Businesses are human too: Unlock B2B marketing success by adopting consumer-centric strategies

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Taking consumer trends and applying them to B2B marketing

Marketing is slowly gaining importance in business-to-business (B2B) organisations, however many still believe the ROI is too hard to measure as cycles are too long; the sale too technical; and sale attribution often simply goes to sales people. As such, B2B marketing and brand research can be viewed by some as inaccurate, while for those conducting it, it is often considered dry and dull (unfortunately further reducing interest in it.) We’ve seen that this doesn’t have to be the case and here we look at what B2B marketers should be doing differently to cut through to their audiences by taking a page out of the business-to-consumer (B2C) playbook. 

No matter the angle or the question, it comes back to the same insight: we’re talking to humans, not businesses. Humans make the decisions. Humans are the ones who are influenced. Humans respond (positively or negatively) to an experience. Humans do the research. Humans experience your brand. Which means, when it comes to marketing - and research too - on a basic level we need to think about these decision makers in much the same way our B2C peers think about their consumers because they make decisions as all humans make decisions.

But we do need to acknowledge that their realities are different to those of a B2C consumer. In their business role they may be less likely to be influenced by social media (although nowadays this is debatable[1]);  the sales and customer journey they go on is very different (it may be longer, have more touchpoints that are harder to measure and be more complicated with more technical details); and they are more likely to be loyal to suppliers and relationships they have (because of longer customer journeys, subscription models, personal relationships and the amount of research that goes into that decision to begin with). 

However, decision making is rarely based on pure rational logic, even in the B2B space. As Kristin Luck tweets, ‘Recognize that, ultimately, customers buy solutions, not products or services. They are interested in what you can do to help solve their problems or make life easier for them.’

While many companies in the B2B space offer increasingly attractive switching incentives, if you have a relationship with your customer, these incentives are likely to be less attractive.  Therefore, it’s not just the B2C brands that need to adjust their thinking to focus on relationships and not transactions. Successful and forward-thinking businesses are already thinking like this. As admitted in a roundtable conducted by Marketing Week, Oliver Harcourt, head of UK marketing at Vistaprint had this to say: ‘In the past we were short-term focused when we looked at attribution. We were only looking at what drove the sale. We have realised over time that we’re very transactional and we need to build a brand and a relationship.We need to evolve our marketing into short- and long-term goals, commercial and brand goals.’

In a world where all consumers increasingly seek experiences over material objects, are loyal to companies with which they have an emotional engagement and are fickle when it comes to pure financial reward, it is in the interests, then, of the B2B marketer to consider how this wider consumer trend can be applied to their customers. They may continue to be price sensitive but when you consider that it’s humans making the decisions and not a computer, it may change how you engage with them – whether that’s through your communications, the channels you use, or the way you reward their loyalty. Most importantly, maybe when you consider your customers in that light it will change the value you place on marketing and the role it plays in the sales process. 

[1]IDG Connect research found that 86% of business technology decision makers use social media for professional reasons Forrester research found that 86% of business technology decision makers use social media for professional reasons.