As I’ve said here many times before, Marketing with Meaning is not limited to consumer brands with multimillion-dollar budgets, but rather it can be the basis of business-to-business strategy as well. Several weeks ago I wrote about the example of the word-of-mouth agency, Abraham & Harrison, which sent me a valuable piece of data in order to get on my radar. Today I wanted to provide examples from Ari Rosenberg, who writes that publishers have a meaningful marketing tool lying right under their noses.
In an article that I’ve been hanging onto since April, Rosenberg writes that publishers need to be “buying what [they're] selling” by leveraging their great content into something that ad sales targets will find useful. According to Rosenberg:
If I am Business Week, I am using my editorial clout to host intimate business insight conferences for advertisers and agencies on the industry of advertising. If I am any one of the cooking brands out there, I am creating a catering service to feed a different agency’s media department once a week throughout the year. If I am Weather.com, I am sending emails or text alerts every Friday to all of my clients who opt in for a personalized weekend weather report. If I am a finance brand, I am conducting investment seminars tailored specifically for the media buyers I call on.”
Sounds a lot better than another round of cold calls, eh? What I love about these examples is that each one leverages content and expertise that is already sitting in-house at publishers’ offices. Further, these meaningful services completely reinforce the unique expertise and brand positioning of the brands that offer them.
Other business and industries are slowly moving to this type of model—essentially getting a B2B sales meeting by bringing something relevant to the customer. For example, a few years ago my team at Bridge Worldwide created a series of books on understanding the 65+ consumer that P&G pharma sales reps brought in to share with their physician customers. Because of an influx of 65+ patients resulting from the Medicare bill, these physicians had a need to improve their understanding and skills. P&G was able to leverage its core strength in understanding consumer behavior, and get many more meetings than those who just wanted to talk about a drug, or paid for a pizza lunch. P&G and many other large consumer products firms do something similar with their B2B retail customers by putting marketing people on the ground in their headquarters offices—with a charge to drive the retail customers’ total category sales, not just those of P&G brands.
So if you’re a consumer marketer that sells to a business as well, how can you offer something uniquely valuable to your B2B market that leverages your core product or strength?
such a simple concept but sometimes forgotten or missed entirely. it’s so easier to sell if you start giving than if you start just asking.
Absolute truth if I’ve ever heard it. What’s remarkable about B2B however, is how often (especially in mega companies) the sales staff, the media team, the creative agency, the product team, the product design team and the product support teams have little to do with one another.
Coming together requires a cohesive unit that can put a strong face forward. This is easier in ad sales, where products are defined within an inch of their lives, than in big box b2b where investments are large, long term, and the people with buying power aren’t interested in group lunch.
The fishing with the right bait approach still works, but it is executed in a wholly different fashion. And it’s a bit more difficult to pull off (speaking both as an ad man, and a b2b marketer).
Great points, Jon. In large companies the silos can be killer. There’s also a bit of a church vs. state issue that I could have mentioned in the main post.
[...] First let me call out that this breakfast at Better Homes and Gardens is itself an outstanding example of Marketing with Meaning. Along with my speech, the magazine brought in Robert Levy, who shared insights from his group’s most recent study of consumer habits and attitudes around new products. The magazine provided valuable, free content to the marketers that it works with—in a way, investing in their careers, rather than just giving them cheaper ad space. This is a lesson in B2B marketing that I wrote about several months ago here. [...]