In consumer items there are a lot of ways to reach a customer – television, print, social media etc. Depending on where your demographic audience is and how the psychographics work out, you could also use good old direct mail and leaflets and tele-callers.

In B2B markets there are unique challenges. There’s a massive fall in print magazine circulation especially the business focused magazines. Not sure how many people watch television to check out the next business strategy.

In the B2B market, mail does not reach the person on the desk, because a lot of times people don’t have a desk and are mobile. So the mail has to be collected by the person by going to the mail room. Since people don’t come to the office so often and with Covid19, even fewer are coming to office so no one visits the mail room and the mail you send does not reach the intended recipients. So if you are targeting professional services companies, financial services etc. I have found direct mail to be a tough ask.

On the other hand if you were looking at companies which were more into manufacturing, utilities etc. I would guess direct mail would work especially for the back office functions and factory / warehouse functions.

Email is a quick, free medium and that’s it very basic problem. In B2B all the people are inundated with mail and you get a fraction of a second on the mobile phone, before the person ignores or deletes your mail. That is if your mail even reaches the person’s mailbox, because the spam filters will block your mail if they even observe a single item in the mail which smells of spam.

Before the pandemic started, webinars was a good way to get people to join you and hear your message, but I am observing a definite sense of exhaustion with webinars. The registration and attendance and company sponsored webinars has fallen dramatically. It may still be possible to get some attendance if the webinar is being run by an industry body or an independent analyst or a reputed media group with some respected industry veterans.

As a B2B marketer I am always looking out for some effective ways to get in front my audience. By ensuring that I target a “single target market”, and try and target only my ideal customer profile, I try to learn from each interaction that we have with a client and see how we can incorporate that learning into our next interaction. Its always a good idea to send a personal email to a person so that the spam filters don’t think you are spamming. You try to use as much knowledge you have of the industry to make this email so that the person reading it finds it useful.

Please let me know in case you have found any other method to reach your prospects in B2B in the comments below.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!