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What’s in store for B2B marketing?

B2B marketers are working to make their marketing programmes more sophisticated and better integrated. Forrester recently hosted a B2B marketing event where attendees and industry experts discussed emerging trends. Laura Ramos, Vice-president of Forrester Research Inc, sums up what she heard

While attendees at the recent one-day workshop on B2B (business-to-business) marketing effectiveness hosted by Forrester raised high-hype topics such as blogs and social marketing, we found that most B2B marketers improve marketing’s value when they focus on increasing their alignment with sales, integrating their marketing programmes, and improving the quality of their results.

B2B marketers struggle most to reach decision-makers and measure results. To address these challenges, they are shifting budget dollars to direct and interactive tactics. But what other changes are in store for B2B marketers? Forrester posed this question to a panel of B2B marketing leaders at the event. Here’s what we heard.

• Search specialisation and audience targeting will intensify. Several event attendees complained that they are losing keyword bids to larger competitors who use their big search budgets to secure paid placement priority. The answer? B2B marketers should increase attention on vertical- or audience-specific search sites like GlobalSpec for engineers, ThomasNet for industrial buyers, and TechTarget for IT professionals that cater to the exacting, information-seeking needs of the business buyer.
• Direct mail will make a comeback in micro-targeted, ‘luxury’ campaigns. B2B marketers will rediscover direct mail—but with a new twist and a highly targeted approach. Rather than cluttering mailrooms with envelopes that rarely make it past the recycling bin, marketers will use expensive give-aways (such as MP3 players pre-loaded with podcasts) that are guaranteed to hit the addressee’s desk. Even when give-aways cost up to $400 a pop, one of our panellists reported solid ROI (return on investment) numbers by targeting just a few dozen key execs.
• Messaging will move beyond one-size-fits-all. More than five years ago, we promoted the idea of using e-mail to establish interactive dialogues aligned with the customer lifecycle stages. But most marketers were still experimenting with the channel, and weren’t ready to coordinate these more complex, rule-driven dialogues. Because business buying cycles are often long and complex, B2B marketers have much to gain by adopting communication strategies that nurture prospects throughout their buying process. A software company launched a staged series of communications aimed at moving prospects from consideration to purchase. By engaging and educating site visitors and by responding to prospect reactions with customised messages, the company increased orders from small and medium-size business (SMB) accounts by 10 percent in the first quarter after programme launch.
• Blogs will become communities of interest. Media hype and curiosity about the applicability of blogs to business marketing is running high. Our main concern? Blogs are hard to keep current, and suffer when readers see them as crafted messages rather than an authentic, thought-provoking conversation. Buyers would rather share in two-way dialogues than listen to pontification, and will seek out communities of common interest as blogging continues to take hold. B2B companies like high-tech software providers and electronics distributors, which sponsor communities using collaborative portals, also stand to gain new customer insight—and perhaps greater loyalty—when these communities start to thrive.
• Applications will evolve that facilitate integration of B2B marketing tactics and process. Around 2000, nascent online marketing novices glorified the Web as the way to manage customer relationships. Unfortunately, many early efforts fell short of expectations. As experience with tactics such as e-mail, Web analytics, search marketing, and online advertising increases, B2B marketers will renew efforts to integrate the technologies that support these tactics. Vendors like Eloqua and Vtrenz, which focus exclusively on B2B marketing and other high-consideration buying processes, are building their capabilities to support these initiatives.

The author may be contacted at lramos@forrester.com
For more information contact Sudin Apte, Forrester India, Country Manager, at sapte@forrester.com or phone 020 2567 4390/91