B2B Promotional Mix
Like business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, business-to-business (B2B) marketing, or business marketing, relies on product, price, placement, and promotion to competitively position the product offerings, promote the brand, and efficiently use company resources. Similar to consumer marketers, business marketers must create an integrated marketing communications strategy to ensure products and promotional methods complement and support each other.
B2B marketing spans all types of businesses and industries. Because B2B sales tend to be much larger than consumer purchases, business marketers use different channels to reach their target audiences. Industry white papers, trade shows, corporate websites, and webcasts are often used as promotional tactics to build brand awareness and generate leads. A significant portion of B2B brands also employ social media, including podcasts, social networking, and blogging sites, to drive web traffic to their online channels and draw prospective customers to their brand.
Business Marketing: A trade show is a common promotional element in business marketing.
Measuring B2B Marketing Success
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are often used to assess marketing performance in B2B organizations. B2B sales cycles can last more than several months and involve numerous stages before the sale is completed. Therefore, CRM systems help business marketers integrate metrics from different activities to accurately assess how marketing directly contributed to the transaction. For example, labels may be assigned to certain promotional elements (e.g., website, trade show) in the system to indicate where and how prospects converted to customers.