What’s love got to do with a B2B brand?
You can’t love a robot. Or can you? There’s plenty of science fiction around that topic, but in real life, forget about it.
Being open to discourse means listening and respecting the channels the audience is using at the moment.
In B2C, channels are often Facebook, Instagram, etc. But, in B2B, it’s not necessarily the same. For example, magazines are becoming extinct; they have been hit hard by the internet and digital/programmatic advertising.
Today, 70% of B2B people get their information from Google searches BEFORE they even talk to a rep or read a piece of content. A client just sent me an article he found online that had a photo of his product. Great publicity, but the piece never named the product, or the products relationship to the content of the article! That’s opportunity knocking in many ways.
What is your B2B brand doing to accommodate desired behaviors? The fact is, most are doing nothing, really. Most B2B companies continue down traditional roads and end up losing contact with their prime audiences. It’s hard to be relevant to everyone all the time, isn’t it? But AI can help.
One of the key differentiations between B2C and B2B is the word “audience.” In B2C, you have one audience: consumers. And while you can break that audience down demographically, as you can with any main category, a consumer is a consumer. In B2B, the word is “audiences,” plural. Because in B2B, there are many audiences who influence the product’s path to purchase — from purchasers, specifiers, installers, etc.. That makes “discourse” very difficult, as each of the audience’s needs are different.
Of course, it doesn’t change the facts: audiences are channel jumping more than ever before. They are, in fact, using mutli-channels.
Understanding the transition from the 30-second spot to social and digital is important.
In B2B, which rarely used traditional TV, you can substitute “print” for the 30-second spot and you’ve got the formula of change. You have shorter and shorter time spans to connect with prospects and customers. Nevertheless, there is evidence that if you engage properly, those seconds can turn into minutes, and into actually many minutes. If your content is relevant, that relevance is a magnet for eyeballs.
Print has shifted from a primary to a secondary channel – something many publishers still struggle with. E-mail marketing, digital outreach have reversed roles with traditional print and direct mail (i.e., in the past, you ran a print ad, and followed up with support tactics, but now, you use your support tactics as the lead and back it up with print). And yet, marketers continue down the print road for some reason.
As simple as this sounds, B2B CMOs have a difficult time making the transition. Change is always difficult, isn’t it? Digital works best with narrow messaging, but it’s deeper, driven by an original brand personality and a bit of vulnerability. I’m often asked how long a blog should be. My answer is always the same: as long as you want. Unlike other media, Google reads EVERYTHING and then indexes EVERYTHING. But the point is to use channels your customers are using as appropriate to the objective of your campaign.
Negative can be a positive too.
It’s called listening, and then adapting. For example, we did an e-mail campaign for a client that resulted in one of our programmers running into my office saying there’s an irate engineer on the phone complaining about receiving the e-mail we just sent. I took the call, and the engineer said, “Where the #@$!! did you get my name?”
I apologized and told him that he would be removed immediately from our lists, but he demanded to know where we got his name. I told him and there was an immediate silence. “Jim, I can’t thank you enough. I’ve been getting bombarded by e-mails recently, and no one was willing to tell me anything.”
We had a five minute conversation about the ins and outs of e-mail, his job and so on. It ended this way: “Oh, by the way, I’m not the guy you’re looking for. The guy you want is so-and-so, and his e-mail is ____. Good speaking with you.”
The name he gave us for our client was the director of operations for one of the major retailers in the country (who we thought was the guy who we called). We targeted that original person because of the amount of construction projects we had detected that were going on within their company. Listening and not going into crisis mode all the time often delivers rewards you haven’t dreamt of.
Know your brand identity so well you’re not trying to be everything to everyone; just stay true to who you are.
Socrates said, “Know Thyself.” Truer words in communications – whether B2C or B2B – can’t be overstated. We have seen clients repeatedly get hammered when they leave their core competencies behind. This is not to say that innovation or brand extensions are wrong. However, when you abandon your core – who you are – it inevitably leads to unforeseen problems. In one instance, we had a client that wanted to penetrate a new market. After research, we told them, “It’s not worth it.” We explained why, but the client was determined. After all, they were the powerhouse in their own market — they figured they could do the same in a related market.
We reminded them that the new product they wanted to bring in was not their core competency. “We want the annuity from this product,” they said. “We are doing to do this, with your help, or we’ll find someone else.” This isn’t the first time we hear these ultimatums. And since our job is to help our clients, we always go “all in.” Unfortunately, after two years and millions of dollars on not must marketing, but on creating a new sales force and all the other requirements of doing business in a new channel where you didn’t exist before, they abandoned their effort. It was a total bust.
Why did this happen? They left their core competency on the floor and entered a world where the competency they wanted to gain (annuity with repeat sales) was owned by three other companies much larger than our client’s. Simply, those companies were not going to “give way” to another company entering into their turf.
The point is AI enhances efficiency, but true value comes from trust, reliability, and differentiation.