Business to Business Ecommerce – the forgotten brother to BtoC

I have been asked to do a small study on BtoB ecommerce in Africa for a UN body, the International Trade Centre. This is to explore how ready BtoB online selling is in preparation for the African Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and identify best practices.

In a recent post from West Africa I noted criticism that many business-to-business (B2B) marketers confuse product marketing with content marketing. The blog went on to point out that BtoB marketers get it right when they understand the difference between these 2 fundamentally different types of marketing, what their purposes are and how to use them correctly. The process of creating and distributing content will ultimately give high value to an e-merchant, and that has little to nothing to do with the product. If the objective is ecommerce stores, good content marketing teaches how to increase sales. If the objective is senior sales leaders, great content marketing can help build a winning sales team. The best content marketing often uses proprietary data or analysis that is exclusive to the seller’s company — this could be anything from website traffic figures or an analysis of 10 million sales calls. Finding an exclusive benefit to offer provides the key which would be almost impossible to get from another source.