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Creating a B2B content marketing strategy to target businesses is much more different than creating a B2C content strategy. One involves creating content to target the decision-makers of companies and the other involves targeting broad audiences. Even though as many as 82 percent of B2B marketers in one survey, said they employed “content marketing” as a strategy, failing to understand the difference between B2B and B2C content marketing is an important reason why many B2B content strategies fail……..Continue reading….
By Syed Balkhi
Source: Entrepreneur
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You may like to read: Digital Content Strategies To Elevate Any Brand
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Critics:
Business marketing is a marketing practice of individuals or organizations (including commercial businesses, governments, and institutions). It allows them to sell products or services to other companies or organizations, who either resell them, use them in their products or services, or use them to support their work.
The field of marketing can be broken down into many sections such as business-to-business (B2B) marketing, business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, and business-to-developer (B2D) marketing. However, business marketing is typically associated with the business-to-business sector.
The internal efficiency of a business entity is the factor by which it prepares a product or service in a cost efficient manner. The external efficiency of a business entity is the factor by which it effectively markets itself so as to utilize the market, in order to retrieve maximum profits from that internal efficiency.
So in a B2B market setting, the external efficiencies of the business entities due to conduct trade is vital to the success of the B2B transaction, especially if they belong to the same concern, in which case an internal market between the co-owned business entities is emergent. Being able to make use of external economies of scale within the same ownership group is actually one of the motivations for creating a concern.
Business markets have derived demand – a demand in them exists because of demand in the consumer marketing. An example would be a government wishing to purchase equipment for a nuclear power plant. Another example would be when items are in popular demand. The underlying consumer demand that has triggered this is that people are consuming more electricity (by using more household devices such as washing machines and computers). Business markets do not exist in isolation.
A single consumer market demand can give rise to hundreds of business market demands. The demand for cars creates demands for castings, forgings, plastic components, steel, and tires. In turn, this creates demands for casting sand, forging machines, mining materials, polymers, and rubber. Each of these growing demands has triggered more demands. As the spending power of citizens increases, countries generally see an upward wave in their economies. Cities or countries with growing consumption are generally growing business markets.
Despite the differences between business and consumer marketing from a surface perspective being seemingly obvious, there are more subtle distinctions between the two with substantial ramifications. Dwyer and Tanner note that business marketing generally entails shorter and more direct channels of distribution. While consumer marketing is aimed at large groups through mass media and retailers, the negotiation process between the buyer and seller is more personal in business marketing.
According to Hutt and Speh (2004), most business marketers commit only a small part of their promotional budgets to advertising, and that is usually through direct mail efforts and trade journals. While advertising is limited, it often helps the business marketer set up successful sales calls. Both business to business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing is done with the ultimate intention of making a profit to the seller (business-to-business marketing). In B2C, B2B and B2G marketing situations, the marketer must always:
- successfully match the product or service strengths with the needs of a definable target market;
- position and price to align the product or service with its market, often an intricate balance; and
- communicate and sell it in the fashion that demonstrates its value effectively to the target market.
These are the fundamental principles of the 4 Ps of marketing (the marketing mix) first documented by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960. While “other businesses” might seem like the simple answer, Dwyer and Tanner say business customers fall into four broad categories: companies that consume products or services, government agencies, institutions and resellers.
The first category includes original equipment manufacturers, such as large auto-makers who buy gauges to put in their cars and also small firms owned by 1–2 individuals who purchase products to run their business. The second category, government agencies, is the biggest. In fact, the U.S. government is the biggest single purchaser of products and services in the country, spending more than $300 billion annually.
But this category also includes state and local governments. The third category, institutions, includes schools, hospitals and nursing homes, churches and charities. Finally, resellers consist of wholesalers, brokers and industrial distributors.Often the target market for a business product or service is smaller and has more specialized needs reflective of a specific industry or niche.
A B2B niche, a segment of the market, can be described in terms of firmographics which requires marketers to have good business intelligence in order to increase response rates. There may be multiple influencers on the purchase decision, which may also have to be marketed to, though they may not be members of the decision making unit. In addition the research and decision making process a B2B buyer undertakes will be more extensive.
Finally the purchase information that buyers are researching changes as they go through the buying process. According to Anderson and Narus (2004), two new types of resellers have emerged as by-products of the Internet: infomediaries and metamediaries. Infomediaries, such as Google and Yahoo, are search engine companies that also function as brokers, or middlemen, in the business marketing world.
They charge companies fees to find information on the Web as well as for banner and pop-up ads and search engine optimization services. Metamediaries are companies with robust Internet sites which furnish customers with multiproduct, multivendor and multiservice marketspace in return for commissions on sales.
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