According to Sandhusen and Richard (2008), Business-to-business (B2B)
describes commerce transactions between businesses, such as between amanufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer in marketing perspective.B2B branding is a term used in marketing. The overall volume of B2B transactions is much higher than the volume of B2C transactions. The primary reason for this is that in a typical supply chain there will be many B2B transactions involving sub components or raw materials, and only one B2C transaction, specifically sale of the finished product to the end customer. The final transaction, a finished vehicle sold to the consumer, is a single (B2C) transaction. B2B is also used in the context of communication and collaboration. Many businesses are now using social media to connect with their consumers (B2C), however, they are now using similar tools within the business so employees can connect with one another. When communication is taking place amongst employees, this can be referred to as "B2B" communication. (Sandhusen Richard, 2008). According to Joel York, the todays trend business buyers are awash in a deluge of online information. B2B buyer behavior has evolved in adaptation to the Internet. A new species of B2B buyer has arisen that is more connected, more impatient, more elusive, more impulsive, and more informed than its pre-millennium ancestors. The Internet has changed the B2B buying process so radically that its difficult to recollect exactly how the pre-Internet B2B buyer used to go about the business of making a purchase: paper, phone and people mostly. The process went something like this: ask the analysts about the next big thing, collect requirements into and RFP, get a list of vendors from a roundup in an industry magazine, go to a trade show and collect collateral, solicit and evaluate RFP responses by mail or fax, call in a short list of vendors to do a dog and pony show, follow up with a technical drill down meeting, maybe do a bake-off or a pilot, select a vendor, call a reference account, negotiate final pricing and contract terms, and wrap it all up by planning out phase 2 of the project: a complex and expensive implementation. It was a slow, arduous and expensive process for which consultants charged exorbitant fees that B2B buyers were happy to pay, because it wasnt easy. With such a treasure trove of information available online, the Internet is the 21st century B2B buyers first stop for researching products and services. It wont be the only source of information for the savvy prospect, but the Internet now is a significant and recurring influence throughout the B2B buying process. The new species of B2B buyer is connected to the Internet physically, functionally, socially and frequently. Moreover, the B2B buying process neither starts nor stops at your website. It is more likely to start at a major search engine, industry portal or social network. If you want your product or service to be considered, its critical that your content appear wherever the new B2B buyer goes online at every point in the decision making process. It isnt enough to just write a blog or make a white paper available for download on your website, because your prospects may never find your website if you dont show up in search and social media. In the pre-millennium B2B buying process, the salesperson was the gatekeeper of information. That meant that the pre-millennium B2B buyer had to engage with the salesperson early on and stay engaged throughout every stage of the B2B buying process. A prospect might go dark or a sale might be lost, but a purchase could not move forward without engaging with the salesperson. Not so today. Unfortunately for the B2B salesperson, the new B2B buying process tips the information imbalance in the prospects favor. The new breed of B2B buyer can find your product or service, learn about it, evaluate it, see what others think about it, and in many cases try it and buy it, all without engaging with a salesperson. The new breed of B2B buyer is more agile than its pre-millennium ancestor. Cheap and easy access to online information about products and services enables flexibility in the new B2B buying process the same way the elimination of setup costs enable flexibility in manufacturing. When the up-front cost of purchase-related information was high, the pre-millennium B2B buyer was forced to orchestrate a rigid, deterministic B2B buying process that ensured the investment required to execute the process itself was not wasted and produced a positive result, i.e., a considered purchase with high ROI. Purchase decisions were made up frontonly the vendor was unknown, budgets were established before the buying process began, requirements were collected and communicated, vendors were evaluated in tandem, and a clean vendor selection was made. The new breed of B2B buyer does not face this constraint. Today, window shopping is cheap. In the case of most SaaS and cloud applications, the entire B2B buying process is cheap: trial is free and purchase amounts to a monthly subscription that can be canceled at any time. Instead of orchestrating a structured B2B buying process with a certain outcome, the new B2B buyer can start, stop, start again, turn around, go slow, go fast, whatever. The new B2B buying process carries no internal momentum. Purchases are motivated by near term organizational priorities and the relative urgency to solve a pressing business