The B2B Marketing Challenge

Hi, I'm Peter Spande, director of TechRepublic and I'm here today to talk about the B2B marketing challenge. There are many things that make marketing to business professionals challenging. Three things that really stand out most clearly are these: There are lots of people involved in the purchase decision. These people have very different backgrounds, very different needs and very different attitudes and because all of these people ultimately have to sync up on one solution, that can often create some challenges.

Second challenge is money. A lot of these solutions cost a lot of money. Now how much money, it depends on the companies. For some companies, $50,000 will be a massive purchase. For other companies, it might be 50 million. At any case, if you don't make the right purchase, your job is in jeopardy and the company may suffer as well. Both the number of people and the complexity that goes into these decisions coupled with the amount of dollars at stake.

The one thing that makes this most challenging of all and that is this, time. Everything gets slowed down as you involve all of these different ingredients into the purchase process. So one way that we like to look at marketing to these B2B professionals is through the use of we're calling the marketing funnel. Certainly it's not unique to CNET Networks, but it's something that we find very useful when we look at developing programs and helping our partners market to these professionals.

At the very top of the funnel, at the wider space, you're talking to the largest number of people. This is more of the mass marketing and at this point, you're really working to make these people aware of your solution. You're trying to tell them what you think they need to know that they don't know they need to know. So at this point you're really, you're doing broad advertising, you're working in your PR, you're trying to make as big a splash as possible to pull these people in.

Moving further down the funnel, we're looking to cultivate interest and at this point, you're really working on educating these people, taking that awareness and moving it to the next level, giving them more details, giving them a firmer grasp on the solution so that they can get their arms around it and understand it at a more deeper level. In both these areas, you're connecting to a number of people, but at the interest level, there's going to be a small group of people than there were at the awareness level.

By the time you get down into the third level, which we're calling consideration, you're talking to an even smaller group of people and those people have much more stringent requirements when they're looking at your solution. They are looking for, you know, product data. They are looking to compare this to your competitors. They are looking at alternatives and ultimately they're trying to make the best decision that will please all of these people, make the most efficient use of your money and ultimately once the solution is implemented, hopefully save time. At the end of this marketing mission, you are handing off people who have developed an interest to your sales people who are then turning this back into a sale for your company.