It’s time to fight back.
I’m tired of the persistent idea that somehow B2B is the less glamorous bit of marketing, and that B2C is where it’s all happening.
And yes, I know the lines between B2B and B2C are blurring (blah, blah, blah…), but that’s not the point.
The point is that for a marketer who likes a challenge, B2B is actually a bigger test of your skills. After all, the formula for marketing insurance or baked beans is well established. You can learn it at college. Where do you learn how to sell virtualised application delivery controllers?
Yet you still have to place a smile in the B2B tech mind, and you need old-school creative techniques to do it. Why? Because the best marketing communications campaigns have always been driven by a deep understanding of the audience.
This is where the lines really blur, because the mind of a consumer is every bit as complex as the mind of a network manager or a CIO.
But, judging by the difficulty we have in finding really good people, your average creative or marketer from any branch of the profession struggles with the idea of getting into the head of a professional developer, networking engineer or senior IT decision-maker. It’s big and complicated and deeply sceptical in there.
We can all relate to a shopper, a sports fan or someone who likes baked beans. We can thus come up with fun ideas to engage their imaginations. It’s a lot harder to find common ground with a tech audience if we’ve never worked in a server room or led a major digital transformation project.
And yes, there’s the proper and proven point that people are people, and that even a chief finance officer likes a laugh from time to time. But that’s no reason to abandon the other core principle of effective marketing communications, which is to speak to the audience in a language they understand.
Just as you don’t sell Heinz by talking about the biological structure of a bean, you don’t sell a new SDN-ready networking switch by saying how cool it looks on the outside. In fact, one of our latest campaigns features an X-ray photograph of a switch, partly because it makes an interesting image, and partly because it brings out aspects of the product that will engage the imaginations of our prime target audience.
You or I may not be stopped in our tracks by the inner workings of the next generation of networking technology (actually, I might be…), but to a person whose success is judged on network uptime and performance, it makes darned interesting viewing.
This is why we ask the same question of everyone who joins us: are you passionate about technology? If they struggle to answer, we know they may not fit.
It’s also the reason so many clients give for choosing, and staying, with us. Our teams are technology literate, and they have short learning curves. It saves a lot of time in briefing, and it leads to ideas that are not only creative, but effective.
So if the B2B marketing community has any lingering sense of inferiority when compared to our glamorous B2C counterparts, let’s have no more of it. We’re working with a fraction of the budgets and resources they have, and we’re still having a lot of fun.
Now if you’ll excuse me, someone’s just sent me a link to an amazing new cloud-based video conferencing solution, and I can’t wait to take a look.
