Business services companies have a bad reputation among marketers. A straw poll among the contributors to this article found that not one believed that the marketing of such firms was particularly creative or, for want of a better term, ‘good’.
Perhaps most telling of all was the response from the sector’s professional association. The Business Services Association (BSA) turned down the offer to contribute claiming it was “not best placed to talk on the issue of the marketing of business services” as it was more involved in “strategic issues [but not] the day-to-day running of things.” That one comment probably says more about the state of marketing within business services than any other. Even the BSA does not view marketing as strategic, but as perfunctory.
Time and again, organisations declined to comment on their marketing activity. To coin a phrase, one declination is unfortunate, two suspicious, but three is murder. Or at least seriously disturbing. Why the silence if not an admission that there’s really not very much going on?
Broad church
Business services is a difficult sector to pin down. It is a broad and disparate church taking in anything from low-value commodities such as stationery to high-ticket services such as telephony, web hosting or security. In essence the sector is divided along these lines, creating two quite distinct marketing challenges.
“Cleaning, stationery, furniture, catering are all non-critical and necessary evils of running a business,” says Steve Dyer, managing director of marcomms agency Clockwork IMC. “If these things fail it would not be business critical. At the other end of the spectrum there is web hosting, security, IT support and telephony. If these fail you’re talking about a potential disaster.”
Critical theory
The non-critical services are often sold on price, more often than not are tangible products and in Dyer’s estimation are less beholden to the brand values of the company.
“With a product, I don’t really care who makes it so long as it works. I don’t really care if my water cooler is made by Nestlé just so long as it gives me cold water,” Dyer adds.
At the business critical end of the market, the opposite is true. These services very rarely come as tangible off-the-shelf products, and will usually be tailored specifically to the needs of an individual organisation.
“Service delivery is about the brand and the reputation of the company,” says Dyer. “The risks here are high as you’re in the business of managing expectations. To see how it can go wrong you only need look at CRM. So much was promised, everyone’s hopes were high and so was the spend, but it just hasn’t delivered. And has been damaged as a result.”
Clearly this dichotomy of business critical versus non-essential services brings very distinct marketing challenges. These are challenges that are being met in very different ways.
Taking it to the top
The high-value services are by their very nature intangible. Because something such as web hosting will be tailored specifically to the needs of an organisation, it becomes difficult to market and communicate. Almost by definition you have to buy the service to experience it.
“There’s only so much you can communicate before actually sitting down with your prospect and talking specifics. But to get to the stage of setting up that meeting can be really difficult,” says Dyer.
The more business-critical the service being marketed, the more senior the person you’re marketing to becomes.
“Big business decisions are made by groups of people at board level,” says Piggy Lines, creative director, MRM Partners. “We were marketing quite expensive IT services and needed to communicate relatively dry information to very senior people. It’s very hard to sell such products and services off the page; you have to try and instigate a conversation with them.”
Lines says that in this sense marketing business services is governed by the same rules as all marketing. “People are over-communicated to, they are time-short and most of the communication they receive is dross. There is an awful lot of broad communication that hopes to create a touch point but simply ends up in the bin.”
Into the mindset
To avoid meeting the same fate for one client, Lines says he meticulously researched the target organisation and, “tried to get into the mindset of the key decision makers.”
One direct mail piece was created, this was then tailored to each of the key business decision makers: the finance director, the IT director, managing director etc.
Lines adds, “by reaching each of the senior decision makers and having a proposition that was specifically targeted to them, we could instigate a conversation. We had to make sure that each of them could understand the proposition in detail while also getting a brief overview from their partners.”
This strategy adheres to one of the golden rules of targeting senior people: don’t sell to them, empower them. “These people want to stay in control of the buying process,” says Dyer of Clockwork IMC.
Peers talk to peers and, in Lines’ opinion, this campaign worked because the finance director had been convinced of the ROI benefits, while the IT director was persuaded as to the improved downtime. They could talk to one another and seek each other’s valued judgements rather than feel they were being sold to.
Personalising and targeting campaigns may seem an obvious trick, but it is one that many business services marketers are only just discovering.
