Business Marketing – Maximize Your Worth

Any business wants to keep and augment its market share, and the tactics it uses to achieve that are important. Most companies start out the same way – spotting a need and fulfilling that need by advertising to potential customers using any means necessary. Your first few meetings with customers probably were, or will be, face-to-face consultations that either developed into a regular appointment or solved a problem within the initial few meetings. As a business grows, though, an increasing amount of its custom starts to come from other businesses.

Whether your work is chiefly consultative or supply-based, business to business marketing is something that you should think about early on in the life of your business. There are various reasons for this. Companies outsource a lot of work so that they can concentrate on applying themselves to their area of expertise. They want to get someone – for a reasonable price – who will have the same level of expertise in a different area. Also, companies have by their nature larger budgets than individuals, can write off consultative work as tax-deductible and are larger entities (therefore having more needs).

Business to business marketing is also more conducive to direct mailing by its nature. A personal email address is, for many people, where they receive updates from their family and friends, or what they use to keep track of blogs or forum memberships. Receiving business emails to those addresses can be somewhat jarring, and sending to them can put in place some tricky questions about how “businesslike” you can be in your approach. Working between businesses can be liberating in this respect, as it is all the more clear that you are in a financial transaction, a quid pro quo.

Business marketing is also free from the ethical question of “cold marketing”. There can be few of us who have not hung up on a telemarketer once or twice, particularly when they call us at home. Our home address is where we live, eat and are ourselves. In the office, it is right to talk about business. Getting a phone call trying to sell you anti-virus software at 7:30 pm is another thing entirely. So it is with email and direct mail through the postal service. A lot of people feel put out by receiving marketing copy with their daily postal delivery – but if they are a business it is part of the process and less of a problem.

Whatever else you do in terms of business marketing, this does make the entire process a lot more straightforward. You can be more direct, and can be more honest about the fact that you are selling something. This is a weight off any direct marketer’s mind. If you stop and talk to someone who works as a telemarketer it is not rare to hear them say that, as this is the only job they can get, they have to simply grin and bear it when a customer is rude to them. In direct business marketing this is much less of a hazard, and this clarity is extremely welcome for any business.