Opinions, best practices and research into B2B marketing strategy and practices

Credibility

Credibility is the degree to which your company or brand is deemed trustworthy and believable. To establish credibility, there must be little or no disconnect between your company’s delivered competencies and offerings and the picture you paint for the outside world.
With online customer testimonials playing an increasingly important role in buyer behavior and with attitudes towards corporate spin or propaganda hardening, credibility has become an important parameter for a company’s success.

Efforts to build and sustain credibility must be ongoing and response must be immediate if that credibility is threatened. B2B businesses can earn extra credibility by representing the industry rather than the interests of a specific company—and by becoming an industry advocate instead of a salesperson.

Posted in
on

Why ‘should’ can take a long walk off a short pier

by Laura Matheson
swimming pool ladder bright blue yellow

Hot on the heels of an exceptionally hot European summer and CNN naming Copenhagen as the best city in the world for swimming, the nearby beaches and harbors are still teeming with people cooling off in the open water. When I complain about the heat, I’m often told, ‘You should go for a dip!’

The only valid reason I can see for swimming is to avoid death by drowning – but that ‘should’ stops me in my tracks. It carries a sense of obligation, judgement, pressure and, most of all, guilt.

I don’t like to swim, but I should.

Should is for things we don’t want to do. Should is based on the expectations of others. Should is inconsistent with our own values and how we want to behave. Continue reading →

Posted in
on

How to create affordable testimonial videos for employer branding

by David Hoskin
Employee testimonial videos

Most marketing or HR directors would love to have several high-quality employee testimonial videos to support the company’s employer branding efforts – particularly when it comes to recruitment. They also say, however, that it’s one of those difficult and expensive tasks that they just don’t seem to be able to manage with available resources. Frankly, I disagree that producing testimonial videos for employer branding is difficult – or expensive. Continue reading →

Posted in
on

Please, no more propaganda

by Jonathan Winch

The disciplines and craft of journalism have changed corporate communications – for the better. New opportunities to cut through the noise and engage an audience abound, partly because so many companies still seem to believe that bragging about themselves in buzz words is the best way of making sure their target audience will understand the value of their brand.
Continue reading →

Posted in
on

Customer centricity: The ‘easy’ way to better business performance

by David Hoskin
Make it easy for your B2B customers

In a B2B environment that is becoming increasingly competitive, there is growing interest in what actually drives business performance.

I was recently presented with some research by Professor Moira Clark of the Henley Centre for Customer Management, which concluded that making it easier for customers to do business is a sure-fire way of improving the bottom line. This takes the notion of customer experience one step further, and she claims that more companies are beginning to bring this line of thought into their strategic planning.

Essentially, it’s about having a customer-centric approach, and the research suggests that customer centricity in B2B drives business performance. The great challenge facing B2B companies, however, is how to change the business to become more customer-centric. For many, it may seem an unrealistic task. Continue reading →

Posted in
on

The CMO’s opinion isn’t always appreciated

by Jonathan Winch

When the CEO of all too many B2B companies sits down to decide on the three- or five-year strategy, a select group of executives are typically asked to front up with factual data and strategic opinions: The Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Commercial Officer and the Chief Operations Officer. Equipped with their inputs, the CEO usually feels he or she has enough information to formulate the strategy (perhaps supplemented with external advice). Then, and only then, the strategy is explained to the CMO. Continue reading →

Posted in
on

Not just another B2B case story

by David Hoskin
Does your B2B case story allow you to speak the truth?

How often have you read a B2B case story and thought that you’d seen it before, just from another supplier? Same old, same old.

I’ve seen it often. You realize that what you’re reading is another product brochure disguised as a customer case story.

I was recently involved in what could have been a very interesting story, covering the journey traveled by the company and customer. It was a journey describing a strong, long-standing relationship and the use of market-leading technology (sorry about the propaganda), careful attention to detail, and excellent customer service.

But, most interestingly, it also covered how the company solved unexpected challenges that arose during the implementation of the solution. Continue reading →

Posted in
on

4 ways Danish companies can nail B2B marketing in English

by Mandy Chilcott

It’s not that hard to write a blog post, a Tweet or an article, right?

All you have to do is think about what you want to say, structure it, then start tapping away at the keyboard. At least, that’s pretty much true if you’re a good writer and English is your native language!

Our Danish-based B2B clients, on the other hand, have an added challenge in comparison with competitors from English-speaking regions: producing high-quality English texts when English is their second (or even third) language.

Continue reading →

Posted in
on

The CMO as the new B2B superhero

by David Hoskin

When push comes to shove, it’s hard to find a CEO of a B2B company who sees marketing as the go-to function for business performance. Marketers are constantly challenged by their executive management to demonstrate the effectiveness of their efforts.

Does that mean the CMO role at B2B companies is redundant? And what can marketing do to move itself from a support function into the company’s upper echelons? Continue reading →

Posted in
on

How to lose a B2B sale in 4 ways… and how not to!

by Mandy Chilcott

Like all relationships between people, B2B relationships require trust and credibility to work.

In fact, we could liken a prospective B2B buyer to a sophisticated partner who is well-educated, has high expectations and is generally intolerant of mistakes. And like in all relationships, there are certain behaviours that strengthen bonds, and critical mistakes that turn people off.

Take your website, for example. In B2B, missteps can sow enough seeds of doubt in the minds of potential or existing customers to make them lose faith in your brand, question your professionalism, or simply click away from your site. Once you lose that credibility, it can be as hard to get back as convincing a cheated-on lover to trust you again. And the result of lost credibility? Lost sales.

So what can you do to make sure you hang onto B2B prospects?

Continue reading →