Business Marketing is the practice of individuals or organizations facilitating the sale of their products or services to other companies or organizations, according to Wikipedia. Also known B2B marketing, for short.
Business Marketing Fundamentals
When it comes to business marketing the process should always start with a good brainstorming session to get your branding right. While most people brainstorm many different ideas, tag lines and cute quotes, the real problem with ineffective brainstorming is that people rely on the wrong information to start with. You must begin by fully understanding the fundamentals of your business, your product or service and your business clients.
Who are the customers for your B2B Sale? Answering this along with what language they speak, their lingo or jargon should be asked, answered and understood before undertaking your brainstorming session.
The same for getting clear on what the product or service offers your customers. Another fundamental in business marketing branding is finding your powerful story. To stand out from the crowd , your marketing must consistently put forward an emotionally rich story.
Do this and you can overcome all odds including economic hard times. The story might not be in the product but the business owner. Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop is a classic example. Her passion to save the rainforest and demonstrate that being environmentally conscious could also be profitable is a compelling story that brings emotion to the emerging marketing of the time. Here emotional story was branded with her product. They have become inseparable.
The next step would be to ask how can you portray this story and stand out? Remember that it is better to stand out than to be ignored. And finally the critical element to business marketing is to discover how you can communicate your story in your clients language. It is very easy in brainstorming to get excited about your own creativity, but if it does not speak to your audience there will be no sales. A classic example of this was the Breast Cancer Foundations recent billboard ads that said Breast Cancer is No Big Deal.
In the mind of the creative team for the foundation the understanding was that now they had better screening and earlier detection the incidences of overcoming breast cancer were on the rise. So donate more to us to keep this good work up. However, to the female audience who may be concerned about breast cancer, it is a big deal for them and the slogan did not communicate to them, neither did it communicate their own message.
To be successful in business marketing you must master the 4 main fundamentals of Who are the customers for your B2B Sale. What is your product or service, what is your powerful story and how can you portray this story, stand out and how can you communicate it in the language of your clients?