Small advertising budget: The secret sauce of a B2B Marketplace

How to get business leads from local and national buyers when you have a small advertising budget? The secret lies in a smart B2B marketplace.

Marketing budgets grow like unavoidable monsters. The cost of identifying, locating, reaching, and convincing a prospective customer goes up as you scale.

Money and Marketing

A recent CMO survey shows the tendency of marketing budgets to grow by 8.7% annually. Also, 61% of CMOs expected marketing budgets to increase in 2020 as per the Gartner CMO Spend Survey for 2019-2020.

And how much revenue goes into this funnel again? Most surveys hint at a figure of 9.8% of revenue for the average marketing spend. This is where B2C service companies spend 15.6% of their revenue into marketing. And B2B product companies spend roughly 8.6% of revenue into marketing. According to the Gartner CMO Survey, marketing expense budgets form 10.5% of the total company revenue.

However, the emergence of digital alternatives can shake up these expenditures.

B2B Marketplace: The Digital War-chest

The B2B space changes are worth noticing. Do you know that B2B marketplaces are offering digital cataloging, logistics and online payments, similar to e-commerce players, on their platforms?

The new breed of competition is not scared or confused about digital B2B marketplaces. On the contrary, they are using these platforms to expand their reach and speed up their product growth. Inspired by their e-commerce counterparts, these disruptors use the many advantages that digital environments offer–they can be precise, intuitive, fast, and well-equipped to provide solutions to customers.

Have you devised any future-forward way to rise above the advertising noise both in traditional and digital platforms? Is there an easy answer to achieve market outreach without spending millions of rupees in clueless advertising? Turns out there is.

Track your advertising

All you need to do is find a strong B2B marketplace aligned with the digital forces of the new landscape. You have to find a spot in the digital world where your visibility, influence, and impact for the customer is elevated.

• Save on advertising: One immediate outcome of going on a smart B2B marketplace is your savings on advertising costs. You will be in the company of the very people you need to connect with. You are not wasting conversations and attention on the wrong tables.
• Small budget for promotion: A B2B marketplace can also have a lot of players operating at the same time. You may need to spend some money to get that extra visibility by using tools like Classifieds. But the advertising budget required here is tiny compared to what you would have to spend outside in multiple channels like newspapers, social media, paid campaigns, etc.
• Local connection: In B2B marketplace, you can get straight to the local businesses that bring the regional knowledge you need for a given market territory. When you target a particular geography and customer segment, you need someone who knows that market in and out. This is where interactions and collaborations with local players increase your advantage. They can bridge the marketing distance between your product and the prospect.
• Right messaging: Such local players allow you to discover the right prospects and give you the knowledge that comes handy in reaching out to them. They help you sharpen your messaging and offering to the specific needs of the target customer.
• Well-integrated tools: Payment, tracking, escrow facility, order tracking, and more. Launching your own website and adding e-Commerce capabilities takes time, money, and expertise. A B2B marketplace can give you all those tools for a fraction of the cost, in one place.

Imagine doing all this without spending a mountain of marketing expenses! This may sound unbelievable, but some of your smart industry peers are already reaping that advantage.

Get smart about spending

A Gartner 2019 study has shown how marketing leaders plan to spend 26% of their marketing budget on marketing technology in 2020. Another report shows that the average firm is expected to allocate 45% of their total marketing budget to online. Meanwhile, digital marketing is registering an 11% compound annual growth rate between 2016 and 2021.

Clearly, you need to pay close attention to marketing expenses in these challenging times. So why stay in the clutter anymore when you can tap the local voice, and the local ear. Get in the right group and create a compelling marketing conversation, without burning a hole in your pocket.