Having world-class practitioners of both disciplines in here we often get into conversations on the similarities – and differences. It’s great to learn and know when it’s an advantage to involve each other.
So here, for the record, is our top three, plus the best of both.
Knowing your audience
Every good PR and digital marketing practitioner has to know their audiences. Our B2B teams often target tech managers and directors and well as the C-Suite. So, the audience is often similar, it is the markets they are in that frequently vary. What’s happening in Big Data is different to what’s going down in e-commerce.
For consumer, you can never know enough about a client’s audience to feed your strategy. What are the sweet spots, who are their influencers, what are the hot trends and topics? Let’s take strollers. If you’re, say, Cybex, you’re targeting the city yummy Mummy wanting to look uber-stylish and on this season’s key colour trends. If you’re Britax you’re appealing to a more practical parent with safety, comfort and ease of use front of mind. The clearer the fix on your exact audience the sharper the strategy, the better creative, the higher impacting the result.
Understanding markets and trends
To be king or queen of your castle in any discipline you must know your markets, trends and hot topics.
In B2B, knowing lots of market trends, issues and product knowledge is a must. You need to follow the twists and turns of the industry and be able to have that conversation with the media. No mean feat.
In consumer, you need to know the hot trends, today’s water cooler conversations, happening locations, colours, sounds, smells, and know how to get that emotional response and even entertain.
Creative skills
Both disciplines require creativity. Of different kinds. It is just as challenging to come up with a great topic for an industry roundtable as it is to come up with a national feature idea for a consumer one. Consumer creativity can appear more ‘creative’: we see it around us every day.
Both disciplines work in crowded markets. To get cut-through on that page or with that influencer your idea must be so on point and that rests on experience and knowledge of either discipline.
Techniques we love – the best of both
We love that the B2B team are masters at creating market leadership and consumer borrows big for our national and trade campaigns. We love the consumer team’s ability to think brave and fresh – we won PRCA’s B2B campaign of the Year 2015 based on consumer-style thinking.
Both sides have a deep knowledge of international campaigns and cross cultures that help our teams get the most working for international companies – and on international briefs.
We are both often charged with building sales (leads), building trust, creating stories and delivering behaviour change. We love swapping insights, tricks and techniques from both sides.
As you can see it is a fascinating conversation. Long may it continue.
This blog was originally published on OneChocolate's blog.