B2B Marketing Advantages and Disadvantages

B2B marketing is a term used in the context of marketing, the full form of B2B is Business to Business. Under B2B marketing company sell its products to other companies or businesses directly and not to the customers, hence in a way in this type of marketing company deals with other companies and not with individual customers. In order to understand about this better let’s look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of B2B marketing –

Advantages of B2B Marketing

1. The first and foremost advantage of this type of marketing is that company has to deal with companies and not customers. Since companies are involved it is much easier to convince a single or group of companies about the products of the company then convincing a large number of customers.
2. Another benefit of this type of marketing is that since companies are involved the sales transaction amount will be of big value so suppose a company makes watches and instead of selling those watches to 1000 customers it sells 1000 watches to single company then as far company is concerned it is equivalent to selling to 1000 customers in single sale transaction.
3. Another advantage of B2B marketing is that it once a company becomes your customer it will remain with you for long period of time if your customer service is good. In simple words brand loyalty in case of companies is more as compared to regular customers and development of a close relationship with the company to which sales is made is another factor which in the long run can help the company big time.

Disadvantages of B2B Marketing

1. The biggest disadvantage of this type of marketing is that target market in this type of marketing is limited as companies to which company can market or sell its products are very few as compared to individual customers which are large in number so the scope of marketing is limited due to limited number of customers for the product sold by the company.
2. Another disadvantage of this type of marketing is that company has to give a discount on orders given by companies as their orders are in bulk and they have some bargaining power as compared to normal customers who purchases in small quantities and therefore they are price takers and have no bargaining power.
3. Another limitation is that there are multiple people involved when one sells to companies and sales cannot be done overnight which is the case with B2C marketing where purchasing decision are instantaneous and hence B2B marketing is time-consuming process and that too without any certainty whether company will able to make a sale or not after consuming so much time.

As one can see from the above that B2B marketing has many benefits as well as limitations and any company thinking of doing this type of marketing should carefully analyze the company’s product as well as market condition and then take the decision whether to adopt this marketing strategy or not.