1. Understanding The Channels:
An Overview Of Social, Mobile, Digital And Traditional
Marketing For B2B

2. With an endless gamut of channels coming into
play in today’s complex world of marketing, B2B
marketers often find themselves reeling under the
pressure of which one to choose. There’s digital in
general, mobile marketing and how our
omnipresent devices are changing everything
about marketing. There’s social media marketing
and, of course, there’s traditional marketing, which
still remains an important part of the equation.
However, in the B2B industry, not every marketing
channel makes sense for every business. No one-
size-fits-all-formula works either. What works then?
In order to find the right marketing channel for your
business, you’ve got to be a little inquisitive, a little
more intuitive and a whole lot more focused.

3. ONE GOAL, MANY STRATEGIES – KNOW THE
DIFFERENCE
While your marketing efforts should be customer-
centric, you may go about it through different
marketing routes.

4. TRADITIONAL MARKETING
Display ads, direct mail, banner ads, billboards,
TV, radio, and a whole lot of offline tactics are
important when it comes to attracting the
attention of your target customers. These are
traditional marketing tactics and, for a long time,
were the only way to do business.
DIGITAL MARKETING
I like to think of digital marketing as traditional
marketing done online, as the basic premise remains
the same – engaging the customers and responding
to their concerns. While digital marketing may seem
like a less human interaction than face-to-face
marketing, remember there’s a human behind every
desktop or mobile screen that you’re targeting.

5. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
With marketers increasing their social media spending at
a steady rate, this has emerged as one of the most
popular marketing channels for B2B companies. Great
for building a brand image for your business, for
listening and gathering insights, and for finding and
engaging with prospects and customers, this marketing
strategy works best when integrated with other
marketing tactics.
MOBILE MARKETING
Mobile has, without question, taken over as the most
preferred medium for research and consumption of
content on the Internet. As such, a designing and
developing all marketing strategies with a mobile first
mindset isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.

6. MARKETING STRATEGIES MUST OVERLAP
At some point, your marketing strategies need to
converge to give you the best outcomes. For instance,
if you are selling software, you can find new
customers and educate or inform the existing ones
about new products or updates through social media
and/or the use of video in creative ways. But, if you
sell farming equipment, you might split your marketing
efforts into two ways – social media for educating
customers, combined with traditional methods like
direct mail, banner ads or TV spots to help you do the
actual selling.
Then again, dividing your prospects into different
segments would require you to have more than one
marketing strategies in place to target specific groups.
This is why you need a marketing mix – a seamless
integration of two or more marketing tactics

7. LET’S START WITH THE BASICS
The heart of every marketing effort should lie in its target customers. So if you start by
shutting out all the noises and focus only on your target customers, you will be better
positioned to develop the right marketing model to suit your business goals. Remember,
what’s good for your customers will ultimately be good for your business. Here are a few
steps you can follow to know what might work for you:

8. KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS
An important fact that most marketers
ignore is that customer intelligence at the
core of your marketing efforts. So the
ideal way to begin is by gaining a better
understanding of your customers. Note
their key demographics like age, gender
etc., identify their needs, their purchase
patterns, spending habits, what influences
their buying decision, and so on.
Collecting and analyzing this data is
crucial in deciding which marketing
channels are the best fits for you.

9. ANALYZE YOUR OWN STRENGTHS
AND WEAKNESSES
Introspecting is a great way to build your
marketing model on the basis of your
strengths while supplanting your
weaknesses. Carry out a SWOT analysis
to spot the strengths and weaknesses of
your business operation while identifying
the opportunities and threats you are likely
to face.

10. UNDERSTAND WHAT ‘MIGHT’ GIVE
YOU THE BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK
To find the right marketing voice for your
business you would of course be looking
for that channel which offers the best
returns on your money and efforts. But
ROI is a highly elusive term and if you’re
not sure what to measure, you could well
end up mistaking all those glorious social
media “likes” and “shares” as a great
return, while there’s no real cash coming
in. When it comes to calculating your ROI,
look at your vanity metrics, but use your
real metrics – things like list growth, form
submission, leads, conversions, etc., and
what channels they came from to measure
your true ROI.

11. DON’T BE TEMPTED TO TRY EVERY NEW TRICK
IN THE BOOK RANDOMLY
If you wish to try something new, by all means, go
ahead. However, don’t be swept away by every shiny
new tactic that arrives in the market. If there’s
something that’s working for you, stick to it while
adding one or two tactics in your marketing mix and
then evaluating their effectiveness. Try out one
marketing model at a time. Give your strategies
some time to show results before jumping on to the
next one.
While trialing different strategies is something that
most marketers do, they tend to overlook the main
goal behind their marketing efforts – giving their
customers the best experience ever. When this is
taken care of, your marketing efforts will fall into
place.

12. Dan Newman is the president of Broadsuite where he works side
by side with brands big and small to help them be found, seen and
heard in a cluttered digital world. A regular contributor to Forbes,
Entrepreneur and Huffington Post, he is also the author of two
books, a business professor and a huge fan of watching his
daughters play soccer.
Dan Newman
President of Broadsuite
@danielnewmanuv dnewman@broadsuite.com