hello and welcome back to the digital marketing podcast my name is Kieran Rogers I'm Louise Crossley and I'm Daniel rolls and today we are discussing B2B versus B to C [Music] okay before we get going we have an announcement the digital marketing toolkit awards are open so if you don't know the history of this essentially we've had the digital marketing toolkit for a long time if you want to find it does Google digital marketing toolkit it will be number one in Google but we decided that we're gonna get you all to nominate tools that you
love and you think are great and you can nominate your own tool so if you're a tool vendor you can nominate it as well it's broken down into categories you go Target internet.com forward slash toolkit you will find the way of going through and nominating and you can nominate your tools up until the 17th of July so you go through normally after that we'll have a voting period where we'll get all of you listeners to go through uh and to vote and then we will have the awards uh to go through and nominate what are
the decide what the best tools are based on everyone's votes as we go through so if you have a tool that you love if you own a tool and you want it nominated targetinternet.com forward slash toolkit you go in there you submit it that will close on the 17th of July and you can select the appropriate category and so on so that's that's a bit of an announcement and I'm very excited because the awards are these actual physical Awards in the shape of a Target internet logo with their name on them and they're beautiful like
a proper thing it's a proper proper thing that you can put in your office and put up on the wall golden envelopes yeah can I dance sparkly dress I think we should dress up for the award ceremony I think it's making quite especially if the visual or the espec if you're listening to the podcast I'll just describe kieran's outfit that'll be delightful for you but um yeah let's move on before we get into kieran's outfits too much because I can see this going in all sorts of wrong directions uh we are talking B to B
versus b2c and the reason for this I had a number of emails with people either saying um I love the podcast and I I know you were all these massive Brands but we're a small business or I I really love the podcast but I know you work with all these massive Brands but we're B2B or I love the podcast and you work with all these big Brands but we're b2c and I'm like oh okay um it's a lot of love but uh yeah yeah yeah a lot a lot of yeah okay but yeah sorry yeah
that just sounds wrong that's not right it's okay that doesn't matter you know where I was going I know you were going with it um the the key thing is that the core principles do apply but I get this in training all the time because you'll get people saying yeah but that doesn't apply to us because we're government or it doesn't apply to us because we're director consumer or it doesn't apply to us actually I would argue most of it does not all of it don't get me wrong so we want to go through what
the key differences are today and just talk about it but the point I always come back to whatever you are is you are actually marketing to people if you're even if you're business to business you're talking to people inside that organization it might be multiple people there might be lots of different decision makers it might be that your tone of voice is different it might be that the buying Cycles are much longer but you're still marketing to people and you need to think about it from their perspective and the risk here is it will be
to be all we're going to talk about is our products and services it's like still at the top of the funnel I don't care about your product and your service I have day-to-day problems in my job and my career that I need you to kind of help me with from that point of view as well so is it different yeah it is different the user journey is different but the user gen is different for every product every service every scenario and it's changing all the time anyway so I would say there's more of a similarity
and I think it's and this is not from the people that emailed in because they had some really great questions but you quite often get it when you're on a course where people will just go this isn't for me switch off right and I've been guilty of it so Instagram comes along you go that's not for us with B2B and then suddenly it is for us and that Tick Tock that's not for us with B2B oh actually it is now and so on and it and it's the case or you say we're BTC LinkedIn doesn't
matter well it doesn't in terms of getting to your direct customers but actually your relationships and all those kind of things is still important so I think you need to try and be open-minded about this in your mind yeah and just think what could I learn from this that I might be able to apply in a slightly different way for my organization as well it's almost a little mental tick you need to develop that the moment you hear you say head saying oh that's not for me because that is the moment that you should embrace
it and play the little game of three wise if I had to use this like if my life depended on my children's life depends on that how would I use it and just by Playing devil's advocate and forcing yourself to take a look at it I've found very often actually that opens my eyes because if my eyes are closed I'm not going to see it and actually I could now be blind to the best opportunity that's just come my way and I didn't take it because I wasn't an early enough mover an adopter and I
