But first, let me tweet it

By Mariagiulia Haag

The objective of this work is to demonstrate how the Digital Marketing can actually represent an important economical opportunity for B2B companies and how it should evolve from being just an occasional and optional activity to rather a strong and structured practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mariagiulia Haag
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9786050376135

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1. Abstract

The objective of this work is to demonstrate how the Digital Marketing can actually represent an important economical opportunity for B2B companies and how it should evolve from being just an occasional and optional activity to rather a strong and structured practice.

After providing a theoretical overview of the B2B market and B2B (online and offline) Marketing practices – the research draws attention to the analysis of the online profile of some B2B European and American companies to assess whether successful experiences of a Digital Marketing application are effectively present on the market. The truthfulness of the collected results is verified through further investigations, involving a different context: some B2B companies with specific characteristics (Italian companies operating also abroad and international companies located autonomously in Italy and with significant turnovers) are taken into consideration and directly interviewed through the compilation of a questionnaire. Given the broad variety of different industries that characterizes the B2B environment and the extremely high number of companies that operate in it – the whole analysis is aimed to identify a trend in the Digital Marketing phenomenon but it is conducted with the awareness of the limited range of the samples considered and an inevitable lack of completeness.

The results of the data analyzed show that the adoption of the Digital Marketing is much more acquired in the American markets than what happens in the Italian and European realities. To date, the benefits deriving from the application of Digital Marketing seem to regard only an improvement of corporate image and an increase of brand awareness but they have to become (and they have the potential of doing it) also economical, with a return in terms of revenues and turnover. Digital Marketing is a phenomenon that is definitely worthy to be explored and deepened: it is a real and concrete economical opportunity that should be included in the strategic lines of the companies' Marketing plan and stop being considered as something experimental.

The Italian companies that are operating in international markets should change their marketing approach and overcome as soon as possible the doubts and uncertainties that they have and start to develop a Digital Marketing strategy – choosing the tools and practices that are most suitable for their business and target audience, investing in the education and training of the personnel and adopting internal and/or external specialists. Getting success in Digital Marketing is rather a path but, on the basis of the research and the analysis made, it looks like companies are on the right way.

2. The B2B Market

Business-to-business (B2B) markets – usually known also as industrial markets – " can best be described as markets where one business markets and sells products and services for an organization’s own use or to sell on to other businesses for their own use " (Wright 2004).

Hence, B2B markets, rather than selling products and services directly to the end users, focus on the transactions in which two businesses are involved. It means that, differently to what happens on the business-to-consumer (B2C) markets, in a B2B context, the consumer is an organization that purchases the products or services for its business and not for an individual or private use.

In a B2B market it is possible to identify three different typologies of customers, each of which is characterized by a specific purchasing approach and represents a huge amount of buying power (Brassington & Pettitt 2006): commercial enterprises, government bodies and institutions.

In all B2B markets, customer satisfaction is the main mission: the whole organization in fact, has to be necessarily focused on the customers – with the objective to create supply and good (or service) value. Customer satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) is the feeling a customer has relatively to the extent their needs were effectively met by the experiences had with an organization (Hill, Roche & Allen 2007). Thus customer satisfaction is a relative concept which comprises, at the same time, the customer's expectations and the product or service performance. What really makes important customer satisfaction is the opportunity, for a company, to grab an economic profit from it. Customer satisfaction can be defined as an attitude, while loyalty should be considered as a behavior. Since behaviors are usually driven by attitudes, the correct measurement of customer satisfaction becomes crucially important for a company – not only to have a clearer overview of the future behaviors of the customers, but especially to make the right strategic moves in terms of the future performance. The first priority for a B2B company is to keep the old customers and then moving forward to acquire new ones.

A correct and successful B2B markets' management finds its basis on the following main principles:

1. Give to the value the utmost focus in the supplier/customer relationship . Value can be defined as what customers receive in terms of economic, technical and service benefits when purchasing a good – independently from the price that has been paid. In other words, value can be considered as a sort of economic evaluation made during the good's life in terms of the benefits received. 

2. Think through processes. A business process is the group of activities that are necessary in order to create a good or a service which is