There are no shortcuts, difficult to shortcuts, and difficult to reach, compared with the marketing gameplay of a hundred flowers on the C-side, B2B marketing is full of complexity. With the development of the TO B industry, the situation of cross-industry alliance and competition is becoming more and more obvious, and how B2B enterprises can use marketing to achieve brand promotion and business development is becoming the most concerned issue for CXOs in the TO B industry in the digital era.
SAP is the world's leading provider of enterprise application software, providing solutions and services that help businesses of all sizes in more than 25 industries achieve operational excellence. While the business is developing steadily, SAP is also constantly innovating in marketing methods, and in recent years, SAP's different types of marketing projects have been recognized by the Effie Award for many times.
This time, Effie Greater China invited Effie to dialogueQuan Jijian, a member of Effie's CXO Club, Vice President of SAP Greater China, and General Manager of Digital Marketing CenterSir, share how to match subdivided industries with different content through a variety of marketing methods and channel combinations, so as to achieve the trinity of B2B marketing in brand promotion, business development and user empowerment.
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Transcript of the interview
q1
You have been working in the field of B2B marketing for many years, and SAP has also won several Effie Awards in the B2B track in the past few years. Can you share with us your observations in the field of B2B marketing, what are the characteristics of B2B marketing?
I think there are three main characteristics of B2B marketing. First of all, B2B marketing needs to be based on deeper insights into customers and their business needs. Most of the B2B business decision-making chain is relatively long compared to B2C, from the beginning of the contact to the final cooperation process, there will be a lot of different levels of influencing factors and people into the decision-making chain, according to the third-party research shows, a B2B decision-making, customers will have an average of as many as 27 contacts with the first business. Therefore, it is very important to deeply understand customer needs, care about the current situation and trends of the industry in which customers live, and gain insight into what the business challenges brought about by these status quos and trends.
In the past, the marketing department could only conduct some customer interviews or conduct some targeted questionnaires, but now because we have more ways to obtain information, we can deeply understand the needs of customers and their industries from more and broader scopes and perspectives, so as to provide more targeted help and support to sales.
Secondly, B2B marketing places a lot of emphasis on interaction with customers. As mentioned earlier, the chain of B2B marketing process is very long, and we need to face many levels of customer contacts, and in the past, we could only communicate with standardized content, expecting a set of solutions to be applicable everywhere. Now we have a lot of freedom to customize richer personalized communication, and we have a high degree of freedom in communication channels and communication times, and we are able to face different customers through different communication channels at different communication points for targeted interaction;And with the development of AIGC, we can quickly produce targeted customized content in terms of contentFinally, with the development of technology,We can quickly get feedback on interactions, and guide the channel, timing and content adjustments in subsequent communications, so as to achieve more targeted and efficient interactions.
Third, B2B marketing also needs to pay attention to the coordination and linkage of marketing and sales. The sales leads found by marketing should be able to be delivered to sales colleagues in a timely manner, and the communication feedback between sales and customers will also be synchronized to marketing colleagues, and marketing colleagues will adjust marketing content and channels according to the feedback to assist in the promotion of sales. Especially for cloud services such as SAP, in the past, the sale of monolithic software or solutions to customers ended, and now SaaS solutions need to maintain communication with customers, understand the use and needs, and adjust product functions or services at any time, which is a long-term companion service way, so B2B marketing will have higher requirements for professionals.
q2
It will be more challenging for B2B brands to achieve a breakthrough in communication than ordinary B2C brands
Brand is very important to every company, especially for a software company like SAP, and it is the core strength of our communication with customers. I believe that corporate branding is not just the work of the marketing department or the brand department, everyone in the company should be a contributor to the brand.
I believe that the success of the SAP brand mainly lies in the following aspects. First of all, the company's business strategy is aligned with the needs of users. SAP in China to deliver to customersWe adhere to the concept of "in China, for China", and want to become an enabler of "new Chinese enterprises" in the cloud era. This is very much in line with the needs of Chinese customers.
