B-2-B not just boring business to boring business anymore

An interesting article about b-2-b marketing – read the full story here. 

"Times change. The b-to-b sector accounts for over 50% of the U.S. gross domestic product."

 “B-to-b often got kicked around as the poor stepchild of consumer advertising. While exceptions abound, the stereotype was always that b-to-b marketing was boring. B-to-b companies did little TV advertising and spent most of their media dollars on trade publications. You had industrial companies selling boring products to other boring companies. All that anyone cared about was price and product features.

As a category, b-to-b makes a huge contribution to the economy, job creation and innovation. Now marketers are just as likely to engage with business customers on personal channels like Facebook and blogs as we are to engage with them in trade publications.

Today, no one would call b-to-b anybody's stepchild. With the explosion of social and content platforms, most consumer and b-to-b companies have access to the same communications channels and can compete on an equal footing. 

… the convergence of consumer and b-to-b creates exciting opportunities for both clients and agencies who want to break out of old marketing habits." 

Top of the search results - is it enough?

A great deal is written and discussed on the subject of search engine optimisation and the importance of ranking highly on the first page of Google results for your search term. But pause for a moment and think about that point. Are the search terms used to optimise your site the same terms someone searching will use? Enter the search term 'marketing' and approximately 493,000,000 results  are returned in 0.33 seconds. The first 3 are paid for positions and the top organic result is a Wikipedia definition followed by Marketing Magazine, the Chartered Institute of Marketing and various guidance information rather than marketing agencies that might actually help a business move forward. Take a step back, why search on 'marketing' in the first place? Indeed what need prompts someone to turn to the Internet? Perhaps a business is experiencing a falling order book and someone has suggested marketing could help. But as we have seen simply entering the term 'marketing' is not very helpful. Although the keywords people search on are collated, can be analysed and optimised, practical experience indicates that most visitors arriving at a web have actually combined the company name or brand with the product or service they are seeking. This suggests that the search is not just random but prompted by some other marketing activity. Common sense suggests people don't want millions of results, they want to quickly get to a short list of people that can provide what they need and to use the Internet to get this they have to refine the search. The message is not to assume that the web site is a stand alone marketing tool that will deliver a steady steam of well qualified prospects, but a component within an integrated marketing strategy. Other marketing techniques such as advertising and press relations can help raise and maintain the awareness of a business and its products or services. The web site is great for providing information and as a response channel working within a well planned and co-ordinated marketing communications programme.

Technical Marketing blog is now on ET Express

Starting this week, the Technical Marketing Diary Blog will be published on ET Express, the weekly e-mail newsletter for the entertainment technology market. The blog is replacing the former "One Minute Marketing" feature that for some time now has signed off the ET Express news that pops into e-mail in-boxes each Friday. "One Minute Marketing" was written as a simple briefing on marketing techniques covering a range of topics from advertising to public relations and intended for the benefit of engineers and entrepreneurs without marketing knowledge and with limited time, seeking to promote their products in a competitive marketing place. Articles from this series are still available and have been collated so that they can be downloaded as a PDF booklet from the Technical Marketing web site. Our blog takes a much wider brief allowing us to comment on marketing practice, ideas, new developments, technologies and campaigns. For example recent blog stories have covered such diverse topics as publishing trends, in-bound marketing, Twitter and marketing through the recession. Technical Marketing Diary blog headlines are also published on Twitter.

Our focus will be towards business-to- business (b-2-b) marketing where probably the biggest difference from consumer marketing is the size of marketing budget. But just because budgets are much smaller there is no reason why b-2-b marketing should not be professional. It is tempting for modest sized businesses, particularly in difficult trading times, to resort to in-house solutions. Unfortunately prospective customers can also spot an amateurishly produced brochure or web site and what message does that convey about the company's products and services?