B2B Social Media – Why recession means innovation.

Obviously, recessions hurt.

The amount of money out there has dwindled. The banks stopped lending, first to consumers, then also to businesses. This stopped businesses from spending money with other businesses and so on down the chain. Eventually, these businesses had less income and little profits, so they laid off employees to stay afloat. They reduced investment in plant and machinery, training, marketing and they will continue to do this until either the recession ends and the upturn begins or they go out of business. Its a cycle that has been repeating for centuries and it will probably carry on regardless of rule changes, regulation, anger, frustration or anything else.

Ok, I hear you say, thanks KnowledgeBank for the doom and gloom, we know this – where’s the relevance to your b2b marketing musings.

Well actually, we think this means opportunity and here’s why.

Just as wars have always resulted in massive advances in technology like computers, medicine and science, so recessions have resulted in massive advances in innovation in marketing. The reason for this is all to do with the supply of money. Although you, the client, may want to spend more on marketing, the reality is that the return on investment isn’t there to sustain it using poorly targeted activity, this then translates into only really wanting to pay for things that work. To you (and us to an extent) this means tangible solutions with no risk. The snag with this is that they don’t exist, well not in a sustainable or scalable fashion, beyond big promises and usually no cigar.

We believe that this is the real driver behind several trends including Twitter (because its free), Google (because it’s really measurable and they have nice graphs), facebook (because we can pick Marketing Managers in Hull with 3 children and an interest in yoga) and Linkedin‘s recruitment ‘engine’ (because if none of the above work, we can find a new employer!)

Having become leading exponents in several of these, we can also dispel the myth that they are free or even cheap methods of marketing. The time involved in building a signficant presence in most of these is lots and lots. Although it works very well for us and we have more than 20k followers on Twitter for example. Lets face it, Twitter is populated by our prime audience – the marketing experts, so we don’t pretend that we can make it work for anyone else in quite the same way.

These innovative channels are still being developed and we believe that they will eventually be ubiquitous, but for now, incredibly, we are still getting our best results from mailing activity both for ourselves and for most of our clients. This is probably due to a number of factors – we tend to use the best b2b data available in the UK, combined with really innovative analysis and we also reckon that most businesses receive fewer direct mail items these days and that they are almost a novelty, but I would recommend anyone to look at a direct means of communication.

Our blog is not for selling, (as it is on the internet, where you can’t sell, but only enable people to buy ), but you are reading this and of course, you are in our target audience of B2B marketers, and we have got you in front of our buying message, so if you want to, give us a call and we can chat about it – no strings. We have a couple of really innovative solutions which we haven’t even mentioned here as they are so new, but we will happily share them directly with interested parties.

You will have to click through to our website for the phone number though and at that point we can track you too! Ooh, modern marketing.

Online Marketing 2.0 – Round 2 begins

Well, we correctly predicted that a big Microsoft Office announcement must be imminent to prompt a Google Chrome OS spoiler announcement last week. As a follow up to that follow up, it is interesting to consider how this may translate in strategy terms and how this affects b2b and b2c marketers.

As we already know, the transition from offline to free online software has to be paid for.

Microsoft have resisted moving online because this inevitably means that they are putting potential clickers into a space where 80%+ of the revenue then goes to Google – in simple terms they would be indirectly funding Google!

The launch of Microsoft Office 2010 online is interesting because it will need to address the issue of keeping the customer online, but more importantly, then keeping them searching with Microsoft rather than Google and therefore driving the revenue to maintain that web presence and ultimately replacing the revenue from the software offline-only version of Microsoft Office.

In this context, the strategy to keep people both online and offline i.e. a software app with web connectivity and storage works both ways – at least while Microsoft work out how to get some market share and revenue back in the search space. Interestingly, Google and Adobe are simultaneously working back the other way – from online to offline using Google Gears and Adobe Air.

To the customer, I suspect this will be quite acceptable, as it provides a gradual means to move to working entirely on the web at some point in the future and for Microsoft, it provides a delaying tactic to re-establish their search capability in the meantime. We reckon they could do with having a browser without a search box sitting outside of the main window though!

Ultimately, what fascinates us and what makes it relevant to marketers, is that all of this is driven by revenue streams, which come from (or through) us, the marketers – the online camp is driven by marketing spend and a desire to grow it by increasing advertising. Offline is only really driven by Microsoft’s reliance on software like Office to generate billions of dollars of income.

The question is – as a marketer, which version would you therefore prefer, online or offline?

How Google plan to increase sales

We saw the news about the new Google Chrome OS and thought a mini-post would be relevant to our last topic of online vs offline marketing, so here it is. (And because its a trendy topic, we might also get some extra clicks!)

Like every form of marketing, “if the customers ain’t buying, then the suppliers ain’t paying for marketing to attract ’em” and this will be as true for online marketing as offline. Although I have encapsulated this phrase in quotes,to make it look official and from someone with great authority, I actually invented it just now, so if it gets repeated, reference me.

If it is the case that people are not purchasing goods as much, then it stands to reason that they will therefore be searching for goods less. Inevitably, this will mean lower response and conversion from marketing, resulting in lower return on investment and therefore ultimately lower investment in more marketing. So if you are Google, and you derive revenue from this primarily, what do you do? ( Well what do you do that you can control!)

The answer is…

…you need to get people searching more frequently.

So how do you get people searching more frequently?

You get them to be online more.

How do you get them to be online more?

Simple, make it so that the Operating System gets them to the web faster and then keeps them there. i.e it boots up in seconds and it boots straight into the web or more specifically it boots straight into Google. No distractions, no faffing and no opportunity to avoid the ads. Then you make the browser work all of your lovely web based apps, which keep them online even longer, work really quickly in your own browser. If this sounds like a familiar strategy, I think you are catching our drift.

Next, we might see some heavy promotion of the cloud and acquisition of some SaaS companies to keep us online longer.

The question is, once we are online all the time, how will Google grow?

Suggestions are welcome below.