Secondly, technological innovation helps to achieve brand strategy. Many of the campaigns we do, whether it's AI basketball coaching or creating a zero-carbon court, are all about realizing our brand strategy through SAP's technological innovations.
The third point is to promote with customers and endorse the brand with actual cases. A lot of SAP's brand promotion is done through our customers' practices, and the actual effects of customers can bring strong communication effects to the brand.
Fourth, brands also need to use cross-border cooperation to make a wider public understand, and our "Legendary Movement" project, which successfully won the Effie Award in Greater China in 2022, has achieved brand breakthrough communication through cross-border cooperation, and has received a lot of praise in the industry. NBA data and SAP solutions are very B2B content, which will be easy for people in the IT industry to understand, but the public is not very familiar with it, so we choose to cooperate with the international pianist Lang Lang to visualize the technical application value of SAP through the best form that the public can understand, so that the public can easily understand.
q3
Under the vigorous trend of the development of the digital economy, the fragmentation of user attention is becoming more and more obvious, and new concepts, new models, and new business formats are emerging one after another, which is dizzying. How should enterprises use new marketing methods to achieve effective reach?
The integration of quality and efficiency is the ideal goal of marketing, but in fact, brand and effectiveness are twoIn different dimensions, brand communication is mainly about concepts and value directions, and actual reach is about business opportunities and products. Brand communication can help acquire customers and increase sales, and product-based communication can help brands enrich their connotation and better interpret the value and tonality of the brand. On this basis, we have also made a lot of new marketing attempts to integrate quality and efficiency. For example, we have been operating the community for many years, and we are not only IT or technical leaders, but we also continue to integrate business, HR and other C-level customers into the community. In the operation of the C Level community, we have always adhered to the purpose of providing value without commercial purpose.
I would like to share with you a case where we recently won the 2023 Effie Performance Marketing Award, SAP and HR think tank and vertical ** have worked together to create a refined private domain community - the CHRO community of Synopsys. This project is not only a private domain community, but also a model of omnichannel marketing.
Through a complete set of digital SCRM system "Intelligent Address Book", we reach out to long-term interactions such as content customized push and personalized tags in the HR head ** data pool, delineate target customers, and customize and recommend more online and offline theme exchange activities and community social activities to them. In doing so, Smart Contacts is used throughout the customer journey to ensure that customer data privacy is in place in the marketing campaign and meets or exceeds the compliance standards required by the latest personal privacy regulations.
We do not directly promote our products in the community, but provide added value to community members through information sharing and case sharing, and provide experience and help support for their work. We will also provide communication opportunities for customers in different industries in the community, promote interaction and cooperation between them, and make the community a platform for communication and cooperation, rather than a channel for SAP product information release. By operating and managing the community in such a non-commercial way, we already have a lot of business from community members who actively communicate with us to achieve the integration of quality and efficiency.
q4
With the development of the global economy and the popularity of cross-border e-commerce, more and more enterprises are aware of the importance of overseas marketing. SAP is the world's leading provider of enterprise-level software solutions, do you have any suggestions for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of overseas marketing with the help of digital marketing tools?
SAP has the broadest and most comprehensive range of enterprise-grade solutionsWhat we provide is a set of global operation solutions, not only in terms of overseas marketing, but also in local compliance control, logistics management, chain collaboration and other all-round support.
Of course, we have obvious advantages in the subdivision scenario of overseas marketing. First of all, we have a lot of successful service experienceWe have helped many large, medium and small Chinese enterprises to achieve business overseas, such as DJI and Hisense are our long-term customers.
Secondly, we have a very complete compliance data management system. Like many hotels, airlines and other customers, their user information is the core asset, but there are local data management standards, how to achieve global integration and compliance operation in various places, SAP has perfect solutions and experience.
Thirdly, we have started to be intelligent in the field of marketing. Combined with AI capabilities, we can provide customers with market analysis and development, and grasp market trends in advance to formulate marketing measures. Finally, we have highly integrated solutions. Based on our years of ERP experience, our solutions can help customers connect marketing with production, sales and logistics, and realize the overall management and operation of the whole link in the product life cycle.