Marketing, in particular B2B marketing, is often paralysed because the questions asked are too complicated. A huge number of parameters must be fulfilled before you can start being successful.

Why make life more complicated than it needs to be?

Successful B2B marketing begins by asking yourself three questions:

1. Whom do I want to do what when they’ve seen my message?
2. Why would they change their status quo?
3. How can I prove the change is worth their while?

Unraveling the answers to these questions gets you far quickly.

If you need help to make it work, I’m waiting to hear from you.

When content marketing is gradually getting a foothold also in the B2B world, it always makes one happy to meet a company that cares to communicate with its customers. Like, for example, one that has a customer magazine. A customer magazine is an excellent vehicle for both creating thought leadership and sharing important information.

A company publishing an online customer magazine deserves a medal not least for having understood one of the requirements of today’s online marketing: the more content you have online being found by search engines, the more likely it is that those who are interested in search terms related to your business will find their way to your website.

But. Stop for a moment and give a thought to your reader experience.

A print magazine doesn’t work online

Regrettably many companies take the easy way out. The online customer magazine is a facsimile of the print magazine—in practice the PDF file sent to the printers. Easy to do and cost-effective, yes, but a lousy reading experience on a computer screen. And there are those who don’t know the difference between hi-res and low-res and simply upload their huge print PDF that takes ages to appear on the reader’s screen. When the generally accepted online patience limit is somewhere between 3 and 10 seconds, there are precious few people who will wait a minute or two to see your marketing material.

Today’s search engines do a pretty good job of indexing the content of PDF files. Nevertheless, a print PDF almost invariably has the same column layout as the print magazine. Imagine a reader who finds your customer magazine through a search term. When she reads the first column down to the bottom, she’ll have to scroll back up to see how the story continues. It doesn’t. This is the breaking point. If your magazine has, say, four columns, the reader experience will be dismal enough for the reader to probably leave your magazine before she’s completed reading the first article.

Many content publishers seem to forget that where a print magazine has a portrait format, the computer screen is landscape. If you publish a facsimile of your print page online, your reader will see about half of it. You automatically introduce scrolling and make your reader stumble.

Clever new technology may be an obstacle to success

Some marketers have discovered applications that make online magazines that can be leafed through just like “real” magazines. I suppose you’ve seen stuff like this. Assuming someone who finds your content through a search engine is really interested in what you have to say, why make the user interface more difficult than necessary? (All right, the content in that example was written by me, and the reading experience isn’t among the worst because of the large font, but what if you’d be looking at a tabloid-size multi-column customer mag on a smartphone screen…)

The more easily the content is readable, the better. A leaf-through magazine looks nice and probably has a certain amount of novelty appeal for many people, but if the print is too small to be read without enlarging, you’ve managed to create an obstacle between your reader and your content. Why would you want your message to be difficult to reach?

Surprise, the net works with HTML

A bit of effort to make your reader’s life easier is always a good idea. You already have the content. Make it an HTML page that’s easier to read online. The native file format for the web is HTML.

True, any reasonably modern browser can probably display other file formats than HTML at least passably. But if you’re not publishing your print magazine in mirror text, why would you force your online reader and her technology make an extra effort?

What about communication?

In the first paragraph of this post I talked about communicating with customers. Wikipedia tells us this:

Communication (from Latin “communis“, meaning to share) is the activity of conveying information through the exchange of thoughts, messages, or information, as by speech, visuals, signals, writing, or behaviour.

Where is your interactivity? Does your online customer magazine have a commenting system? If it’s in PDF format, no. You already guessed it, I’m suggesting a two-way blog instead of a one-way magazine.

The more hooks you provide to the reader interested in you, your company and your product to connect with you directly and get direct feedback, the more committed potential you will get.

We’re talking about content marketing, right? Something that should produce something on the bottom line?

Enabling comments and feedback you will be opening a two-way channel. A potential customer who reads your message and may even bother to comment on it will be a lot closer to being a buying customer than someone down whose throat you’re pushing a one-way message.

Now that we’re almost one quarter into the new year, it might be time to take a look at how your B2B marketing budget 2013 will develop. No great surprises here—the situation is not much different from 2012.

The backdrop, at least in Europe, is that 2013 will clearly not be the best of years for the economy. The European Central Bank has lowered its forecast for the EU area’s GDP, now expecting a decline between 0.1 and 0.9% instead of the up to 0.3-per cent increase it said as recently as in December 2012.