didn't explore what the possibilities let's talk about that so the three wires I talk about is you say this isn't for me you go why and I go well because it's not used by audience but why are they not using it well because they haven't really got there yet oh so maybe they're going to get there so you asked the Y three times the other thing is that first lead Advantage right which is we know that if you're an early YouTuber it was easier to to get that kind of critical mass if you go into
podcasts early like we did like 12 years is it 12 years 13 years now 13 years we started this podcast um I can't believe you've been listening to me for 13 years you must be exhausted I've been listening to you longer because I was listening to you about six years before you oh in the internet marketing podcast I was like my go-to expert I bought my first time now the student has become the master just so I could listen to you because I was burning stuff yeah I was burning Daniel onto a CD an audio
CD so I could listen to it in my car that was amazing I I seem to remember as well didn't you not have a CD player in your car and you had to one of those things that was a tape yes it's a cassette tape you wouldn't even remember this one it's a cassette with a wire coming out of it that went into a CD plus you'd stick it into your cassette play and then you'd fool it into thinking a cassette was playing but really a CD yeah I've still got it I still use it
wow that's amazing um anyway we digress um I forgot where we were going with this now were you confused B versus b2c yeah let's go back on track so the the key thing here is to kind of say if the first lead Advantage which is where I was going with this is that you know early podcast you had the opportunity to get into the charts get critical mass Tick Tock was the same kind of thing um and so on so actually if you do open your mind test things out you've got to have a lack
of risk aversion you've got to be willing to try stuff out so your brand you know quite often B2B brands are a little bit more stayed a little bit you know we must be professional completely agree with that but I'd also say one thing that we've learned is personal professional is really effective the starter keep quoting and I don't know where the source of this is now so this is maybe a made-up Daniel stat which does occasionally happen don't put it in any assignments yeah let's go through um it is you're 12 times more likely
to engage with an individual than you are a brand this was actually a chartered Institute of marketing quote originally I try and find the source um and the point was that if you know Target internet posts something great but if Louise posts something called Kieran post something I'm more likely to engage because there's that human connection so you are still dealing with people your internal brand ambassadors become really important from that point of view as well but you're still marketing to people and you've got that first lead Advantage potentially if you have an open mind
to doing these things sometimes as well so actually saying we are a corporate brand but we are willing to have two different slightly brand voices there's no in corporate brand voice but here's the voice of our advocates and that will have a slightly different tone to it so you need to have a little think about that and that needs to really be built into your social media guidelines quite often as well from that point of view now what this really comes down to is two things who's your target audience and what does the user Journey
look like so we've got our Persona user Journey thing which is the standard thing anywhere but also what's your desired end conversion Point very often in a B to C we've got two situations there's one which is the conversion point is the sale that happens on the website it's kind of e-commerce transactional I want you to go and buy something so it's a quite a transactional journey potentially but also you might have to I want to drive you to somewhere physical I want you in my dealership I want you in my shop I want you
to visit my country whatever it might be so you need to think about that desired outcome whereas more often than not in B to B you've got lead generation I want you to get in contact with me but the actual conversion is going to happen somewhere later on down in the journey they're not that dissimilar really because it's like I want you in my shop I want you to pick up the phone to whatever it might be you've just you've got to work out which percentage of your journey is happening online and is that Journey
going from the very very beginning at the top like sea think do care at Sea through to care and loyalty all their bits that will be offline in that Journey it is undoubtedly harder for B to be businesses to Market using digital channels do you think yeah I'll tell you what I think oh I see I'm not sure I agree oh this is gone good because you do both so yeah the reason why I say it's more difficult is because there's a lot more touch points and a lot more people involved therefore yes that's harder
to measure it's just harder to measure and harder to get those kind of outcomes especially when you very often like very big B2B organization let's say I make jet engines yeah okay very small niche of audience that are going to be interested in buying a chat engine normally we buy the Jets that the engines have been put into right so we've instantly got a tiny group of people um how are we going to measure how are we going to measure the impact of our digital marketing on on that like what channels are we going to
