Traditional versus Online Marketing for B2B Organizations: Where the Line Blurs

Abstract

The rise of the internet has opened the way for a whole array of marketing techniques tailoredspecifically for this new medium. Even so, online and traditional marketing tactics are not whollyopposed to each other, quite the contrary. Many of the primary outbound marketing tactics are stillviable by themselves. With some of them, there is already a lot of overlap with the realm of onlinetactics. And, in some other cases, they've completely morphed into the strategies of internetmarketing. Understanding the way in which traditional marketing can improve the efficiency ofonline tactics is key especially in the business-to-business (B2B) environment, where the buyingcycle is a long, arduous process, driven by multiple stakeholders with different agendas. The aimof this paper is to analyse how traditional marketing principles apply to net-enabled B2Borganizations and how traditional marketing philosophies translate into the online world. In otherwords, with the help of the B2B sector, we would like to pin point the exact converging pointsbetween traditional and internet marketing, how they can complement each other and thus bringnew insights for nowadays digital marketers.

Keywords

• B2B marketing
• Internet marketing
• B2B customer experience
• Content marketing
• Online consumer behavior
• Relationship marketing