The four humours of B2B marketing (2.0, that is)
In today's B2B (business-to-business) marketing world, an over-emphasis on brand and creativity is no longer relevant, according to multichannel marketing firm CleverTouch, which reports that marketing budgets are now lagging behind reality.
The company's own research found that brand and creativity are still key areas within most B2B marketing budgets, despite the fact that marketers should now be trying to balance creativity with business processes, intelligent technologies, and a greater depth of buyer understanding in order achieve more efficient sales operations.
As a result, and inspired by Aristotle's 'four humours' of the human body, CleverTouch has compiled its own 'Four humours of Marketing 2.0', which suggest that the Marketing 2.0-savvy organisation must be carefully balanced in all four of these disciplines in order to be effective in 2010:
- Customer & Prospect Understanding Most marketing organisations still orientate themselves toward marketing campaigns and creative elements which, while very necessary, are not wholly sufficient. Marketers should therefore focus on buyers' personas to understand who their customers are and how they use their products, as well as what the buying stages are, and then map content according to each stage of the buying process.
- Business Process & Workflow Too much marketing time is spent on reinventing processes, and 'spreadsheet jockeying', when an established system should be taking care of operational details. For example, CleverTouch's own 'Lead Leakage Analysis Methodology' maps both current and future business process workflows while also being sensitive to the needs of the organisation, and actually guarantees to save time and money.
- Marketing Automation Recently, marketers have found some salvation in e-mail marketing. As a result, e-mail marketing has become central to most marketing strategies. But the company recommends that marketers should look beyond e-mail marketing and find suppliers that can manage the whole array of multi-channel marketing requirements from a single platform. If these are seamlessly linked into a CRM system, they can enable true marketing scoring and profiling - definite benefits of marketing automation.
- Creativity, Collaboration & Innovation While creativity is a must for most marketers, they are usually too busy to be creative, to collaborate or to innovate. But by focusing on the other 3 humours first, marketing can become more relevant, essential, and even fun for the rest of the organisation.
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