use and that so that is different it is untangle it right yeah yes it does and also you can't play the oh well we can't do that because you have to look at it from the other side of the card and go well if we had to do that how might we do it you could ask well who else in our space is doing something on that channel and what have they done and is it amazing or does it suck like these are the questions not only that who else like what other companies or Brands
out there are servicing a very similar audience to whoever it might be doing completely different things but similar audience and what have they done and do we think it rocks or does it really really cycle these are all the questions that you ask to sort of explore those Avenues but it I definitely know from speaking to lots of people on the training courses it is a lot harder when it comes to measurement because with digital you know there are there aren't you can't measure everything definitely and also yeah and generally you do need a lot
of aggregated data to get a pattern you know when a marketing to maybe like I don't know like 50 people what in the country that might want to buy but if that's the case I mean this is the other thing I would argue with this as well we said well it's harder because there's not enough of them and we won't get as much data it's like yeah but if there's 50 of them we could just do account based management you just literally speak to those people individually you go I need to speak to to John
Smith right let's let's be a lot more specific maybe this is a different form of marketing um and actually it's going to be really personal but I can almost on a one-to-one basis I mean we're how amazing is that yeah what what b2c brand wouldn't absolutely kill to do one-on-one marketing yeah so like flip it yeah that's what I mean it's an opportunity right wow we're really lucky and actually I don't hear anybody in the B2B marketing space going we're really lucky that would be to be there normally we're we're sort of oh the gloves
half empty it's really hard no actually no we need to flip it we need to keep it positive so I think with B2B as well it's you know there's a lot more of a workflow involved there's more people involved and you've got to make sure that you're ticking certain boxes that that business requires whereas with b2c it's a lot people act on their emotions more so you can use social media you can use the digital channels to try and get them to persuade them and although yeah that is a really good point but what I'd
also say is we still I remember some research from years ago we still make B2B decisions on an emotional basis but the emotion is different right so there's a lot of impulse in I'm gonna I'm gonna buy that pair of running shoes or I'm going to get that Gadget I mean like the amount of impulse stuff that I just buy on Instagram is just incredible the stuff I get stuff through the door I'm like when did I order a jaw Society I'm gonna draw exercise I see some stupid Instagram videos get bombarded by them like
another thing that I do in the shower to do and just ridiculous stuff right so that's your secret that's why I look like this yeah exactly it doesn't work clearly yeah exactly um so that I've never been accused having a chisel that's for sure so the the thing here is it's a different emotion right and that emotion is quite often risk adversity I don't want to make the wrong decision so that's that's part of it sometimes it's like a long-term relationship yeah whereas purchasing from a business as a customer might be more transactional yeah that's
very true if you're doing B2B that's someone that you're going to have an ongoing relationship but I also think the BT opportunity is that you you it's transactional but then have more transactions and more transactions because keeping your customers better than having to pay for a new one right in a lot of cases you've got a proper relationship but it's more of a relationship yeah yeah internet's B2B right and and I know that we have two types of customers we call one b2c and B but it's not BC it's still an individual buying our product
but they are still within a business a lot of the time so we'll do stuff like persuade your boss like you know you you want to sign up for this thing here's a kit to help you because we're on your team we're on your side so it's that positioning is slightly different and then on the The Big B to B you know if a Big Brand comes along and they've got you know 5000 marketers globally we will be account managing that and we will know them and I I will undoubtedly uh having Zoom calls at
the very least but I probably met them face to face and so on as well so that's a different Beast as well you're definitely trying to influence a whole team of people not just one and that's just harder yeah and I think you need to acknowledge that and what you normally have is an advocate there's normally someone that wants your product or your service and you need to give them the tools and bring them into your your kind of team it's so true and very often there's someone else that has a strong relationship with another
vendor and they don't like they fight they fight for it like you would fight for your friends sometimes like I've seen that happen well we've seen it so we we come up against a kind of standard set of competitors fairly regularly no one quite does the same stuff as us that's that's great because we can position ourselves slightly differently but you go how do you differentiate then and it's like well brand has a big impact and I mean product is very much a thing for us but you need to then say who are our competitors
