B-2-B slow to change marketing priorities

This morning I was prompted by an e-mail article on business blogs  to look back at some of the early blogs from the time when this Technical Marketing Diary started in August 2006. Our blog was launched without fanfare, more as an experiment over 3 years ago, which already seems a long time in the life of the Internet. We discussed RSS which we had already been using for more than 2 years, but Twitter and Facebook were yet to make their mark. So it is not surprising that  blogs frequently discussed change - the arrival of new marketing opportunities and equally the possible decline of other more established technologies, such as print. Accompanying the Internet developments came an increasing number of niche disciplines and experts ready to advise and consult on the intricacies of everything from search engine optimisation and usability testing to social media marketing. 

But despite an avalanche of advice from the collective experts that the Internet is the place to be and the marketing task is no longer to stand out from the crowd in busy media, but now to get visitors to your web site and retain their interest, anecdotal evidence suggests for many b-2-b companies this is not the case. Display advertising in the traditional printed media is still likely to attract the biggest portion of the marketing budget, possibly followed by exhibitions.

 As a generalisation it can be said b-2-b marketing has been slow to appreciate the business benefits of these new Internet based opportunities and continued to support the established and traditional communication tools. As long as companies warily watch their competitors and continue to advertise in the same media and exhibit at the same trade shows as each other, the media owners and exhibition promoters have an on-going revenue stream fueled by the fear of not being there, rather than a realistic marketing analysis.