One of the most important tenants of marketing is to know your audience. Most companies consider themselves either business to business facing or business to customer facing. At Defiant, I believe every business should be both.
Peer recommendation is the second largest way consumers choose a brand. Businesses can benefit from peer endorsement from other businesses. particularly within the same location. Openly working collaboratively online like a digital traders association, can endorse both businesses to the others clientele and promote cross business sales. Twitter is a perfect platform for this. Bath-based Twitter is full of independent companies supporting and retweeting each other. This validation by other businesses can not only boost individual company profiles online by opening up new markets via other businesses audiences, but can lead to future collaborative B2B endeavours. With more companies rushing to get online and establish a presence, its important not just for your direct customers to know your there. While you may consider yourself a B2C business and market that way 80% of the time, it is still important to develop some relational marketing with B2B elements to endorse your business within its local vicinity.
If you consider yourself a primarily B2B company, your online presence can still be grown by appealing to end users of your product. A wholesaler to a business I support reached beyond B2B contracts as the hospitality sector shrank to market B2C directly to end user customers with Flash Sales, online sign ups and digital catalogues. On a larger scale, businesses such as tresemme, started as salon products and was traditionally marketed in a B2B capacity but they branched to B2C marketing directly to the end user. By offering to cut out the expansive salon, to get their salon products you wanted at a fraction of the salon prices, they made their product instantly more affordable and expanded their niche.
Its important for businesses to not pigeon-hole themselves into a small market niche where sales stagnate. It may seem counter productive to building sales leads to focus away from a target audience (or custom audience you have built) but particularly digitally, where
competition is fierce and the best way to generate leads can come from a simple, generic message with wide appeal.
Defiant Media & Marketing 