what's great about our product that theirs hasn't got and then give the potential buyer the kick to say look they do this they don't do it give them a comparison table it shows some evidence to kind of back it up and actually give them the stuff they need for an internal conversation to persuade other people the other thing is you really need a CRM system that's going to flag up for you that you've had multiple people from the same company visiting your website because the risk is you're looking at stuff and you have different people
and you're triggering stuff out to them and then you go oh we've had seven different people from that one company on the website we hadn't even noticed it's only if your CRM is set up to trigger that stuff automatically that you will notice it so you've got to be kind of careful of that um there's there's lots of tools out there always made me laugh where they do this reverse IP lookup thing right so they say we can tell you what companies have been on your website and it is useful for that point of view
but if you like you know there's been 10 people from Microsoft on your website so right quick call Microsoft hi someone your company's been on my website can you just put me through to them it's not going to work right so it's more from the point of view of you going if I do have one of those tools okay I've got those people coming through what am I actually going to do with that how am I going to action it and that's why on the B2B side of things even more than the BT you want
to get people's email addresses not to email you don't need to opt in but so you can at least go who's on my website what are they doing what are they looking at and then start to understand that you've got multiple people from the same company so that whole gated content I will give you something in exchange for something yeah really great offers free stuff all that kind of thing is really important also just like BTC understanding the pain points so that at the top of the funnel before they're even thinking about your stuff you
can give them stuff that's useful you're building a relationship and there's a stat I mentioned before which is all about the fact that if you've been exposed to a brand previously and we were talking about via podcast when you actually go to the website you're a lot more likely to convert so actually if I can build that relationship and you're not even thinking about it and then when you're coming to I need this thing we see this through the podcast a lot right so people will listen for years and then they go oh I need
to train my team I I trust that I trust those people I'll get in contact with them so you've you've done the pre-work you've done that build up and we've seen that cumulatively but it's a big investment up front in order to do that kind of stuff as well in a way I think b2c marketers can be a lot lazier because for most b2c businesses there's always more customers because it's bigger numbers yeah okay huge whereas B2B if I burn people they're not going to come back and again with B2B I think your reputation spreads
even quicker because again it's a much smaller pool much smaller pool which is a benefit and a challenge yeah yeah that's it so so I think you've got to think about multiple decision makers um the buying cycle duration like if you are specifying a part for a jet engine that could be five years ten years I can't keep saying to you by our stuff buy our stuff buy our stuff because it's profoundly annoying so that's why I need to think that flow of content that's going to kind of go through and you have to really
think about your content marketing and I think a lot of people get this wrong and also students when they're study and get their head around this the top of the funnel seems to confuse people he's like right bottom of funnel is our product stuff up the funnel is the topic area top of the funnel is broader stuff about our products no no it's not it's it's about just the problems your target audience has so you know we don't talk about um different types of e-learning and online learning we talk about digital marketing best practice because
that's the pain point that our target audience has got how can we assist them how can we keep them up to date with that stuff and you see an awful lot of what's basically top of funnel content which is you know someone's selling a CRM system compared the top five crms that's middle bottom of the funnel it's not top of the funnel at all so I think that's the mindset you need to really Elevate what you're going to talk about and make sure that you understand what are the pain Point questions I can answer how
can I make myself useful and sometimes that's difficult because you're having to talk about things that aren't your core business so you need to bring some subject matter experts in to potentially go through and do that stuff as well but the the funnel still applies but in B2B you're going to spend a lot more time at the top in the middle of the funnel you're not just diving straight in and actually in b2c you can get away with just direct to the bottom of the funnel here's my amazing product uh here's a video of this
mind-boggling jaw exerciser that's going to cost you 30 and just a bit of rubber okay and whatever it might be and actually I can just wow you with the product and say you people like you need this thing whereas B2B doesn't it B2B doesn't doesn't work like that I'm going to give you it comes in three different strengths yeah I'll give you one um so the the reality is there's great similarities but you need to work out what those slight differences I'm reminded of the awful moment when I discovered that I'd pushed this was for
