In a current Swedish pod debate, several insightful people claim that conventional B2B media (analogue and digital) are at the verge of extinction. And that B2B marketing departments will morph into editorial offices producing content relevant to potential buyers.
This evolution seems more or less inevitable:
• The most effective means of business communication has always been the real time dialogue between potential buyers and sellers. When the buyer needs the product or service, and the seller can supply it. In our digital age this can be achieved in far more precise and efficient ways.
• Buyers and sellers will find each other via net search, but a mutually beneficial match requires that all relevant information is searchable, reasonably objective and reliable. And that buyers use more and more sophisticated and complex search strings.
• Suppliers will continually search for more and more knowledge about current and potential customers, their needs, priorities, preferences, habits etc. And use the insight to optimize their offering as well as their presentation and services via their web sites.
• These websites (and other owned and controlled digital arenas) will continue to merge with sales and other internal systems.
• Print becomes more and more marginalized, and external, bought digital media cannot be expected to manage this continual and highly dynamic matching process very effectively.
• Current and potential customers/clents will expect their suppliers’ websites to offer more complete, less self-centered, more updated, more reliable and objective and more easily searchable information. Much like they used to expect in leading trade publications.
This may not necessarily be the whole truth, but would you really invest in a trade publication today? Or, more to the point, what does all this mean for your marketing strategy and, indeed, for your job?