As an increasing number of companies around the world vie to become the new Twitter (which recently celebrated its fifth birthday), Alex Aspinall asks whether B2B marketers are facing technology overload
Many of you will have attended the recent Technology for Marketing and Advertising (TFM&A) event, held in London at the end of February, or will be planning to attend its Manchester-based cousin in May. Likewise, a good contingent will also have ventured to the Social Media World Forum at the end of March. Fewer of you will have made the pilgrimage down to Austin, Texas for the annual music, film and interactive festival South by Southwest (SXSW). But whichever event you made it to, you will undoubtedly have been presented with an overwhelming range of apps, platforms, software solutions and digital developments, all purporting to be designed to make your lives easier.
Though not specifically aimed at marketers, the SXSW event in Texas is particularly interesting as it was here, five years ago, that Twitter gained the publicity it needed to go from trendy bleeding edge app to worldwide must-have. And its continued growth and relevance in B2B circles clearly need little explanation.
But it is important to remember Twitter is one success story among countless failures. How do you really know if you are being offered the opportunity to get involved with something destined to knock Facebook off the top spot, something that will really benefit your ROI, or if you’re being sold something destined for the scrap heap in six months?
As Michael Frier of Speed Communications says, “It seems that at the moment there is a new platform being created every week – but they are not all going to help you. Many of them are aimed at consumer audiences and can be hard to manipulate for a B2B audience.”
Keep an eye on the radar
If you’re putting your name on the line and using your marketing budget to do so, it is important to make sure you get it right.
Paying attention in the right places is key, according to Bryony Thomas, founder of Clear Thought Consulting. She said, “Unless what you’re selling is in the marketing technology space, I wouldn’t say that being absolutely up to the minute is essential. I would say that it’s probably more effective to keep abreast of what people are actually doing with new technologies, getting familiar with them under the radar, and deciding which will work for you with a cool head.”
So despite the continual bombardment of new opportunities it is far from essential in B2B to be the first to act. There’s little to be gained from moving faster than your customers, after all. Scot McKee, managing director at Birddog, points out that any business wishing to retain relevance has to position itself in the places where its customers are most likely to be listening. And this includes moving when they do.
The big challenge is that it is very hard to predict which new products are going to be worth your time and money. McKee says, “Some tools have exponential initial growth that just as quickly falls away, such as Google Wave. Others have growth that just keeps going, like Twitter. The ones that keep going are the ones to engage with. Business risk is endemic. It’s constantly being managed and mitigated by business brands. That’s safe and sensible, but inertia ultimately becomes a risk in itself.”
This view is shared by Steve Kemish, director at Cyance. He says, “Too many marketers are sheep and follow the masses or buzz and adopt ‘just because everyone else is talking about it.’ If one of these launches seems to offer a better/best way of communicating your brand and message, then try it – but dip a toe, don’t dive in head first. Prove the concept to secure the further funding or risk falling on your sword.”
Innovation brings innovation
Finding a balance between keeping up-to-date with what’s coming next and knowing what your customers are actually doing right now is clearly best practice. Few would argue that the plethora of digital solutions now available have not offered most B2B marketers the opportunity to reach out to their potential customers in new and exciting ways. Companies can converse with their customers in real time, target them with increasingly personalised campaigns and even listen to what other people are saying about them. All of which would have been almost impossible less than a decade ago. You just have to make the technology work for you, rather than becoming its slave.
One thing many B2B marketers agree on is that the constant stream of technology solutions, whether aimed specifically at marketers or whether they happen to be appropriated by them, is not going to disappear. If anything innovation stimulates innovation, and we can expect more solutions every month.
David Sealey, business development director at Quba, says, “Marketing technology will continue to change as marketers’ needs change. All of this will be driven by the marketing methods that are perceived to work. Case studies of technology success will catalyse demand for software, which in turn will fuel future product development.”
Twitter may only be five years old but in another five years we will probably be talking about a different app/service/platform/device, which has also reinvented the marketing landscape. Technology and communications are the driving forces of the 21st century. And, as Dave Katz, managing director UK at Ybrant Digital, points out, “Some of the biggest brands in the world today did not exist when I was growing up – and Apple and Microsoft seem to have been around for an aeon compared to Facebook and Google.”
