3 strategies to reach your B2B and B2C audiences
Working for an industrial giant in the agricultural machinery sector
There are more and more companies — also in the industrial sector — that break with the false belief that B2B communication does not require as much effort as B2C communication, because they have learned that segmenting the audience and developing different communication strategies for different audiences has sense.
Working for BCS Group we have developed projects that are exclusively B2B but, especially, projects that fall into a third category: B2B2C; a model in which company A sells to company B, but in turn interacts directly with customers of company B under its own brand.
The company
Abbiategrasso — half agricultural, half industrial city, just 22 kilometers from Milan — houses the headquarter of BCS Group, one of the three production centers that the leading company in the manufacture of tractors, agricultural and industrial machinery has in Italy. Ferrari, in Luzzara, is dedicated to the design and manufacture of mechanical transmissions and tractors. And MOSA, in Cusago, to the generation of autonomous electric power — generators and lighting towers — and to autonomous welding equipment — welding machines.
The company, which operates in more than 100 countries with the BCS, Ferrari, Pasquali and Mosa trademarks, needs to develop different strategies as they are aimed at its direct customers — distributors and importers of machinery — or its final customers — professional farmers, among others. The following are three of the most recent projects carried out for BCS Group, both for B2B and B2C clients.
1. Product catalogs for B2B sales
The very nature of the company, with two lines of business — agricultural and industrial — and with a multitude of products makes it difficult for the commercial team to transmit, to distributors and potential customers, a global vision of the company and its offer.
Adapting the message to the audience is always the key to success and we were faced with one of those cases in which a company presents itself to its distributors using the same materials, often dispersed –multiple catalogs, at the rate of a catalog for each product–, which said distributors will use for sale to the final customer.
Based on this challenge, we conceptualized and designed an individualized product catalog for each brand, specially created for B2B sales (manufacturer –distributor).
If the commercial team previously presented the company using the same catalogs that are intended for the end customer, it can now be done with catalogs created specifically for potential distributors/importers to quickly and clearly perceive the value the brand can bring to their business.
More info on the catalogs: Case Study at Baku.cat
2. Product videos
Once provided with catalogs for B2B sales, the company wanted to explore a different way of addressing its end customers — for those who already had paper (catalog) and digital (web) documentary support—, demonstrating how adapted to their needs are the products BCS manufactures.
Considering how succesful the company was whenever they organized product demonstrations, in which they invited farmers to see the machines working, we proposed to develop a series of documentary videos in which specific operations of the machines could be seen in certain crops, with the collaboration of important producers.
The vineyards of Sant Sadurní d’Anoia (Catalunya), the greenhouses in El Ejido (Almería), blueberries and wild fruits in Huelva, kiwifruit vineyards in Felgueiras (Portugal), are — among others — key crops for BCS, in which we based the development of this series of videos. In addition to showing the machines in their natural habitat, we filmed the testimonies of farms owners and the farmers who use the machines daily.
For each crop we generated a final piece of 4 minutes of video, which is distributed in different channels — mainly web and social networks—, in which it is the farmers themselves who explain the product to other farmers who are working the same crops and having the same needs.
It is not always essential to have a large budget to reach our audience. In this case it was enough to find the appropriate channels and formats that make our message perceived as useful and valuable by our potential client.
We decided to flee from a regular advertising tone, avoiding spectacular shots, special effects and an artificial construction of the scenes, using real actors and focusing on what really brought credibility to the project: the testimonies of the farmers, presenting them without makeup and without acting.
3. Articles in specialized press
All the displacements required by the video production are also used to gather information in each area about the crops, farms and farmers that work in them, in order to write a series of technical articles that will be published in different specialized journals in the sector.
These articles act as a counterpoint to the videos which —as commented before— offer a vision centered on the testimonies of the farmers, with a technical discourse built from the company itself, with our implication in the writing, in addition to the technical and marketing departments, which allows us to delve deeper into the explanation of the product.
However powerful a company’s marketing or communication department may be, it is often technicians who know the product better than anyone else. A positive effect of this initiative is that the company adopts a culture in which technicians participate in product description, raising, as experts, the quality of communication.
More info: Baku.cat
