B2B Online Marketing is Targeted
Unlike most B2C marketing, which defines mass marketing, B2B marketing is quite targeted. This actually plays to the strength of many online vehicles, which help target specific customers and customer groups.
There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of television commercials for B2B companies; television is too broad a marketing vehicle. Online marketing, on the other hand, can be more easily focused by demographic or region or other specific attributes. That makes it ideal for B2B marketing campaigns.
Take, for example, search engine marketing, which works to boost website traffic by increasing a website’s ranking with Google and other search engines. Search engine marketing is all about keywords, and it’s easy enough to select specific keywords that target the desired business customer. In the case of B2B marketing, you use keywords as a way to filter out unwanted consumer traffic; by choosing keywords that reflect industry buzzwords and jargon, you ensure that your site appears only in the search results of interested businesses, not in the search results of the general public.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising also helps to targeted the focused B2B audience. You purchase only those keywords that have value to your targeted market; only those businesses searching for those keywords will see your PPC ads. In this aspect, PPC advertising is the antithesis of the mass marketing common in B2C marketing.
Once you’ve developed a prospect or established a customer, other online marketing vehicles can be used to communicate directly with that business. Whether you’re talking email marketing or social media marketing, there are numerous online marketing vehicles that enable one-to-one communication of this sort.
In short, B2B companies can use online marketing tools to reach a very targeted business audience, without overshooting that target and wasting money on vehicles that address the general public.