(Gasp!) Is it true? Is an endeavor on which so many hard-working copywriters have staked their incomes, though perhaps not their sanity, really going down the tubes?
Well, of course not. But that premise was the basis of an interesting piece “Is b-to-b marketing really obsolete?” recently published in B to B: The Magazine for Marketing Strategists.
In the piece, a panel of three prominent advertising executives—Rick Segal of GyroHSR, Gary Slack of Slack & Co., and Tom Stein of Stein Rogan+Partners—offered opinions about the evolution of business-to-business outreach.
The article was a bit long for my tastes, but these guys are professional communicators with strong egos, and they can be pardoned for pontificating a bit. This is the wisdom I distilled:
- Being at work is a state of mind. You’re no longer in an office much of the day and are continually switching back and forth between your work and personal lives. In fact, the demarcation is very, very blurry, aided and abetted by smartphones and the social media.
- B2B marketers, past and present, just wanna be where the buyers are. As Gary Slack notes, “That was true 40 to 30 to 20 years ago…and it’ll be true 10, 20, 30, 40 years into the future.”
- Creating custom content that speaks to customers and their communication preferences is now accounting for up to 25% of the marketing budgets of a lot of companies.
This quote from Rick Segal really sums it all up: “B-to-b marketing has always been social network marketing. It has just simply been conducted without the assistance of the wider range of tools and applications.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
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