My speaking season begins every year at about the X’mas time. This year I am going to speak for the e-Academy hosted by Reed Exhibitions and then the World SME Expo organized by Hong Kong Trade Development Council, followed by the Integrated B2B Online Marketing in Manufacturing 2009 held in Shanghai. All of these are the B2B events with a mix of audiences who want to know the practices and the trends of B2B marketing.
E-marketing is a topic for all my audiences in the events. The people mix represents a couple of interest groups. We have the fellows from B2B media, representatives from the supplier side and also from the buyer side. These marketers from the B2B ecosystem are quite different.
Unlike other techie marketing community, you won’t meet a very geeky person nor anyone who will turn sudden hyperactive because of a new technical hack. You will meet a marketer who also happens to be a business owner, or that marketer who also handles the sales job in the company, who becomes the supplier of another company. Someone from a trade show organizer who wants to reach out to more exhibitors; someone who used to pay for exhibiting in a trade show is looking for an online substitute. My audiences are slow-heated, take time to warm up for new ideas, cautious and conscious for the result, and very performance-driven.
Speaking in front of these audiences, you don’t want to trick them by showing all the marketing fanciness. They know the market better than you. They know the supply chain better than you. Also, you can forget about showing the weird marketing metrics, unless you can equate the numbers and rationalize it for a sales potential. But don’t forget when you talk about sales potential, they know the marketplace better than you.
This year I know my audiences are expecting something about marketing under recession. But I must say for myself that I am not a big fan of “Guerrilla Marketing.” I will be fond of any cost effective way to improve the marketing result, but not spending nothing for a result. This year, I am going to speak about marketing for the preciseness of lead sourcing and managing influence for customer retention. I’ve just begun my speaker’s prep works by studying the audiences. Thought will be developed and documented via this blog from time to time. Stay tuned.
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