What B2B Marketers Can Learn from B2C

B2B Magazine just ran a short piece I wrote on how B2B marketers can borrow digital tactics from the business to consumer side of digital.

One of the things we really love about working in the B2B space is that it has its own unique challenges for reaching the right audience.  Whereas a broad-appeal B2C product might want to reach hundreds of millions, a B2B product might be trying to reach a corporate audience that numbers in the tens of thousands.  Finding ways to creatively reach the right people is a must for these B2B campaigns, and media plans have to consider ways of reaching a niche audience online other than simply picking the websites of the magazines that appear on the print schedule.  It’s a terrific challenge that we enjoy here.

Aside from advanced targeting, one of the ways we’re adding value for our B2B clients is in the realm of measurement.  The publishers we work with on the B2B side of the business tend to small – not exactly fitting the profile of a comScore 500 site.  So many of them haven’t heard of measurement technologies we might use on the consumer side.  What’s particularly cool about this is that we’ve had the opportunity to work with some of these small publishers to execute their first brand studies.  One surprise we found was that completion rates for surveys were much higher than they typically are in consumer advertising.  And this makes sense – when you’re reaching the right people with a B2B campaign, you won’t have any shortage of people willing to share their opinions about advertising to their particular business sector.

Other things that can be borrowed from the consumer sector?  Rich media technologies, advanced ad metrics and approaches to search marketing.  In the coming months, we’ll be talking a lot more about this stuff.  Stay tuned.