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B2B marketing is harder than B2C marketing. Feel free to argue the point below, perhaps one day I'll do a post on the topic, but not today. Today I'm thinking about how B2B marketing is really B2C2C2C2C2C marketing. And this is why it is so difficult.
Marketing business-to-business sounds fairly mundane. One business communicates with another about goods and or services they can supply the other business for a nice big fat check. The problem is, and this may shock some of you, I have never in all of my years in this job seen companies talk to one another. No, never.
Companies are made up of people. People represent the company and different facets of its business. People talk to people, helping business talk to business.
B2B marketing is finding the right way, time and place in which the right people within your business can talk to the right people within their business.
All facets of this conversation are important and it is why, when undergoing B2B marketing you need to employ
KUALLA:
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Know the people on the other end of the line (or Tweet to be completely current);
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Understand their pain point by making it your own;
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Ask where they congregate and communicate, offline and on;
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Listen to the stories of the people that make up the company your are trying to reach, versus simply understanding the company;
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Learn about the processes it takes for these people to get their job done within the company each day;
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Act on your knowledge to provide these people with the information they need to understand you and thus your company;
KUALLA helps you focus on the fact that you are talking with people, even when performing B2B marketing. Ultimately by the time you reach the end of KUALLA you have established a relationship with the right person in the right way. Marketing it may have been, but marketing it certainly did not seem.
UPDATE: And yes, this is poking fun at all the "marketing experts" who use inane acronyms to describe their methods...although if you are a book publisher I'm more than willing to write a few hundred pages on the "Power of KUALLA" ;)
