Promoting B2B products and services requires more than a series of actions, it requires a well-defined strategy based on the information requirements and buying process of your audience.

This blog post is the first in a series of three exploring how to promote B2B products and services.

The optimum B2B promotional mix can be defined only after you consider:
•    what you are selling,
•    to whom you are selling it,
•    the length of the sales cycle, and
•    the number contributors to the decision making process.

It seems that the smaller your potential group of buyers and the more complex your offering; the more precise your promotional efforts need to be. It is the old rifle vs. shotgun approach at its finest.

Rick Short (Indium Corporation’s, Director of Marketing) describes his thoughts on marketing technical products to engineers in his recent blog post “Questioning ‘Advertising’ Answer: Promotions“. Rick concludes that to promote Indium’s solder products it is “…more valuable to make clear, supported claims, with access to both our data, our technologists, and samples of my products.” than to advertise.

Rick describes the ingredients of his secret promotional sauce as:
•    blogs,
•    whitepapers,
•    technology sessions,
•    training,
•    consultations, and
•    sample implementation program.

This post made me think about the B2B buying process and I was reminded of Enquiro Search Solutions’ whitepaper “Marketing to a B2B Technical Buyer – Business to Business Survey 2007.”

It should be noted that the phrase technical buyer, in the context of Enquiro’s report is a general term used to describe a buyer who’s role it is to screen out a potential product or service from consideration. This opposed to an engineer, scientist or other technologist as intended in Rick’s blog post.

Within Enquiro’s report, the buying process is broken down into four stages: awareness, research, negotiation and purchase. Throughout all phases, websites, word-of-mouth (both offline and online – online via support forums and new groups) and search engines were the most influential factors. See Figure 1.

Figure 1: Top online and offline B2B buying influencers (source: www.enquiroresearch.com).

The question was asked “Where did you end up making your purchase”. Interestingly, whether the purchase was made online or offline, 83% of buyers making a purchase did so after finding the vendor online. In contrast only 14% reported that they found the successful vendor offline.  See Figure 2.

Figure 2: In the B2B arena, being found online is critical regardless of how products (or services) are purchased (source: www.enquiroresearch.com).

So how do you get a potential buyers attention in the first place? Figure 3 shows that 51% of buyers started with a search engine (77% of respondents used Google).

Figure 3: Search engines are the dominant online way prospects first became aware of a vendor (source: www.enquiroresearch.com).

In the end, just getting a buyers attention is not good enough. The selection of online information source shifts throughout the buying cycle. As the buying process progresses, search engines decreased in importance (but remained the most important throughout), vendor websites were fairly consistent and B2B vertical websites increased in importance (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Online influencers change in importance as the buying process progresses (source: www.enquiroresearch.com).

So what does this all mean? How should you promote your B2B products?

Here are my thoughts:
•    Create a solid foundation based on an aggressive search engine marketing program.
•    Establish yourself as the expert in your field by providing prospects detailed information via multiple online and offline sources.
•    Communicate the way your prospects gather information.
•    Leverage online and offline opportunities to create word-of-mouth (buzz).
•    Adjust your promotional approach to address each phase of your prospects buying process.

Please check back for two related posts:
1)    Getting in the game – Use Search Engines to position your company directly in the path of prospects at the exact moment they have an information need.
2)    Delivering great online content.

As always, thanks for your time. Any thoughts?

Brian