B2B or P2P?

B2B marketing is different. Ask any B2B agency and they'll tell you so. Decisions take longer. They involve many more people. They are, in every way, more complex than B2C.

You'll hear talk about the decision making unit (DMU) – almost as if there is some crack team of buyers who swing into action every time a company needs a new piece of kit. Typically these purchasing ninjas will comprise a business decision maker (BDM), a technical decision maker (TDM) and often a financial decision maker (FDM) as well as other influential stakeholders.

So far so good. But...

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it makes audiences too abstract. It encourages B2B marketers to look at their customers as demographics first and people second. In doing so there's a tendency to 'target at' rather than 'engage with'.

Now I know what you're thinking, this is going to be another play for social media. It's not. It's a play for the core truism that people buy people. They want to work with people they like and trust. They want to know that when things get sticky (and they will) that they can have a human conversation with someone who can help and who cares.

Too often this can be lost in the cutting and slicing of DMUs and BDMs and all the other tedious acronyms. But B2B marketers do so at their peril.

Four things to do about this

• Think of your customers as living, breathing, irrational people first and acronyms very much second (or third or not at all)
• Focus on emotions – emotion drives behaviour in B2B just as it does in B2C, what do your customers worry about? Where do they need reassurance? How can you help? They'll have all the time in the world to post-rationalise their decisions later but it's emotions that'll get the ball rolling
• Look at the connections – what are the roles of those making the decision (and don't simply look at their job titles)? What is the web of influence surrounding a decision?
• Find out how you can make your brand and your offering more human and more engaging – and look at ways of sustaining this engagement over a long sales cycle