B2B – a booming market

According to recent research the UK business-to-business marketing sector is worth a staggering £9.8 billion and booming. There are reckoned to be 176,000 marketing practitioners just working in B2B and a further 272,000 partly working in B2B marketing. So, on paper a big market for agencies to go after. What is not clear from the summary and headline figures is quite how the B2B sector is structured. On the face of it there should be some huge agencies just living on B2B clients, yet most big advertising agencies seem to focus on consumer marketing and anecdotal evidence suggests most B2B agencies are small, or one man operations. Then again the report says that ‘agencies are not seen as important’ that only 20% use agencies for strategic thinking, over a quarter do not use an agency at all and 50% of the marketing practitioners have no marketing qualifications. These figures tally better with our experience of B2B marketing. Yes companies are putting money into activities broadly classified as marketing, many try to do their own thing, few have any real strategy or a written marketing plan. So from the agency side it is quite likely a large part of the £9.8 billion does not go through them, so whether B2B specialist marketing agencies are booming is another matter, but probably not. Neither judging by the attention of media salesmen are traditional trade publications booming. Particularly in the industrial sector many journals seem to have stripped back staffing levels and are hanging on by the skin of their teeth while reluctantly, belatedly and half-heartedly looking towards the internet. The trouble with big numbers like billions is we never handle sums on money with that many zeros, or are even sure how many zeros there should be. According to Wikipedia it is 1,000,000,000 but the there is the short scale billion (a thousand million) or long scale (a million million – 1,000,000,000,000). So rounding figures up the UK B2B market is put at £10,000,000,000, the number of practitioners at 476,000 so that works out at about £21,000 per head not such an exciting number, or it could be £2 million of course - unlikely. That is another problem with big numbers, relating them to something meaningful. Our experience shows that knowing market sizes and market shares does not easily translate into useful marketing knowledge. At the end of the day the only knowledge is does the marketing investment contribute to improved profitability.