8 principles of b2b marketing

8 principles of b2b marketing

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#1 Clearly communicate why you are here, what you do and how you add value. Cisco's POV is a good example. World would be a better place if we learnt to collaborate. A very good organising principle.

#2 To cut through the search mentality you have to be interesting, whether it be content or free stuff or sponsorship. Like Sage's sponsorship of Krypton factor. There is also a big point here about listening and relevance.

#3 Obvious. And a lot more than just social media by the way.

#4 If customers bother to contact you (and you sell expensive stuff) roll out the carpet.

#5 They expect free stuff. do it. Tools, articles, assessments. Try not to make it too thinly veiled a selling process.

#6 CRM. yes. and don't leave it to sales.

#7 Advocacy, customer forums, co-creation. Dell, BMW telematics design, Amex Open.

#8 The bit everyone struggles with. Involves everything from collateral to managing intermediary relationships.

I am composing a list of case studies if anyone has some suggestions love to hear them.

Rational ignorance

More on the economics bit - traditional not behavioural this time . When i was taught economics they defined it as the science of resource allocation. Now all the layman literature talks about incentives and how incentives drive every decision from where to live to marriage and divorce. Interestingly they say the world is a whole lot more rational than the behavioral economists would have you think.

Anyway came across this expression. Rational ignorance. I wish i had known about it before. It explains a lot of consumer purchase decisions.

At some point the cost of acquiring more information or evaluating a potential purchase, lets say a washing machine, really outweighs the incremental benefit. It is rational to live with a little ignorance beause after a certain point how wrong can you be?

Rational ignorance also explains why we like brands, they are information shortcuts, they signify quality (amongst a host of other stuff). They save us the information costs. It explains why we dont have an unerring temptation to subscribe to Which every time we want to spend more than £10.

7 B2B Social Media Tools You Haven't heard of

With the vast array of social media tools out there, it’s easy for some useful ones to get lost in the mix. Here’s a few that might be flying below the radar, but can be valuable tools for B2B marketers

Read more: http://socialmediab2b.com/2010/04/b2b-social-media-tools-3/#ixzz0vFpKKelt

7 B2B Social Media Tools You Haven’t Heard Of

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Trends 2008

Trends 2008

OK so it is from 2008, but some still make sense (not been proved wrong yet) others dont (have been). There is some personal originality in here.

Behavioural Marketing

Customer centric marketing is just too difficult, luckily I think we can give up on it and move on to something a bit easier, behavioural marketing.

We still talk a lot about segmentation and understanding customers needs. The argument is we can group customers into like minded groups and infer likely behaviour from their profiles. Why bother? It is a lot easier to observe what they do, and offer them something on a 'people like you' basis.

What do Amazon know about us? Nothing much about us as people, why should they care. But they do know what we buy and what we have told them is in our wish list. They don't care if two book buyers have different profiles, what does interest them is that they buy the same books. Admittedly they could get a bit smarter merging profiles and behavioural data but it sounds like a lot of work for very little return. Predicting book reading interests from personal data is just too much like guess work, you will get many more misses than hits.

Behavioural marketing is easier to apply in e-commerce environments, retail and service, the likes of Amazon, BA Frequent Flyer clubs but the behavioural approach is applicable across the board. What it means is that the role of the marketer is to do stuff, give stuff away, offer help, offer services, content, whatever allows the customer to do something, interact. The marketer is searching for Behavioural clues. Consequently our job is to do something interesting to the customer rather than something that looks to sell with indecent haste. In high end business technology the things that work best are the offers of free IT reviews, on and off line. The information you get is all you need to know about a customers requirements and willingness to purchase.

The problem with the behavioural marketing approach is that as marketers we have to think about the quality of prospects and customers rather than the numbers we reach. For some this is a major cultural shift, for others it is an easier transition. Behavioural marketing is more than behavioural targeting it is effectively the fusion of digital and direct marketing. It is giving us 121 marketing but without the complexity of profiling and inferring behaviour from attitude, profile, demographics, firmographics or whatever. So what will make it really interesting is when (complimentary) businesses sharing their behavioural data becomes common place.

One day soon, what do my customers look like, may become an irrelevant question. We just won't care.

A Marketing DO list - distributed content

One thing that has changed over the last few years in marketing is an increasing need to go and do things rather than just talk about it. Unfortunately whilst small operations get this, the bigger corporations, clients and agencies alike, have not quite grasped this for a number of pretty understandable reasons. Firstly, there are internal pressures to get the strategy perfect. Secondly, how do agencies charge for earned media, which cannibalise their traditional revenues. As no one has quite mastered payment on performance, agencies will naturally do the work that feeds the children (we are getting older) and leave the other stuff to later. Thirdly, traditional media is more visible (success and failure) to the organisation so as a marketing director you focus on this stuff first. I would.

Distributed content is a classic example. We all know it is a great idea but we can spend too much time in circular strategising.

"How and where are we going to distribute content?"
"Depends on what you are saying?"
"What do we talk about it, the stuff we are marketing or something else?"
"Surely we can re-use our content?"

So here are some DO-ing guidelines.

1. Distributed content is a longer term strategy so focus on your brand, your attitude and what makes you different. Sacrifice strategy to be interesting. In other words don't bother distributing boring marketing stuff or thinly veiled advertising unless you are Apple.

2. Dedicate time and resource (that means people) to creating interesting stuff. You cant just wave goodbye to your content as it leaves the door and hope it brings the goodies back. Hire a journalist, a copy writer. Create videos. How to's. How not to's. Top 10s. My mistakes. It is entertainment.

3. Social media. Get your videos on YouTube, Blinx and other video sharing sites. Get pictures on google images and other photo sharing sites. Wikipedia, How to sites. Link it. Tag it. Start now.

4. Use links and buttons in your email to entice visitors to other destinations. You don't want to be too in the face. Be brave, link away from your site. Host third party content tools in your site if you want to be really clever and transparent.

5. Having already established links with friendly bloggers keep them informed, they are linked with each other so this can snowball really quickly.

6. Plan news releases for next 12 months. Manage your media relations. They love content if it is good. Foster relations, don't harass them ask them what they want. Try using a phone as well as email.

And if you get this half right it should improve relevance scores and traffic through organic search and .

Rewiring business brains

Where do i save a presentation to a client on social media and CRM? Do i save it under the client name or under a discipline? Or both?

When the 4 and 5 year olds of today grow up they won't know what filing is. They may not even understand the concept of folders. That is because everything will be tagged, they will think in terms of search even now i have given up saving files in neat folders on the computer. Save it anywhere and find it again with google desktop. They will also think video. A Forrester type organisation estimate that 91% of new content in 2014 will be video. YouTube is already the world's no 2 search engine.

Increasingly we will struggle to think in linear terms, we will think more by concept association. Even now generation x, or y or is it z, reared on digital struggle to tell structured stories but what they are very good at is managing lots of different thoughts and not worrying about how everything connects. They use their right brain to make sure it feels alright rather than worrying whether something is watertight. Mr Logic has been allowed to put his feet up.

So going back to presentations and presenting information i suspect the new way to illustrate complex ideas will be increasingly be via images, video and pictures; documents will not be structured in a a linear order but the different sections will be hyperlinked. Clients may ask for a 3 minute video pitch rather than charts.

I am sure this 'rewiring' has big social and educational implications but for the moment the thought of less powerpoint is a pretty good one.