problem, which can turn on a dime. Online marketers lament the waning effectiveness of email. Some even claim that email marketing is dead and spam killed it. Email may be waning for marketing communications, but it is central to the internal communications of the new impulsive B2B buyer and acts as a powerful catalyst in the new B2B buying process. The new impulsive B2B buyer can research your product online, coordinate an email conversation among all decision makers, get a basic consensus without a single meeting, and then stop dead because something else came up. Then, six months later the VP of Such-and-Such decides: This needs to get done yesterday! And shoots off an email that reignites the urgency around the purchase. Next thing you know, a previously dead or unknown deal is suddenly very hot, and a purchase is made almost on first contact. Or, at least first contact to the unprepared who are not measuring, modeling and moving the new B2B buying process throughout its lifecycle. (Joel York, 2013). According to finding from Ann Handley and Joe Pulizzi last years survey showed, nine out of 10 B2B marketers are using content marketing to grow their businesses, and on average, marketers use eight content marketing tactics to achieve their marketing goals. The most popular tactics are article posting (79%), social media (excluding blogs) (74%), blogs (65%), eNewsletters (63%), case studies (58%), and in-person events (56%). While marketers are confident about the value of content marketing, they are challenged to demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of individual tactics and distribution channels. That said, the confidence gap we discovered last year is shrinking when it comes to the rates of adoption of specific content marketing tactics and the perceived effectiveness of those tactics. Content marketing uptake is high across industries, with no single industry reporting below 70% adoption. The professional services industry reports the highest level of adoption, just nudging out computing/software, which ranked number one last year. Companies still struggle to integrate digital tactics deep into broader marketing campaigns, but there are a few key points of leverage (such as pushing to mandate an objective Channel Consideration Review early in the process) that can help weed out reflexive channel bias, opening the door for digital influence. Armed with past performance data and evidence from external best practices, a growing number of marketers are pushing to develop standardized campaign architectures, which offer a strong platform for promoting the best applications and integration points for digital tactics. Increased digital marketing efforts demand continuous and collective management, something few companies are designed to support. The value destroyed by this misfit approachalthough hard to quantifyis potentially very large. Several companies are taking steps to restructure as a result. Review your campaign planning process and look for opportunities to apply the practices outlined on in particular, seek ways to hardwire a consideration of digital tactics earlier in the planning process. Evaluate several campaigns with similar objectives and identify a reasonable opportunity to develop a standard architecture for your teams to align to. As noted be sure to look not only inside your own organizations past campaigns and performance data, but seek out industry and outside of industry campaigns as a reference for new ideas and best practices. Take a few hours to exhaustively sketch out the various activities shaping your digital footprint and compare that back to the organizational structure and processes accountable for managing those activities. Then identify all of the specific areas where you could be potentially leaking or losing potential value by not executing in a more coordinated way. Chances are there are several low-hanging fruits for improving integration (e.g., a more frequent or intense coordinating mechanism between SEO and social media) as well as some larger battles (e.g., relocating paid search from the media team to an integration search performance team). Consider tackling a small one and pushing a large one this year. As the trend emerging, the need of the advertising and branding increases parallel. The advertising become a must in the internet perspective. This because it give the advantages to them in branding their product and services. Potential customers are readily turning to their personal networks and publicly available informationincreasingly via digital and social media channelsto self-diagnose their problems and form opinions about solutions. To understand the scope of this issue in the B2B context, CEBs Marketing Leadership Council (MLC) surveyed more than 1,500 customer contacts (decision makers and influencers in a recent major business purchase) for 22 large B2B organizations (spanning all major NAICS categories and 10 industries). In a striking finding, the survey revealed that the average customer had completed more than one-half of the purchase decision- making process prior to engaging a supplier sales rep directly (Figure 1). At the upper limit, that number ran as high as 70% (Figure 2). The fundamental implication is clear: companies that fail to show up strong in this context are underserving potential customers and at risk of losing mindshare and, ultimately, sales opportunities.
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