How Simiens Uses B2C Marketing Tactics To Reach New B2B Audiences
B2B marketing has an image problem.
While promoting your brand to a consumer audience can be full of fun, bright visuals, hashtags, celebrity endorsements, social media campaigns, and more, B2B is often seen as safe, boring, and formulaic.
In the past there were good reasons for this difference. Advertising to businesses tended to focus on professionalism, reliability, and clean crisp design, as these were the traits people wanted from their business partners. They didn’t want anything off the wall or wacky, they just wanted to know that the company offering their business a product or service was going to be able to deliver what they claimed and add value to their offerings.
While much of that is still true to a certain extent, now we are starting to see something of a paradigm shift in the way people like to be marketed to in their working life. This is partly down to the fact the millennial generation – now in their 20s and 30s – have entered business roles where they have the power to make buying decisions.
Millennials have mostly grown up with digital technology and social media and are used to be marketed at through those channels. Most only have an email address out of necessity and engage better with brands through more modern channels. The knock-on effect of this is that these people are now starting to bring these preferences into the business world with them.
Siemens
A powerhouse in the MedTech industry, Siemens felt it’s traditional image was growing outdated, and wanted to take steps to overhaul that perception.
"It is a pleasure to talk about Siemens Healthineers, a business well prepared to take advantage of the paradigm shifts in healthcare," said Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Siemens Healthineers and member of the Siemens Managing Board, Michael Sen. "As a separate listed entity, Siemens Healthineers will have the entrepreneurial flexibility to actively shape its industry with a view to accelerating profitable growth and deliver return.”
The process started a few years ago when the healthcare arm of Siemens was rebranded as Siemens Healthineers. Despite a bizarre launch, complete with a stage full of dancers in brand colour morph suits dancing along to a song about the Healthineers, (described in the Financial Times as a “writhing, spandex-clad horror”) the new updated look served its purpose to help shed the stuffy image the brand had gained. Now the Siemens Healthineers brand is deeply embedded in every part of the Siemens healthcare business and strives to bring a more modern and accessible type of medical tech marketing.
The new ethos extends to the brand’s social media marketing as well.
Take a look at the Siemens Healthineers Facebook page, and you’ll see a brand sharing content and exciting news much in the same way as a B2C company would. Video content is king in social media marketing right now, and Siemens Healthineers’ Facebook is packed with interviews, product demos, think pieces, and more, all designed to communicate the brand message and promote its products.
Unusually for such a large B2B company, the Siemens Healthineers Facebook page also has the messenger option activated. This means that interested parties can communicate with the brand through Facebook, rather than having to go through more traditional communication channels.
One of the biggest issues with B2B businesses is they can seem very opaque at times, not putting forward much of a public presence and sometimes having almost impossible to locate contact information. Siemens Healthineers turns this on its head by allowing people to contact them as if they were anyone else on Facebook.
“Ready or not – we are in the midst of what to many people still feels like the future,” writes Andrea Lutz for Siemens Healthineers. “The rapid advance of digitalisation is changing every aspect of our lives. Technologies such as the Internet of Things, augmented reality, blockchain, and social media are bringing about an unprecedented transformation, affecting our work in ways we never anticipated.”
Final Thoughts
Social media has long been a powerful tool for B2C businesses but less so for B2B. By learning lessons from the B2C world and doing its best to lift the opaque veil of the B2B healthcare device industry and connect with the new generation of medical technology buyers in the fashion to which they’ve become accustomed.
“Meet them where they are,” as the marketing adage goes.
Digital multichannel and social media marketing in the world of medical technology is set to be a hot topic at MedForce 2019, taking place in June at the nHow Hotel Berlin.
Please download the agenda today for more information and insights.