People often forget that business buyers are just as human as the rest of us. Marketers sell to people, not companies. Of course, there are rational corporate “needs”, but B2B buyers have desires too, and emotions, often disguised and rationalised, that influence B2B purchasing decisions.
Buying for a business is a process is driven by many factors, such as accountability, risk and pressure of persuading multiple stakeholders. It certainly takes longer than buying something for the family.
By appealing to both the emotion and logic of your buyers, your brand is immediately more attractive, and memorable. B2B marketing really does demand a combination of rational and emotional appeals at specific points of the process.
B2B brands need to overcome the urge to focus solely on functional capabilities in order to create an emotional connection with their audience. Hard numbers and facts appeal to the rational brain. The abstract brain responds more to concepts such as safety and trust. The tendency with B2B clients is to lead with the “what” and “how”, which invariably means: “We’ve developed this great new product ‘X’, this is what it does, why you need it, and this is how we deliver it.” What we need to do is get B2B clients to bring the why further up list of priorities.
By relegating the why we do what we do to the end, it might not be noticed or even left out altogether. Therefore it’s really no wonder that often customers will not connect with a B2B brand on an emotional level.
What B2B amrketers should be doing more of is telling the brand story and referencing the target’s business problems in order to create empathy. This should then naturally segue into why X product should be purchased. Ultimately, it’s much more powerful to communicate that we understand the customer and can meet their needs.
In this information-loaded world, you can stand out from the crowd and sell more effectively if you concentrate on marketing that tells the world what you believe in and why you’re in the business that you’re in. By doing that effectively you can get prospects excited and engaged. When you communicate and differentiate your B2B brand by appealing to B2B buyers’ wants and beliefs, you make a much more compelling sales pitch.
Maia Honan is a board account director at Group Positive
Business people are human too? Maybe we should look at this the other way around. After all, if some of them behaved at home the way they behaved in the office, they’d decide on what to have for breakfast by having the kids trawl the internet to research the options, write up a report, circulate it to the neighbours, then make a final choice based on price alone – and wonder why nobody else wants to eat what they’ve chosen. Business decision making is simply complex – end of story. By all means make it ’emotional’ too, but don’t expect anything to change anytime soon.