What this means for marketers is that the plight they’ve been grappling with for the entire last year will continue.

A blog post written by Kaon Interactive lists the top three B2B marketing problems:

1. Marketing budgets continue to decline
2. Complex solutions are difficult to explain
3. Inconsistency in the message

Although Kaon operates in the United States while I’m in northern Europe, and although the blog post is now several months old, their conclusions fit well into what I’m seeing in the European market today. Add to this the rather dismal economic outlook for the next nine months, and you’ll see why marketing in every B2B should get its act together quickly.

Marketing budgets continue to decline

Reading about the future of marketing in Finland, Sweden and Estonia—to start from the small economies in the farthest corner of Europe—it is clear that most companies are planning to either freeze their 2013 marketing communication investment at 2012 levels, or decrease it.

For the UK, Marketing Week says,

But while company targets may be increasing, marketers will not have more resources to help turn aims into reality. A worrying 60 per cent of those marketers expecting increased company targets in the year ahead report that their marketing budgets will either remain static or be cut.

In Germany, Mindshare’s CEO says,

Das Konjunktur-Barometer des deutschen Werbemarktes steht für 2013 bestenfalls auf Stagnation. (The economic barometer of the German advertising market for 2013 is stagnating at best.)

Even on the basis of this small sample, it looks like marketers are continuously compelled to do more with less regardless of the size of their market.

Complex solutions are difficult to explain

Particularly in B2B contexts, a company’s offering in most cases is not as straightforward as it might be in a B2C market. That’s why the benefits of doing business with you will often get buried under a convoluted effort to explain what it is you’re selling.

Another common problem is that the more complex a company’s offering is, the more marketing messages seem to focus on what “we” do, instead of explaining what “you” could benefit. This focus on “we” is one of the most detrimental factors affecting the efficiency of B2B marketing, as I’ve said a number of times before, even questioning whether marketers are a breed alienated from real life. No wonder CEOs are disappointed with marketing’s contribution to creating revenue.

What is most alarming is that the non-existing contribution of marketing efforts to the bottom line will inevitably strengthen the C-suite’s belief that marketing is nothing but an expense. In bad times, expenses are always put under a magnifying glass, and it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to see that more marketing budget cuts are just round the corner. That’s a huge disservice to any company’s success, despite many authoritative opinions that you absolutely should not decrease your marketing spend in a slow economy.

Inconsistency in the message

If, as the Kaon post tells us, a company finds that sales is using 64 different messages explaining the company’s offering, it’s obvious marketing isn’t doing its job.

All marketing must use the company’s strategic goals as its ultimate guideline. Marketing must always be systematic, and there is no other way to achieve that than knowing your target audiences, their needs and their purchasing paths on the one hand, and the real benefits your offering will bring on the other.

Only then will it be possible to create customised marketing messages that, despite the different needs of the different target audiences, systematically display the core value your company offers.

Stay alive—destroy silos, align goals

Now is high time for companies to take a hard look at their different functions. Everything a company does should point to its defined business destination. If no goals are defined, no wonder important spending decisions are made based on a gut feeling or last year’s numbers, totally forgetting the “where do we want to be a year from now”. In the worst case, even contradicting other departments’ work or creating unnecessary friction between them.

Marketing is too important to be left in the hands of marketers. Every single marketing action must be derived from the company strategy, and marketing messages must support the strategic goals. As different as the messages may look on the surface.

That’s why top management must make it clear across the organisation where we are heading, and the different functions must align their operations with that goal. Used correctly, marketing is a muscle car, but even a muscle car won’t do any good if it’s just left idling.

While Western economies are slowly recovering from the recession, the recovery will most probably be slower than we thought and hoped. Some industries will do better than others, of course, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see many companies facing big difficulties in meeting their targets.

As always, a slow economy means tight budgets and continuing frugality for industrial and B2B marketers. If you’ve been thinking of cutting your marketing budget and staff, however, I’d like to point you to some online articles that you might want to read before taking any hasty measures. Continue reading →

You’ve probably most often thought about trust in business in the opposite way: is my supplier someone I can trust? But have you ever come to think about how important it is for you as a buyer to be trustworthy in the eyes of your supplier? Continue reading →