“The broad concept of targeting is only just gaining wider understanding and acceptance,” says Alan Timothy, chief executive of marketing analytics agency Rocket Science. “They’re not all getting it right but at least they are finally trying and are doing so in greater numbers than in recent years.”
The human touch
Lawrence Jones, managing director of ISP (Internet service provider) UKFast, claims that offering a targeted, personalised service was his priority from the off. He says he entered the ISP and web-hosting market purely because he saw it was ripe for the picking. “No one else thinks about people, to them it’s all about the speed of the server, robustness, dry figures. These are important, but should only concern us in the back office. Our client just needs to know that their website won’t fall down on a Sunday afternoon and lose them business.”
This is perhaps the biggest mistake made by business services marketers. “I’ve spent my life battling with product specifications,” says Belinda Lawson, director at Lawson Dodd. “I run a business, I’m not interested in gigabytes I want to know how that product will make my business run better.”
To counter such problems, Jones says it is imperative that he sells the company culture and personality of UKFast. He admits there is nothing remarkable in what UKFast does, only that no one else in their market does the same thing.
“When we target a company, we pick up the phone and we speak to them. We have a chat and invite them out to an event. We might take them to the rugby, cricket or football. We find out about them as people and they get to know us.”
Jones says that he’s not looking to snag people overnight, “the big decisions take time. We sow a seed and say that if they want to expand their business, or if they’re having trouble with their current ISP, maybe we should talk. Eventually they always do.”
Corporate hospitality, schmoozing, call it what you will, has been around for years, so it may seem odd that this tactic could be a key differentiator. But if the majority of business services companies are still focusing on the widgets rather than what the widgets can do for their clients, why not use personality as your USP?
“This strategy plays to our advantage massively,” says Jones. “It is different to everyone else in the market – most people don’t do anything like it.”
Creative voids
If the marketing rudiments of targeting and personalisation can create clear blue water in the high-value, business critical end of the sector, what is the state of play among commoditised business services?
“Different degrees of shite,” is the verdict of Alan Timothy of Rocket Science. “The key differentiator for many of these businesses, their main USP, is that they’re not quite as bad at marketing as their competitors.”
Timothy argues that there is very little marketing intelligence within this sector. Marketers are not talking to other marketers, and are not being encouraged by the company culture that exists.
“These companies are in a low margin game. They will simply do what they can to get business through the door. If that happens, for all they care, that’s good marketing.”
Never mind that they could be bringing even more business through the door, at lower cost and for greater ROI. The list of examples of poor marketing proffered by the contributors to this article is long, exhausting and faintly depressing.
But the reasons are so deep-rooted it is hard to see the situation changing. “It’s a conservative sector and changing old habits is very difficult,” says Timothy. “The problems begin with recruitment and grow from there. If you’re keen on marketing the chances are that you want to go into FMCG, failing that you might end up in the City where the big money is. By the time all the talented people have been picked up, a stationer or a cleaner has to make do with what is left.”
Knowledge is power
An additional problem – and one that perhaps explains why so much marketing is still about the product rather than business benefits – is that product knowledge is so highly prized in the sector.
“Often the MD has never worked outside of that sector. They view product knowledge as a virtue and therefore the marketer, who is often working alone and largely unsupported, gets tied up in product spec.”
If the standard of marketing among business services is as poor as appears, what can be done to remedy the situation? In turn people sighed, shrugged, blinked and scratched their heads before drawing the conclusion that so much of it boils down to common sense.
“People don’t focus on the company,” says Lawson of Lawson Dodd. “They try to sell rather than communicate. The other day a stationer tried selling me pencils rather than starting a dialogue and asking what I needed. As it happens I wanted green, recycled pencils that are priced at a premium but reflect my company’s ethos and culture. It’s easy to bemoan the sector’s performance and claim it won’t change, but there are huge opportunities for those who can think a bit more keenly about their marketing. Someone is going to make a killing.”
Perhaps Lawson is right. She likens the situation to the soft drinks market, citing Innocent as an example of a brand that entered a crowded commoditised market but with clever marketing could charge a huge premium. Maybe there is a business services company waiting in the wings to dazzle us with marketing ingenuity.
Until then, we will all continue to field those cold calls and empty the bins with depressing frequency.
