• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, July 17, 2013

Running marketing for a B2B tech start-up is a unique role.  It’s equal parts direct response and brand management, but too many B2B marketers focus all their efforts on one or the other.

The first rule of B2B marketing should be that your customers are also general consumers.  They consume general media as well as trade media, so don’t be afraid to reach them across both channels.  They react in a similar fashion to both, but the messaging resonates differently at different times of the day and in different locations.  I spend a lot of my time reviewing competitive companies and their offerings, and when I go home and spend some time on the personal Web I sometimes get retargeted ads for trade companies on decidedly non-trade sites (music sites, book sites, pop culture sites, etc).  This kind of targeting is actually quite effective because the contextual misalignment is offset by targeting, with the result that these ads completely break through the clutter.

The second bit of advice I would offer is that messaging itself can be fun rather than watered-down tech-speak.  Our industry loves to speak in terms that only we understand.  There’s a strategy that speaks to qualifying your audience by leveling up the copy to ensure those who respond “get it,” but you don’t always need to raise the bar that much.  A well-thought-out creative concept can do a lot for simplifying and personalizing technology.   When you’re developing ads, either online or in print, run your copy through the consumer-filter and see if what you’re writing is too technical.  Try to remove the buzzwords and simply say what you mean rather than try to differentiate with $5 words.  Simplifying your story can do wonders toward ensuring your message makes it through the clutter, as well. 

My third piece of advice is, don’t be married to a single concept or campaign for too long.  The B2B audience is very busy, and sometimes a creative concept can wear out quickly, so you should be willing to redo it early and often.   I try to maintain a foundational message and layer that with regular conceptual refreshes that result in new ways to look at the challenge and pose a solution.  Our messaging is always consistent in terms of tone, look and feel, but the angle of the execution can be revised. If our targets keep seeing and hearing the same message over and over, they eventually tune it out.  Keeping it fresh means they will never (hopefully) tune it out.

I have one other piece of advice when it comes to B2B marketing, more in line with the direct-response side of things: Be sure to properly think through your lead management strategy, and leverage your messaging to qualify your prospects before you hand them to your sales team. You have to put in place the tools, technology and process that will allow you to feed prospects into the conversion path, score them based on actions and qualification hurdles, then funnel them to a salesperson with as much information as possible at the time when they are most likely to engage with you and become a customer.  This is not an easy process and it gets exponentially more difficult as your products become higher cost, but the ROI on this process is measurable, immediately affecting the effectiveness of your sales teams.

B2B marketers get a bad rap for being less “sexy” than B2C, but it’s not true.  B2B marketing can be just as effective and fun as B2C marketing, if you find the right balance between treating your audience like consumers first and businesspeople second.  Once you find that balance, the measurability of your efforts can help steer you in the direction of new ideas and executions that will drive even stronger results.