Like B2C, a challenge at the heart of B2B marketing is a fine balancing act between the long-term with short-term. Balancing investment in brand building with targeted product-based campaigns designed to generate demand and quality leads. Balancing your campaign approach across mass reach channels and narrowly targeted, segmented campaign support focused on efficiently converting prospects - fishing with a net and a spear. Balancing revenue generation today with creation of demand for tomorrow - to use another analogy, simultaneously picking the low hanging fruit with watering the tree. Balancing effectiveness (degree to which overall objective has been met, e.g. growth in market share) with efficiency (e.g. cost per lead generated).
Just as Demand Generation campaigns cannot build a sustainable brand, logical and reasoned arguments are no guarantee of success. Avoidance of risk is a key component of business continuity. Confidence, fear of failure and trust play a role in the B2B buying mindset. Triggering emotions is also a part of this balancing act, as it is key to the process of building memory structures and ensuring your brand is actively recalled. Similarly, don’t discount B2C insight simply because the focus was on consumers rather than B2B prospects - it’s easy to forget that your audience are people rather than decision-making robots.
Therefore, you need to invest time in understanding the relevant emotions of your buyers and their relationship with your brand / product. So, another element of balance is the need to appeal to both hearts and minds. A related balance is demonstrating to Sales colleagues that they’ve been heard and that the business challenge is understood but, ultimately, they’re unlikely to be representative of end customers, i.e. the people who grapple with the problem the brand exists to solve.
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