On the surface it seems so manageable and straightforward. After all, BtoB marketing lists are certainly smaller than BtoC lists. The customer segments are fewer and it would seem that the opportunities for true one-to-one marketing are many. But BtoB marketing comes with some serious pitfalls. They are different than those presented by BtoC but nonetheless challenging.
I see three specific challenges that marketers will have to deal with in order to make BtoB marketing an effort that will yield real results in the form of lead creation and marketing ROI.
Complexity of Transactions: BtoB is rarely a simple transaction. One to one consumer marketing is born out of the retail, direct to consumer world. In the pre-Internet days the biggest challenges associated with getting a direct marketing program off the ground was getting the data assembled, cleaned and standardized and pushed to a mailing house on time. As the process developed over the decades, this process became more commonly known as the Extract, Transfer, Load (ETL) process. At the end of the process, media would go out via postal service or phone and finally email. If all went according to plan, orders would come in through any one of the retail sales channels: store, customer service call center and finally Web. But BtoB companies are often selling complicated and more abstract things like “contracts” or “policies,” many products bundled together like chemicals or construction materials, or an even more abstract service. Typically, you want to have your marketing efforts driven by purchasing behavior and complex products and services make targeting those behaviors more difficult.
The introduction of the “organization” into the database adds a new dimension to the data, and a level of complexity. B2C data is relatively easy. The customer has a name, billing and shipping addresses, and a credit card number, with data integrity enforced in the transactional web environment or through a loyalty program where you can tie a card number or coupon back to the same individual each time. But in the BtoB world, you are selling to organizations rather than people. There is inevitably a many-to-many relationship between an organization record and a contact and resolving this not a simple matter. Add to this the layers of hierarchy in a company, divisions, acquisitions, satellite offices, home offices etc. and determining what contacts and addresses can be bundled together into a single sales opportunity is a formidable problem.
Measuring ROI is difficult under ideal conditions and in B2B can actually be contentious. In the B2C environment, there are opportunities for “explicit” measurement. Send an email, click on the email, place an order. This pattern is easy to track and search for in the B2C database and it is easy to create a link between the marketing effort and the result. In the B2B environment ROI has to be measured “implicitly” by guessing causality between outbound communications and a subsequent purchase. This is complicated by the fact the sale is closed by a sales team way downstream and potentially weeks or months from the initial marketing effort. Although many companies are working to close the ROI gap, it’s still an issue. B2B marketers need clear goals and clear outcomes before executing a plan and an agreed upon method for measuring success.
The conventional wisdom is that anything a marketing team can do in the B2C world will translate to the multi-channel B2C environment, and possibly even be easier considering the smaller data volumes. That’s the myth. In reality, the challenges mentioned above are common stumbling blocks to launching a successful B2B marketing effort. The good news is none of these problems are deal breakers. A well designed and thought out process for managing these types of complexities can lead to profitable marketing programs.
Powered by Compendium Blogware