Want to get a peek at what B2B marketing leaders are spending their money on in 2012? Look no further than our 2011 Marketing Investment Benchmarks.

Here are the big four headline trends for spend this year:

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As marketers, we’re doing a lot to get closer to our customers. It’s partly because we want to improve customer service and sell better to them – tailor messaging, that sort of thing – but it’s also because we want to do a better job of designing the offering to their needs. But what’s much more difficult to accomplish is making customer insight a key driver of strategic internal processes, an asset that animates key decisions across the firm.

Facing a mismatch between internal processes and voice of the customer, health care products company Cardinal Health had to do just that. Looking at sales data, the company’s marketers realized that customers – seeking to dampen costs and not seeing the value in Cardinal Health’s complete offering – often purchased one element of what was intended to be an integrative solutions deal. Not good! Read More »

It’s no secret these days that B2B sales requires a lot more consensus than it did before. You might have a great relationship with one buyer who can push through a small-ticket purchase on his or her own, but what happens when you want to increase your share of the customer’s wallet, or move up to higher-level solutions deals that involve more than one functional silo?

That’s one of the questions Sales is asking itself, as recessionary habits persist in the buying centers of big organizations. The dynamics of internal buying centers are too complicated to be solved with a single solution, but one way Marketing can help is to make sure those buyers that love you – the ones still receptive to “relationship selling” – are equipped to make the case around the organization.

That’s exactly what Iron Mountain, the document management company, did when presented with a similar problem. They noted that typical Iron Mountain buyers – typically too junior to engage in strategic-level relationships – faced three obstacles that stood in the way of advocating for their solutions internally: Read More »

By Claire Tassin

It seems clear that, for a variety of reasons, energy and resource constraints will continue to be key concerns for small business owners for the foreseeable future. Those constraints take a few forms – sometimes they’re around environmental concerns, other times they’re around cost. But what language should you speak to business owners concerned about energy costs?

We know that green marketing can be effective in the B2C world, but how influential are environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility on small businesses’ purchase behavior? This year, the Enterprise Council on Small Business tested the impact of a myriad of factors on small business owners. As it turns out, value alignment – such as on green – has only moderate influence on owners.

Source: ECSB Research, July 2011, n=1099 N.A.

So, if green marketing isn’t an effective way to reach small businesses, what is? ECSB recommends positioning how members’ products and services can alleviate business owners’ pain points. In a recent study, ECSB asked owners what their biggest pain points are in all areas of managing their businesses. In the area of building and office administration, the cost of utilities ranked highest – despite the majority of owners not anticipating price increases for 2012.

At the end of the day, messaging how your products and services can positively impact the bottom line is likely to be more effective than green marketing per se in targeting small businesses. So, rather than focusing on going green, show business owners how your company can help them save some green.

How would you feel if you were served a dish which you never ordered, instead of the one that you really wanted? I can imagine feelings of shock and disappointment. Switch gears to marketing. Many B2B customers today find themselves unpleasantly surprised, when companies design offerings for them that they never asked for. Customers complain that companies claim to design products “just like they wanted”, except that they never wanted it!

Which brings up the question – how can B2B companies get better at customer understanding and at serving their customers? We’ve gathered some of MLC’s research over time to help marketers identify what their customers want. The following will help marketers gain an insight into their customers’ mind: Read More »

This summer, we asked the marketing community to nominate some of the best B2B campaigns of the previous year for our 2011 B2B Marcomm Awards. And now, the results are in – and we’ve created a members-only resource that looks at what makes all of the finalist campaigns tick.

Every year, we notice that the best campaigns seem to revolve around a few principles that tell us a lot about where B2B marketing is heading. Here are a few we uncovered this year: Read More »

Thanksgiving is just around the corner. And if you’re the chef, you know not to overstuff your turkey unless you want to risk a bird explosion in the oven. Ask Rachael Ray or Martha Stewart if you don’t believe me.

I know, it’s tempting to put in just a little bit more deliciousness. If we have it, why not use it?  Be it the extra stuffing or the bunch of variables that haven’t made it into your very comprehensive marketing analysis. Maybe it’s the regret at seeing the extras “go to waste”; maybe it’s the urge to supersize in response to complexity and diminished control.  Cooking up an insightful model from a mountain of data can be just as stressful as cooking a banquet. Read More »

The key to growth for a large portion of B2Bs hinges on suppliers’ abilities to successfully leverage channel partnerships.  This can be particularly challenging because frequently, your marketing strategy’s priorities do not 100% align with those of your partners.  To bridge the priority gap, marketers have long tried to influence desired behaviors in channel partners with monetary incentives – the most common one being volume-based discounts.  While simple to administer and easy to track, volume-based incentives often don’t deliver what we want them to.

We’ve all heard the saying, “You get what you pay for.”  Oftentimes it is spoken as an admonishment after something we bought for what seemed like a too-good-to-be-true low price turns out to be, to put it bluntly, a piece of crap.  The idea also holds true when thinking about channel partner incentives– if you pay for volume, you are going to get volume (oftentimes crappy volume), not growth or margin.  In pursuit of volume, channel partners often subjugate or just plain ignore the other priorities you value.  As a result, “good” partners get paid the same amount “bad” ones do.  For example, imagine two partners with the following profiles under a primarily volume-based incentive structure: Read More »

By Ana Lapter

We often hear that “one size fits all” strategies don’t work. But when it comes to designing mid-funnel messaging strategies, many marketers hammer on undifferentiated, non-customer specific drivers of purchase.

But, why? The main reason is the novelty of the mid-funnel role for Marketers.  Traditionally, Marketing hasn’t owned this stage of the purchasing process.  Sales did the engagement work with buyers to identify their needs, while Marketing was mainly in charge with raising awareness about a product, advertising, or a vendor’s thought leadership position in the industry.

Today’s environment is different.  As our research demonstrated, customers are delaying their contact with Sales until they are well into the mid-funnel.  As a result, Marketing now typically owns a new stage of the purchasing decision funnel and needs to address it with the right messaging strategy.  Such strategy requires customization of content and information based on buyers’ needs and outcomes associated with a purchase.

In our recent survey of 1,900 B2B customers, we identified four types of mid-funnel purchasing needs that require customized messaging. Read More »

“How can you make my company better?” – a question that customers are increasingly asking B2B marketers. Armed with information, and given increasing purchase accountability, growth-minded customers are making strategic purchases to improve their capabilities. Marketers, on the other hand, are finding it increasingly difficult to muse customers about how they’re uniquely positioned to solve their current problems. Here’s how one MLC member answered the question. Read More »