Business Customers Are Digital. Shouldn't Your Marketing Be?

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Are you skeptical about using digital and social media in business marketing? Think it's only for consumers, and that business customers don't have time for it? Your competitors don't think so. And they are gaining competitive advantage by embracing new digital and social methods of connecting with their customers.

Those tools are fast becoming the single most important way to attract new business customers and sustain old ones. Search has become one of the most efficient ways to create and optimize leads. Customers are hungry for more and different kinds of digital content, and new ways to network and engage online.

Increasingly, business customers create great content and experiences to market to their own customers, so they know what they want from suppliers when they themselves are the potential buyers. That doesn't mean Procter & Gamble expects to see the Old Spice guy selling enterprise software (although maybe it couldn't hurt). Business customers do expect to see the same unique and effective tools they use: from how-to videos on YouTube, to personalization tools, to employees as customer service reps, to intuitive design that rewards past activity and predictive data analytics.

At the heart of successful digital marketing to business customers are three core qualities: Radical Transparency, Micro-Relevancy and Open Collaboration.

Radical Transparency
There's no hiding in today's digital world. Your customers already know, or can quickly find out, everything about you and what you sell. They expect you to be honest about how your products and services stack up — by sharing detailed descriptions of features and applications, multiple opinions, and even negative reviews.

Google calls this the Zero Moment of Truth. We've seen Google sales leader Jim Lecinski challenge a room of business marketers to search YouTube for even the most obscure product. It never fails — some video always surfaces.

Dell has invested in ratings and reviews and received an unexpected positive customer response. IBM has empowered more than 100,000 employees to become experts on social media platforms, answering questions and becoming thought leaders.

Micro-Relevancy
Digital marketing tools bring us within reach of the ultimate dream of marketing: reaching the right audience with the right offer at exactly the right time. They reveal who is using your digital content, what they are doing with it, and what they want.

At GE, we call this micro-relevancy. Digital and social tools have enabled focusing on smaller, more meaningful segments of what was a broad, undefined "audience." So, success is no longer measured in millions of pageviews. A more useful metric would be actively engaging, for example, with a thousand university administrators looking to buy new power generation services.

Omni Hotels & Resorts used a blogger outreach program to promote its meetings and events business to a micro-audience of influencers ignored by its competitors, leading to hundreds of conversations and direct sales leads. Accenture Management Consulting used LinkedIn to set up a careers group — when the group ballooned to more than 5000 members, Accenture subdivided it into separate, micro-relevant groups aimed at specific kinds of potential customers.

The more precisely targeted the audience, the more effective recommendations on social platforms can be — after all, businesspeople tend to value the opinions of colleagues and industry professionals, especially specialists in the relevant area.

Open Collaboration
Open collaboration is where the digital promise transcends what was possible even a short time ago — conjuring a world where businesses and customers work together to create something of value that might not have existed otherwise. We're now having constructive conversations with our most knowledgeable and committed customers, whether through a customer advisory board, a user group that regularly gives product feedback, or an online customer-innovation center. That feedback makes later iterations of our products better, faster. It can also open up entirely new pathways of innovation.

One of the oldest methods for encouraging technological innovation — competition — is enjoying a well-deserved comeback thanks to new digital and social tools. Cisco's iPrize is an open innovation competition designed to find an idea that could be the basis for a whole new business unit. Microsoft annually awards its $25,000 Imagine Cup to a student team that best uses technology to solve a real world problem.

At GE, we've enjoyed the unprecedented success of the ecomagination Challenge, where we invited business plans for new inventions to power the smart grid in return for investment funding. We were overwhelmed with the response — 5,000 business plans from innovators in 150 countries, and active participation from nearly 100,000 enthusiasts. The results speak for themselves: new partnerships with start-ups, venture capitalists and retailers, and the ability to bring new offerings to our existing customers.

Digital marketing takes investment, experimentation — even a degree of faith — before specific goals can be met. But results are stacking up. Your customers are digital. Shouldn't you be too?