B2B content marketing for professional services: In-person versus digital contacts

We study whether marketing can have a new role, one that is better aligned with the sales force, by adapting content marketing (CM) in B2B professional services organizations. CM activities can be in-person events such as conferences, which involve personal contacts with clients, or digital, such as webinars (i.e., digital events) or posting firm-generated content on branded websites (i.e., digital content). Fitting random-effects negative binomial regression models with four years of panel data from a large, international, consulting service provider, we show that the number of sales leads and won opportunities from its key accounts are positively affected by the frequency of an account's employees attending digital events and consuming digital content, but not in-person events. Moreover, we find that CM affects sales leads for both low- and high-level account employees. These findings suggest that CM can be effective in bringing sales leads and won opportunities to B2B professional service providers and can play a complementary role to the existing sales force.     

Harnessing marketing automation for B2B content marketing

The growing importance of the Internet to B2B customer purchasing decisions has motivated B2B sellers to create digital content that leads potential buyers to interact with their company. This trend has engendered a new paradigm referred to as ‘content marketing.’ This study investigates the organizational processes for developing valuable and timely content to meet customer needs and for integrating content marketing with B2B selling processes. The results of this single case study demonstrate the use of marketing automation to generate high-quality sales leads through behavioral targeting and content personalization. The study advances understanding of the organizational processes that support content marketing and shows how content marketing can be combined with B2B selling processes via marketing automation in ways that achieve business benefits.     

成品油销售企业非油商品管理优化

随着我国成品油销售企业加油站非油业务规模的不断扩大,非油商品周转缓慢、库存积压、效益不佳等问题日益突出。为切实提高非油商品管理效率和效益,优化非油商品进、销、存和资金管理,降低存货成本,提高非油业务效益,本文深入研究了非油商品采购量优化方法、非油商品销售及周转优化方法、非油商品库存量优化方法、非油商品资金占用优化方法和非油商品EVA价值优化方法。建议在非油业务经营管理中通过优化非油商品采购、库存、结构、周转、效益管理等做法,改善我国成品油销售企业非油商品管理现状,提升非油业务发展质量。     

B2B social media semantics: Analysing multimodal online meanings in marketing conversations

There are theoretical and methodological gaps in the B2B social media marketing communications literature. As a consequence, there is a need for new approaches that provide a comprehensive understanding of how B2B online marketing posts create virtual conversations and the types of meanings these linked communication events construct and convey, particularly as these message are often distributed across multiple social media platforms. This paper presents a Social Semiotic Multimodal (SSMM) framework that attempts to address shortfalls in theory and method conceptualisation of social media communications. This framework employs multimodal extensions to systemic functional linguistics enabling it to be applying to analysing non-language as well as language constituents of social media messages. Furthermore the framework also utilises expansion theory to identify, categorise and analyse various marketing communication resources associated with marketing messages and also to reveal how conversations are chained together to form extended online marketing conversations. This semantic approach is exemplified using a Fairtrade Australia B2B case study demonstrating how marketing conversations can be mapped and analysed. The framework emphasises the importance of acknowledging the impact of all stakeholders, particularly messages that may distract or confuse the original purpose of the conversation.     

A comparison of social media marketing between B2B,B2C and mixed business models

This paper explores the implicit assumption in the growing body of literature that social media usage is fundamentally different in business-to-business (B2B) companies than in the extant business-to-consumer (B2C) literature. Sashi's (2012) customer engagement cycle is utilized to compare organizational practices in relation to social media marketing in B2B, B2C, Mixed B2B/B2C and B2B2C business models. Utilizing 449 responses to an exploratory panel based survey instrument, we clearly identify differences in social media usage and its perceived importance as a communications channel. In particular we identify distinct differences in the relationship between social media importance and the perceived effectiveness of social media marketing across business models. Our results indicate that B2B social media usage is distinct from B2C, Mixed and B2B2C business model approaches. Specifically B2B organizational members perceive social media to have a lower overall effectiveness as a channel and identify it as less important for relationship oriented usage than other business models.     

Setting B2B digital marketing in artificial intelligence-based CRMs: A review and directions for future research

The new business challenges in the B2B sector are determined by connected ecosystems, where data-driven decision making is crucial for successful strategies. At the same time, the use of digital marketing as a communication and sales channel has led to the need and use of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to correctly manage company information. The understanding of B2B traditional Marketing strategies that use CRMs that work with Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been studied, however, research focused on the understanding and application of these technologies in B2B digital marketing is scarce. To cover this gap in the literature, this study develops a literature review on the main academic contributions in this area. To visualize the outcomes of the literature review, the results are then analyzed using a statistical approach known as Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) under the homogeneity analysis of variance by means of alternating least squares (HOMALS) framework programmed in the R language. The research results classify the types of CRMs and their typologies and explore the main techniques and uses of AI-based CRMs in B2B digital marketing. In addition, a discussion, directions and propositions for future research are presented.     

