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Drivers (Marketers),
Restart Your B2B Marketing Engines
From ADV Magazine and ADVMag.com
By Allen Silveri
B2B marketing communicators can take a tip from the sport of auto racing. It’s fast. It’s competitive. And, there’s no holding back. Every fiber of your body has to be focused on one thing. Winning! In the world of the checkered flag, OK performance simply isn’t.
That, in a nutshell, is the essence of B2B Performance Marketing. It’s a strategic new approach that turns traditional ad agency thinking on its head to focus on winning.
Continuing the auto racing analogy, picture yourself as the driver. The car is your marketing communications program, the pit crew is your agency, the track is your market, and the other cars are your competitors who wouldn’t mind wheeling you into the wall. Remember this, the fastest car (or slickest advertising) doesn’t win. The fastest marketer to the finish line wins. There’s a world of difference between the two.
Shifting B2B Marcom Into High Gear
Are you getting a feel for B2B Performance Marketing? Are you working to be the preferred brand (winner) in your markets? Do you have a fuel-efficient machine for generating sales opportunities. Do you have a program to maintain the loyalty of your customers? Are you positioned to dominate your niche market? These are some of the questions that the B2B Performance Marketing approach asks you to reconsider. Are you ready to restart your engine? Do you have a B2B agency "pit crew" that can take you the distance?
As you know, marketing to businesses is very different from marketing to consumers. Business buyers don’t come to you, they don’t purchase on impulse, and they don’t act alone. As B2B professionals, making a considered purchase is part of their job. To win sales, you have to weave through the field of buyer influences who select and approve your products/company as the preferred choice.
What consumer cares who makes Tide or Jiffy peanut butter when walking down the supermarket aisle? However, as a business, your market’s perception of your company as a supplier of pressure transducers or specialty chemicals or microchips or laboratory test equipment is a big part of why you get or do not get the order – or even the opportunity to bid. If you are not positioned to win, your reps don’t have a chance. The original McGraw Hill ad, picturing a man in a chair, put it this way 50 years ago, "I don’t know you. I don’t know your products. I don’t know your company. I don’t know what your company stands for. Now...what were you trying to sell me?"
The B2B Performance Marketing approach balances your need to push and pull product out your door and through your distribution chain. It communicates to your markets on multiple levels to support your need to grow both sales and profits. B2B Performance Marketing works to build preference for your brand, so your company gets more selling opportunities and closes more sales without price-cutting your profits away.
Demanding Full-Throttle Support
How much importance do you place on your B2B marketing communications program? Is your ad agency a vital part of your team – or an appendage you live with or without? Are your expectations of ad agency performance high enough? Do you respect your agency team as true B2B marcom experts? Would you want them as your pit crew if you were really driving 200 miles per hour in the Marcom 500?
Let’s get serious. In B2B marcom, performance isn’t the only thing. It’s everything! If you think of your ad agency as the people who put together an ad or brochure when you need it, your marcom is not running on all cylinders. If public relations isn’t driving your branding and lead-generating activities, you need to change your agency tires. If your prospects and customers are gathering dust in your lead database, you need a new agency turbocharger.
Taking Your Victory Lap
B2B Performance Marketing challenges you to rethink what you’re trying to accomplish with your marketing communications. It challenges you to rethink what kind of performance you demand from yourself and your ad agency.
Ask yourself, "Does your agency pit crew proactively contribute great ideas to keep your program screaming lap after lap? Does your agency continually retune your marcom program’s performance to give you a winning edge? Or, is your marcom program stuck in the pit – about the same as last year’s and the year before that?" Think about it. You can’t be the winner with an agency pit crew that is content to just keep you driving around in circles.
© 1999 Allen Silveri. All rights reserved Schubert Communications
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