While business-to-business marketing efforts should be centered on sales or telemarketing programs, advertising can play an important role in a successful sales effort.
• Direct mail allows you to target an audience comprised of those businesses most likely to respond favorably to your products or services. Your product or service may have a practical application in many industries, but try to limit your mailings to those with the most probable buying potential. Always track your responses.
• Magazine advertising in trade-specific publications that cater to your industry can be effective. There are hundreds of trade publications that will allow you to target your customer base more narrowly and at a lower cost.
• Radio is a distant third choice for business-to-business advertising. It can be effective if you find a business-only station or a station, such as an all-news one, with a heavy concentration of listeners who are business people.
• Yellow Pages can be the best choice for a few business-to-business companies in the service sector, but is totally inappropriate for most others especially product-based businesses.
• Newspapers aren't generally considered high-impact vehicles for business-to-business advertising. One obvious place to advertise in newspapers is in the business sections of both local and national general and business newspapers. However, most small business won't have much luck attracting responses through these fairly general mediums.
• Television may work for huge national business-to-business advertisers like airlines, but is unlikely to work for smaller businesses.
• Outdoor and transit displays have scant applicability in business-to-business advertising.
