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B2B marketing has played second fiddle to B2C for an age, being the poorer, less sexy cousin with very little representation or voice in the market. But times have changed and the B2B marketing sector has quickly matured, facilitated by the explosion of digital, with the vast majority of B2B marketers harnessing the power of digital channels as its proven highly effective for nurturing long-term and high value client and prospect relationships.

But just like B2B was a smaller subset of consumer marketing, now there are microcosms within B2B marketing itself. The one I am very familiar with is the professional services sector, who are not selling products or transactional services, but a combination of reputation, knowledge and specific expertise. This requires a very unique approach to marketing, differing from much of the rest of B2B. For example, simply selling professional services through digital channels will rarely work (although if you have some examples please let me know). 

Professional services marketers are all about relationships, not products, hence why they focus on delivering thought leadership that adds real value to a specifically targeted individual or group of individuals. The aim being to improve the perception of the firm as experts in that area, subsequently increasing the chance of consideration when a potential buyer requires that expertise. Sounds simple, but it can be quite tricky, particularly when the individuals targeted are usually at an executive level and have very busy agendas.

So there is indeed a subset within B2B being professional services, who employ very different strategies than the rest of the sector. It is important that the B2B marketing media and industry educators embrace this diversity in the B2B sector and avoid that trap of focusing attention on big brand marketing.