Target internet I'd pushed a Facebook ad live promoting the podcast to to people who'd visited our website and a look-alike audience right so yes and so and I think unfortunately for me the episode was all about some obscure element of CRM okay right so it was it was it was it was a pod it was a Blog actually that we'd be done and this thing just like Auto promoted it and I had the people like and we got absolutely flamed people are going call yourself Target internet well enough what I want to know about this
I remember this yeah right absolutely flamed and I think you know so some of the things that we I smoke me think actually I'm sort of exploring this actually we probably do need to be more Mindful and to try and think you know moving forward on the on the B to B2B side of things and what are the angles or elements are because you know something like that that we could go on about retargeting look like audiences something we talk a lot but actually when you're marketing to much smaller audiences they look like audiences don't
necessarily work it's very naturally you know so I do that on my jet engine like oh yeah right yeah I mean the thing is just because I like digital marketing doesn't mean any of my friends want to hear about digital marketing I'm not priest yeah exactly so I think that that's very true you've got to be careful of some of those tools this is where a single customer view really helps you you joined update to your CRM system because then you've got that that first party stuff that you can really hone in and I have
realized as well it's very easy to broadcast stuff out but actually one to one makes a big difference I've been playing around with loom quite a lot Loom is one of those platforms that allows you to create little videos and then do a gif of that that video and put it into an email and what I'll do is I'll make sure I don't use the tools where you can mail merge them so you can go through and you can change the graphic on the screen but it's one same video for everyone it's literally I will
have something called I'll have their website on the screen hi Paula yeah right exactly um and I'll literally have their website on the screen and I'll make a video exclusively for that person and I'll send it through to them the hit rate is incredible because if I get oh I've just reviewed a website and think you could do X Y and Z and we think it's like oh okay there's some actual practical stuff in there and they've taken the time to bother recording a little email I wasn't sure and our managing director wasn't sure about
if this was a bit cheesy like getting is getting a video email and I actually thought whenever I've got them I've watched them I don't think there's a single occasion when I've got a video on I haven't actually watched it well you're interested aren't you you're nosy that's it plenty of emails we get hundreds of podcast pictures don't we but I've only ever had one that did a video right there you go don't say this this is awful I'm gonna get loads of videos now by the way we get I reckon I get 30 or
40 a day now hi I'd like to pitch this person to you and it's like okay sorry we don't we don't answer them anymore it's got to that point sadly I mean the occasional one we will if something is original but what I don't like is when people it's awful when they're trying to be funny right I get a um an email saying I watched this episode and I thought blah blah and it's just like you're not funny this isn't amusing um I find them very funny but then I sit them in junk yeah there
you go right so the person that I had when I didn't get back to them and they responded to me a couple days later and asked if I had fallen over and if I needed help getting back oh no but there's lots of those and they're awesome it's a HubSpot template we hadn't even realized yeah and they're really worried about me yeah really worried so sorry they use the template so I think that you have got the opportunity of being more one-to-one but don't if there's only 100 people or 50 people why are you mail
merging it's just take 10 minutes and send something to someone that is actually personal the other thing is like we've LinkedIn everyone just you know goes through and says pitch your stuff at you and it's like actually you haven't even done the research right so the fact that you can go off look someone up see what they've been writing about see what they've published online see where they were working previously what their hobbies are all that kind of thing you can find some commonality and some common ground in there potentially as well as opposed to
this broadcast when you've only got a small target audience so I think this b2cb to B they both have pros and cons and I think that you need to play to the advantage of the particular audience you're going for but don't discount any any particular audience from that point of view as well um so we would love to hear your B2B and BTC experience just a reminder the nominations are open for the digital marketing toolkit Awards Target internet.com forward slash toolkit nominate your own your own tools get in those things that you love in there
as well and then we're going to open up the judging after the 17th of July so you've got until the 17th of July to get those in we'll be announcing it all live on a podcast you will get your uh your actual prize that goes through you get your award and then we're going to be given a load of promotions so it's a really good opportunity to get your tool promoted from that point of view as well as ever thank you for listening to digital marketing podcast and we will see you next time [Music] Please
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