Internet Marketing for B2B starting to pay back

One of the objections I'm met with when I talk to businesses about internet marketing is that it doesn't work for B2B (business to business). I think this is more perception than fact. The full range of social media doesn't get such good results for B2B as B2C (business to consumer), because they have been slower to adopt digital marketing.

If you target other businesses using just a couple of components of the internet marketing mix (notably email marketing and website development) you will get a return on investment, as your customers are now undoubtedly online.

Below is a survey taken in the United States just a couple of months ago, reproduced by emarketer.com:
And look how many of the businesses surveyed were planning on increasing their spend in 2010:


There are some brilliant examples of bold B2B online marketing, some of which I use regularly when training, such as Dell who have created their own Dell social network aimed at supporting business customers and have used Dell on Facebook to provide social media support to businesses:

"Based on our experience at Dell and conversations with customers, we created a series of “Social Media Guides” to help small and medium businesses effectively use these tools to grow and better serve customers." Says the Facebook Page.

This demonstrates some good lateral thinking, and how effective! They've now got nearly 38,000 fans to their Facebook page.

It might be tougher than marketing to consumers, but as with traditional marketing methods, digital marketing can be adapted for B2B marketing quite successfully.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk