Monday, November 12, 2007

B2B – a booming market

According to recent research the UK business-to-business marketing sector is worth a staggering £9.8 billion and booming. There are reckoned to be 176,000 marketing practitioners just working in B2B and a further 272,000 partly working in B2B marketing. So, on paper a big market for agencies to go after. What is not clear from the summary and headline figures is quite how the B2B sector is structured. On the face of it there should be some huge agencies just living on B2B clients, yet most big advertising agencies seem to focus on consumer marketing and anecdotal evidence suggests most B2B agencies are small, or one man operations. Then again the report says that ‘agencies are not seen as important’ that only 20% use agencies for strategic thinking, over a quarter do not use an agency at all and 50% of the marketing practitioners have no marketing qualifications. These figures tally better with our experience of B2B marketing. Yes companies are putting money into activities broadly classified as marketing, many try to do their own thing, few have any real strategy or a written marketing plan. So from the agency side it is quite likely a large part of the £9.8 billion does not go through them, so whether B2B specialist marketing agencies are booming is another matter, but probably not. Neither judging by the attention of media salesmen are traditional trade publications booming. Particularly in the industrial sector many journals seem to have stripped back staffing levels and are hanging on by the skin of their teeth while reluctantly, belatedly and half-heartedly looking towards the internet. The trouble with big numbers like billions is we never handle sums on money with that many zeros, or are even sure how many zeros there should be. According to Wikipedia it is 1,000,000,000 but the there is the short scale billion (a thousand million) or long scale (a million million – 1,000,000,000,000). So rounding figures up the UK B2B market is put at £10,000,000,000, the number of practitioners at 476,000 so that works out at about £21,000 per head not such an exciting number, or it could be £2 million of course - unlikely. That is another problem with big numbers, relating them to something meaningful. Our experience shows that knowing market sizes and market shares does not easily translate into useful marketing knowledge. At the end of the day the only knowledge is does the marketing investment contribute to improved profitability.

e-Mail - a rebirth?

Yesterday news arrived from Honda, by way of their hotmail account, that not only had my e-mail address been drawn to win a new car but I also stood to win several million pound in a further competition. Today I have been contacted by an attorney anxious to trace the beneficiary of a multi-million dollar legacy who has reason to believe I might be the rightful heir to this fortune. Then a K I Bakri asked for help from his death bed in distributing a fortune stashed in his diplomatic box to the under privileged of the world. Perhaps unaware of this rapid accumulation of wealth many more people have kindly sent me offers for fake watches, amazing medications that will enhance my life, share tips and cheap software. All this means frequently de-cluttering my e-mail in box and hoping I don’t inadvertently trash a message that is actually of importance to my business. Amongst all this lunacy there have been frequent reports placing e-mail back as the top Internet application and a powerful marketing tool. Arguably e-mail was the first Internet marketing tool and judging by a sense of weight of e-mail delivered marketing advice recently it has survived all the concerns of junk and spam to emerge reborn. Various communications and blogs seem to have almost rediscovered e-mail as a marketing tool. Of course we are also an advocate of e-mail and for some clients direct mail is just not affordable as the costs are per item – print, postage, envelope etc – compared to an e-mail set up cost largely independent of volume. Of course much has also been written about list building, opt-in subscribers, frequency of e-mails, subject lines and much more. Yes it works, but really as part of an integrated marketing programme where other communications methods are employed as well. But is it enjoying a new beginning? The jury is still out on that one.