BtoB Marketing and the Power of Emotional Appeal

Businesses don’t buy anything. People buy things. The biggest difference between BtoB and BtoC is the complexity of the database work. Other than that it’s simply selling to people who aren’t buying with their own money (though that is certainly an important tactical distinction).

The creative approach for BtoB lead generation needs to elicit an emotional reaction, because people begin the buying process based on emotional appeal. Speeds and feeds have their place–toward the end of the buying process. If you’re talking about lumens while they are trying to visualize using your projector then your conversation is an irrelevant irritant.

This should all sound like old news, but it’s staggering how many marketing people still insist on describing their product when the prospects are trying to figure out if they care about solving the problem. We know people are smarter than that; we assume it’s internal politics driving this direction. You can’t let that interfere. Marketing is too hard today. They’ll forgive you when you win (or not, but at least you’ll win).

Once people have raised their hands, you must get them into as information-rich an environment as they will accept. Tailored newsletters used to be the best tool for this, but now there’s lots of other choices and some people are loathe to read a newsletter. We have good sucess with blogs, because they provide peer-level information that people can trust more than your stilted corporate marketing.

But understand this–if you get people committed to solving a problem, and you don’t get them all the information they want–in the form they choose–then they’ll get it themselves, and you might not like the result.

People need information to move through the buying cycle. Thats always true, whether it’s the five seconds required to check the amount of carbs in your cereal or the careful study required to commit an enterprise to a new technology. The challenge is that they only want what they need, and their needs change over time. You need to have some idea where they are in the buying cycle before you offer them information. It’s incredibly difficult to craft interesting materials that engage people across the broad spectrum of their needs. If you can deliver them to an information-rich environment built to maintain their interests then you’re a primary source of information. That’s very powerful.

People will find out the bad things about your offering–the venues and flows of information are so vast and accessible that anyone can learn as much about your product as any insider. You can use this as part of your marketing–paying attention to the places your product is talked about and making sure qualified people participate in the conversation. Not as a shill (that gets detected almost instantly) but as an honest participant. The conversations go on whether you take part in them or not. If you build a corporate forum or blog and you block anything people say that isn’t complimentary, you’ll only be talking to (and only fooling) yourself.

I once had a habit of saying, “I lie for a living, for big companies,” when people asked my profession. Not true today. It’s never been more important to be honest in your marketing approaches. It’s a great tactic. Connect with emotion, cultivate with honest information and by being part of the conversations, and close lots of business.