The Challenges of B2B Marketing

In the heart of Old City lives a small, fully integrated marketing agency that thrives on helping B2B companies create brand action. Garfield Group works with a wide variety of businesses in different industries such as financial consulting, tax solutions, clinical data management, and more.

As a creative intern, who had never worked in B2B before, I was quite nervous. I had never really thought about B2B being much different than business to consumer until I started at Garfield. But over the past few months, I have realized there is a bit of a learning curve. To me, B2C marketing is easier in the sense that we are marketing directly to the consumer and consumer products tend to be easier to grasp and understand. Sneakers, toothpaste, pens, they’re all fairly easy concepts to grasp and market.

B2B, on the other hand, is a little different. We are marketing the stuff that the average person doesn’t see. We are marketing the stuff that makes their favorite sneaker company run smoother, the stuff that most people don’t know the big brands do behind the scenes.

As a copywriter, this was very intimidating. I can’t do my own taxes let alone write an entire E-book on VAT challenges. I don’t have the first clue how clinical data management companies work and now, I am being asked to write social posts for them.

I was so worried I wasn’t going to understand the material and end up writing horrible content. But within a few weeks, I started getting the hang of it. Once I realized I only needed to focus on the information I was given instead of understanding the industry as a whole, the writing process became much easier. I did so well with it that Garfield asked me to stay on with them for the fall semester.