Convergence in B2B and B2C Mobile Marketing?

(A recent column I wrote for Mobile Marketer.)

On the surface, there are stark differences between
business-to-business marketing and business-to-consumer marketing:
audience size, volume of sales and magnitude of purchases. But as
mobile becomes ubiquitous for connecting with customers, are we
starting to see a convergence between the two? Some industry insiders have contested that a desire to manage unified communications via mobile avenues could become more common in years to come.

I would contend
that the answer is, yes – if we have the courage to think creatively
and move beyond the already-tired clichés of mobile marketing such as
text campaigns and mobile couponing.

In fact, with a bit of creative thought, the opportunity for
connecting with new customers in both audiences is quite remarkable if
we concentrate on the experiences that can be provided with today’s
mobile devices.

So what are the ways that we can get creative?

Let’s look at the root of that word, “creative” for a second. It stems from create.

Every
one of our prospective customers – both B2B and B2C – has not just a
tiny screen onto which we can foist our message, but now has the
ability to create things as well – photos, videos, conversations and
relationships.

Let’s look at the taken-for-granted camera phone capabilities.

Again,
why not think about how we can bring prospects into the process by
enabling and encouraging them to be a creative part of the sale,
instead of a passive recipient?

In the B2C case, we can, for
example, encourage contests and participation where customers take
their photos with the most interesting/scenic/extraordinary usage of
our products and submit them to a community site.

Similarly, we
can encourage B2B customers to send their sales reps photos of their
unique environment/circumstance/prickly problem so that the reps can
better understand the situation and propose an insightful solution.

In the B2C case, we could encourage video testimonials to be pulled into a powerful montage.

In
the B2B case, we can gather videos of customer best-practice tips to
illustrate how our products perform in the real-world and how they are
being used to solve real problems in an efficient manner.

But,
more important than the technical tools, why not enable prospects to
easily connect with the people and information they need to make a
decision to buy?

It is all about the connections and the relationships.

In
the B2C case, a great example of this would be making it easy for
customers to locate and, after the initial sale, create reviews of
their experiences with a product from other customers.

Similarly,
in the B2B realm, this entails providing tools to connect the prospect
with other similar past customer references, testimonials, case studies
or a knowledgeable sales associate.

The upshot is that for both
B2B and B2C we have a real opportunity with mobile: the opportunity to
differentiate based on how we encourage, empower and enable active,
social customers instead of passive targets.

The organizations that crack the code on this are going to be the winners in using this medium.

Moreover, with the emergence of firms like AdAction in the advertising market, businesses can further take advantage of the ‘advertise in mobile‘ technique. This can help entrepreneurs to increase their chances of creating a huge customer base (that comprises both B2B and B2C customers) easily. So, let us use mobile to bring both B2B and B2C customers into the process,
instead of simply throwing marketing messages at them.

Let’s
challenge ourselves to start conversations, and enable prospective
customers to engage with us and with each other, regardless of what
bucket – B2B or B2C – in which they have historically been
classified. Let us try to understand our customers better because that is crucial for the growth of any organization.