Articles

RSS

By Christopher Carfi, CEO, Cerado

On the surface, there are stark differences between Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) marketing. The size of the audience. The volume of sales. The magnitude of purchases. And so forth. But as mobile becomes ubiquitous for connection with customers, are we starting to see a convergence between the two?

I would contend that the answer is "yes," if we have the courage to think creatively and move beyond the already-tired clichés of "mobile marketing" such as text campaigns and mobile couponing. In fact, with a bit of creative thought, the opportunities for connecting with new customers in both audiences is quite remarkable if we concentrate on the experiences that can be provided with today's mobile devices.

So, what are the ways that we can get creative? Let's look at the root of that word, "creative" for a second. It stems from create. Every one of our prospective customers – both B2B and B2C – has not just a tiny screen onto which we can foist our message but now has the ability to create things as well. Photos. Videos. Conversations. Relationships. The list goes on and on.

Let's look at the taken-for-granted cameraphone capabilities. Again, why not think about how we can bring prospects into the process by enabling (and encouraging!) them to be a creative part of the sale, instead of a passive recipient?

In the B2C case, we can, for example, encourage contests and participation where customers take photos of themselves with the most interesting/scenic/extraordinary usage of our products and submit them to a community site.

Similarly, we can encourage B2B customers to send their sales reps photos of their unique environment / circumstance / prickly problem so the rep can better understand the situation and propose an insightful solution.

In the B2C case, we could encourage video testimonials to be pulled into a powerful montage.

In the B2B case, we can gather videos of customer best-practices to illustrate how our products perform in the real-world and how they are being used to solve real problems in an efficient manner.

But, more important than the technical tools, why not enable prospective customers to easily connect with the people and information they need to make a decision to buy?

It's all about the connections and the relationships. In the B2C case, a great example of this would be making it easy for customers to locate (and, after the initial sale, create) reviews of their experiences with a product from other customers. Similarly in the B2B realm, this entails providing tools to connect the prospect with other similar past customer references, testimonials, case studies or a knowledgeable sales associate.

The upshot is that for both B2B and B2C we have a real opportunity with mobile: the opportunity to differentiate based on how we encourage, empower and enable active, social customers instead of passive "targets." The organizations that crack the code on this are going to be the winners in using this medium.

So let's use mobile to bring both B2B and B2C customers into the process, instead of simply throwing marketing messages at them. Let's challenge ourselves to start conversations going, and enable prospective customers to engage with us, and with each other, regardless of what bucket (B2B or B2C) in which they've historically been classified.

SOURCE: Cerado