At The Whiteboard

The B2B marketing sweetspot

Hi, I'm Jay Gulick, director of BNET. Today I'm going to talk about B2B marketing sweet spot. We talk about B2B marketing; there are two groups that you're really talking about. On the one hand, you've got customers over here. We more refer to them as users, but I think that's a little impersonal. On the other side, you've got the B2B marketers, and these are the companies who have products or services that are trying to sell to the end-users who work in businesses, whether they are in HR, IT, finance, accounting, the different job functions that make up a corporation.

So what you have is a group of people who need information who are trying to solve problems at their jobs, to make the organization perform better, and you've got a group of B2B marketers who are trying to sell products and services, which ostensibly are going to help these end-users solve their business problems. Now what I call the sweet spot is, you've got people over here, the customers, that have problems to solve, and on this side you've got the B2B marketers who have products and services to sell. And the sweet spot is this area right here in between.

Traditionally, the way the B2B marketers have approached the customers is with advertising, and they've done it in a variety of ways. Primarily though on the Web what you've seen is a lot of display advertising. So an ad that talks about the marketing benefits, the particular product or service. Increasingly what we're seeing is that end-users' business problems as I said, have problems that they're trying to solve, so the sweet spot is instead of display advertising, to tap into this space right here and for marketers to provide things like white papers, case studies, Webcasts, and opportunities for end-users to solve the problems with these sorts of tools.

One of the recent trends we've seen on CNET networks is traditional display ads get about a 0.25% click for a rate. We've seen rates two to three times that high and we provide opportunities for B2B marketers to contextually provide important information like white papers, case studies, and Webcasts on our properties, and so again back to the sweet spot of, as a B2B marketer the mindset is not so much "how can I push my product or service at the customer, but how can I provide them with useful information and resources to get the message across effectively."