The Marketing Leaders - The challenge of finding and keeping customers

TML discovers that the B2B sector has been very innovative, and this includes the question of how you acquire, retain existing customers and be competitive. How? Read on…

Over recent years, business-to-business marketing seems to be where the real innovations in data, insight and thought leadership have been made. Conversely, consumer marketing appears to be a proliferation of me too products and service providers.

A new generation of B2B experts have been helping companies develop relationship marketing strategies that will continue to deliver consistent, reliable and profitable return on investment into the medium and long-term.

It is common practice to identify prospective new customers by their sector, size, geography etc and applying statistical segmentation analysis to identify groups that exhibit similar characteristics. They also recognise that insight improves overall effectiveness and enables engagement and relationship building.

The particular insight approach chosen by various providers will differ. Information Arts, for instance, focuses on the vast small business and self-employed community - we believe that this market continues to offer suppliers a significant and profitable source of new business opportunities. The sheer size of the market (arguably around 3.5 m business entities) means that a highly targeted approach is required and that more than likely direct media is going to be used.

A business with personality

Most field salespeople will tell you that they instinctively believe that businesses have personalities, and that they adjust their approach once they are in the reception area and pick up the clues about whom they are trying to sell to. This is usually referred to as the company culture and in large businesses is a result of the Board of Directors’ values and prejudices formally articulated in processes and governance, and the interplay of similar personalities supporting those processes.

In the less formalised environment of the small business, it’s the personalities, values and prejudices of the director and owner manager that influence the buying processes, often with little or no dispute. As there are inevitably less of these people in any small business we believe that this effect can be seen in a distilled, raw but useful state.

For this reason, Information Arts created the insight classification DNA. This links business and consumer data together and adds depth through appending consumer information to the underlying directors’ and owners’ data. This blended data approach allows Information Arts to provide all-important insights. Companies are able to see a picture of whom their small business clients are, not just the size and type of business. DNA enables values to be inferred and can make complex selections.

The consumer information element allows more selections to be analysed, for example that customers in various business segments read tabloid or broadsheet newspapers or whether decision makers in certain industry types prefer long or short haul holidays. This greater understanding has enabled companies to produce marketing collateral that really speaks to their audience. No longer is there the need to send the same creative to a 50 year-old tabloid reading married male as to a 25-year-old broadsheet reading single female.

However, this is only part of the targeting journey; there is still some distance to travel. What we now need to understand is what drives directors or owner managers to behave in certain ways so we can develop activity that responds to this.

It is perfectly reasonable that two businesses could appear to be the same, with similar turnover, and be run by owners who are of similar ages and similar characteristics, but importantly make purchase decisions in very different ways. In order to understand the drivers behind the different behaviours Information Arts carried out a primary research programme.

The initial qualitative research produced three high level typologies - Passionate, Expert and Money Maker. This work helped to support the initial assumption that different personalities make purchase decisions for different reasons, but it required further refinement. It also provided clarification of the questions necessary to be able to develop more granular segmentation.

The second stage of the research was a major survey among more than 200,000 small business owners; the output identified eight distinct typologies. This information provides vast insight and colour to support targeting and proposition development and the underlying data allows us to append a psycho-demographic industrial classification (PIC) code to every small business record we hold.

Through this we are now able to provide multi-dimensional selections, which make it possible for companies to finally see the business type, personality characteristics and personal drivers of their customers and prospects. Companies are now able to truly engage with their customers by producing marketing collateral that not only creatively grabs attention, but also tailors messages to fit the personality and values of the intended audience. Furthermore, the insight means it is easier to identify the best marketing medium to communicate these messages.

The granularity and clarity offered by the new values based classification opens the door to some truly innovative and exciting marketing communications. What is needed now is for the creative community to embrace the theory and the practice and to work alongside the new information artists to ensure that their work truly leverages the insights revealed.



		The challenge of finding and keeping customers
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