Industrial marketing management: Bibliometric overview since its foundation

Industrial Marketing Management (IMM) is an outstanding journal in the field of business-to-business marketing. This paper focuses on this journal, with an extensive bibliometric analysis of IMM from its foundation in 1971 to 2017, the last year analyzed in this study. It identifies, among others, the annual evolution of publications, the most influential countries, the most relevant authors, the most prominent institutions supporting research, as well as the citations of IMM papers in major marketing, but also other, business and management journals. To do so, this research uses the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus databases, and analyzes a wide range of bibliometric indicators, including the total number of publications and citations, citations per paper, the h-index, m-value and citation thresholds, and also develops a graphical analysis of the bibliographical material using the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer software. Finally, by applying a cluster analysis by fractional accounting, this research identifies trends and proposes future topics and research lines, such as: trust, innovation, performance, relationship marketing, the future role of new technologies in industrial marketing research, online marketing and corporate image.     

Return on marketing investments in B2B customer relationships: A decision-making and optimization approach

The basic notion of relationship marketing entails that firms should strive for mutually beneficial customer relationships. By combining relationship marketing theory and operations research methods, this paper aims to develop and demonstrate a managerial decision-making model that business market managers can use to optimize and evaluate marketing investments in both a customer-oriented and economically feasible manner. The intended contributions of our work are as follows. First, we add to the return on marketing literature by providing a first decision-making approach that explicitly assesses the optimization of marketing investments in terms of profitability, effort, and resource allocation. Second, we show how the risk of marketing investments can be assessed using sensitivity analysis. By means of an empirical study the versatility of our decision-making approach is demonstrated by assessing various critical decision making issues for business marketing managers in detail.     

成品油直批业务B2B营销模式探讨

在“互联网+”发展的大背景下,B2B模式能有效解决企业和客户交易流程长、信息碎片多、效率低等痛点,重塑企业成本结构,给客户带来增值服务.成品油销售企业要利用互联网思维和技术,对传统直批业务营销模式做加减法,建设直接面向客户购油的在线交易平台,整合后台管理信息系统,通过内嵌信贷模块提供增值服务,提升客户购油体验.     

B2B SME management of antecedents to the application of social media

This paper elucidates how business-to-business (B2B) small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can manage antecedents to the application of social media for potential contributions to their business. This in-depth qualitative research study was conducted at four plastic-producing SMEs from October 2013 to October 2014, with follow-up interviews in October 2015.The findings reveal two important antecedents to the application of social media that overcome the gap between acknowledging the usefulness of social media and its actual limited application in practical B2B contexts. First, open collaborative business model innovation is needed to apply social media in local business processes. Second, central and distributed leadership must be integrated to create ownership and responsibility across the SME organisation and beyond to customers and partners. These findings differ from the social media application stages and the gaps between them identified in the previous literature. The developed model makes a contribution to the B2B SME field and to academia by recognising the importance of integrating critical antecedents before social media application can enhance business in B2B SMEs. This understanding is beneficial for the B2B SMEs and for society.     

Industrial marketing myths

With the primary academic emphasis on private consumer oriented marketing, analysts and theoreticians, as well as the teachers of marketing have largely tended to overlook industrial marketing, leaving it to be mentioned in passing, if at all. This rather cavalier attitude overlooks the distinct differences between the two fields, while emphasizing their similarities. The result has been the growth by default of a marketing technology in the industrial field that is often overly pragmatic, misapplied, misunderstood, or any combination of these. Possibly the most unfortunate consequence has been the establishment and perpetuation of a number of myths among industrial management, frequently even including the industrial marketing manager. A few of the most pervasive and damaging of these myths are described below.     

Industrial marketing in Romania

This article by Dr. Lilian Cre?u facilitates an understanding of industrial marketing procedures in Romania. In the author's country industrial marketing has been, until recently, the least developed branch of marketing activity. However, as the Romanian economy develops (with a predicted 48% of industrial production in 1975 consisting of new or modernized products), classical central planning may become insufficient for accurately predicting and meeting Romania's need for industrial goods. Some autonomous decisionmaking by economic subunits may become necessary. It is possible, therefore, that industrial marketing activity at the microeconomic level will increase. Lilian Cre?u attempts to demonstrate this last point by indicating the changes in the concept and modus operandi of management which are taking place under the impetus of economic expansion.     

Usage, barriers and measurement of social media marketing: An exploratory investigation of small and medium B2B brands

Previous research has established the benefits of branding for business-to-business (B2B) organizations. Various tools can be used to support B2B brands, including the internet and other interactive technologies. Yet research on how organizations use Social Networking Sites (SNS) to achieve brand objectives remains limited. This study addresses the gap by focusing on B2B SMEs and their social networking practices, particularly, usage, perceived barriers, and the measurement of effectiveness of SNS as a marketing tool. Findings from a mail survey show that over a quarter of B2B SMEs in the UK are currently using SNS to achieve brand objectives, the most popular of which is to attract new customers. On the other hand, the most significant barrier is the lack of perceived relevance for particular sectors. Notably, the overwhelming majority of users do not adopt any metrics to assess SNS effectiveness. Almost half of the sample of SMEs that currently use SNS have indicated their intention to increase their marketing spending on this channel, highlighting the growing importance of SNS in a B2B context.