t act as individual consumers but as part of a group. Even when you’re selling to a small company, you’re likely to be selling to more than one person.
In medium-sized companies, there’s likely to be more than one person in the purchasing department. Purchasers will take advice from people who use the product or service; they’ll get specifications before they make a purchase and receive feedback after purchases have been used. Purchasers will also be working with other managers, who may formally authorise acquisitions. Some purchasing decisions will grow out of committee meetings that set broad strategic directions—by mandating cost cutting, for example.
This means that B2B marketing success depends on good business intelligence. For a start, you need to know who to send marketing material to. There’s no point sending brochures to someone who is not contributing to the decision-making process. You need to know who to call to quickly rectify any issues that might arise during negotiations or even after a sale. You need to have a good understanding of the individual personalities at work within an organisation. You also need to be aware not only of their power, but also of their personal preferences.
Fortunately, this is not as difficult as it sounds, because B2B marketing is often a reasonably lengthy process and it demands close engagement with clients. If you’re pitching for a major contract, you’ll have a number of meetings before anything is finalised. You’ll be able to use the meetings to gather information and tweak the terms of your offer to suit the criteria and preferences of all the major players in the decision-making process.
Keeping close contact may be more problematic if you’re selling online. If you’re selling materials, you may know nothing about your clients until they stumble across you in a web search—web searches being an increasingly common tactic as companies use the web to quickly identify suppliers in a given field and do a price comparison.
Web commerce may undermine customer loyalty. However, it also gives you an opportunity to raise your profile with a wider range of clients. You can win regular clients by providing an electronic purchasing system that is flexible and responsive—an online equivalent of personal contact. That means doing the basics right, such as answering emails promptly, dealing with issues in a timely way and being willing to customise your product or service.
Of course, selling online is often the end result rather than the beginning of a business relationship. Nobody is likely to negotiate a major contract online but they may see electronic ordering as a quick and cost-effective way to buy, once a contract is set up. Many companies now prefer to purchase online, as this cuts out a lot of paperwork and allows them to redeploy employees to more value-adding activities.
Selling online is just one of the options you can use to customise and add value to your offering. You may bundle your products or services in a way that provides your clients with a total package, effectively allowing them to outsource part of their operation. You may find yourself working more as a business partner than a mere supplier. Or you may find that you cement business ties by entering into buy-sell, lease or barter arrangements with your clients. All of which goes to emphasise the point that B2B marketing is essentially about building good business relationships.
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