Create a value chain demand with Business to Business marketing

What is Business to Business Marketing?

Business to Business Marketing also referred to as B2B marketing or simply, business marketing is about mostly meeting the demands of other businesses. In this type of marketing, businesses run by individuals or organizations, such as commercial or government businesses, facilitate the sale of their products to other businesses or services, which in turn will resell them to consumers, either directly or in the form of components in products, or as part of services they offer, or use them as support for the operations they perform.

For a long time Business to Business marketing took a back seat allowing its cousin, the Business to consumer marketing to be a front runner. However, over the past fifteen years, Business to Business marketing has emerged as a discipline in its own right and allowed for divergences in the marketing practices.

Let's try to understand Business to Business marketing with an example.  There is a value chain that starts with a customer demand and from which dozens of business services and products are required. Consider the example of the shirt that we buy form a store. They are not found on the shelves by accident. It involves a complex value chain of demands. It begins with the supply of cotton or some fiber that can be woven into cloth, which in turn is stitched into a garment, in this case a shirt, and finally packed and distributed to shops to be sold to consumers. 

This is a classic case of 'chain of derived demand' since a demand is created at every stage of creation of the product before it reaches its full final form. Business sell cotton or fiber to merchants, who in turn sell it to spinners, who sell it to weavers, who in turn sell it to garment manufacturers  and so on. None of the business buy products for pure indulgence, but rather to add value so that the product moves down the chain to finally reach us, the consumers.

Short term Strategies for a successful Business to Business Marketing:

1. Understand the market volume.

You have a goal set up, but does your team know what they need to do to achieve that goal? Many calculators exist to predict the amount of activity required to hit your revenue numbers. Study the volume of the marketing to assist your teams understand the how much of marketing performance they need to generate to hit the targets set. Use marketing funnel tools to run the numbers before the launch of a program.

2. Have a quality contact database.

Now that you have gathered a contact database, you need to know that not all contact data are valid. About 10 to 25 percent can contain critical errors. Make use of  a team to keep track of the data and ensure that your data quality is always in check, updating data regularly and clearing out invalid ones.

3. Take extra effort.

Go out of your way to qualify leads into opportunities. With tele-prospecting you could greatly improve your chances of converting leads into sales ready opportunities through Business to Business marketing.

4. Get feedback.

Encourage your team to engage and build relationships with sales , so that they can discuss their perception on the leads converted into successful opportunities. Doing so will expose them to good feedback about marketing and it's influence on selling process.

5) One of the best examples of Business to Business marketing is tying up with an established brand, such as Heritage Retail and market your products in their supermarket. Heritage Retail has the largest chain of supermarkets in Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Do You Want promote your product in Retail In-store marketing, please click here to Inquire now.

This entry was posted in B2B Marketing.