In the past few weeks I have been working very busy on the set up of Frontiers Digital (FD) Asia operation. The UK partners are now in Hong Kong meeting up local partners and customers. We target the official debut in April.

When you are building something new, besides your hands will be kept busy, it also gives you a chance to revisit a lot of fundamental issues. Myself and the FD’s founding team are constantly debating and to throw each other many fundamentally challenging questions.

FD Asia will introduce a number of B2B digital marketing solutions to the region. So, the first question that comes to us for an answer is how actually B2B marketing works? This is not a rhetorical question. Just because I write a B2B marketing blog, it doesn’t mean my marketing practice can be universally agreed by everyone. So, let’s discuss some of these fundamental issues in this post.

I believe B2B is not the flip side of B2C and it shouldn’t be. It is the marketing tactic to engage buyers that makes the difference, not the technique. Yes, B2B is about final conversion, so does B2C. B2B buyers won’t make impulsive purchase (quite often). It is because the decision for the purchase is always made by a team, not by an individual. So it takes longer time and higher cost per conversion to go through the funnel.

Talking about the marketing funnel, make sure you have a good behavioral marketing solution that will manage your campaign going through every stage with preciseness, a.k.a. awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, and loyalty. Because you won’t be just satisfied with the eyeballs, you want to convert each of them into a buyer.

Here I will point you to the latest Business.com Search Marketing Guide which has covered over 150 marketing agencies’ insights on some B2B marketing aspects such as,

1. B2C often focuses on quick sales conversion, whereas B2B has much longer length of the sales cycle.
2. More people are involved in the purchase decision.
3. The cost and complexity of business purchases in B2B often exceeds that of B2C purchases.
4. Business buying is a dispassionate process. A rational decision process will take longer than an emotional impulse buy.
5. B2B purchases are often made repeatedly.
6. With over 85% of business buyers using the internet during the purchase process.

The marketing guide also has a note that mentions B2B lags B2C in adopting new online technologies by 18-24 months. I believe in this region the B2B marketing practice has even bigger lag behind B2C. Certainly, we have lots to do to pick up our pace.

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