Are you interested in learning more about B2B marketing? If so, I have some good news — there’s plenty of new data and research about the B2B marketing process that you can sink your teeth into.

That’s a positive trend. After all, there are more stories written about B2C marketing than there are about B2B marketing. That’s understandable — Coca-Cola, AT&T and others spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year creating advertising campaigns, social media campaigns and content marketing campaigns focused on the B2C consumer. So, it stands to reason that there would be a lot of data around B2C consumer behavior and how to leverage it for business.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of information about the B2B consumer. In fact, research and insights into the B2B buying process have helped many companies improve their marketing ROI quite significantly over the past several years.

A driving force behind the improvement of B2B marketing ROI has been the fact that business-to-business marketers are now viewing their customers as individuals rather than as an enterprise entity. In other words, B2B marketers understand that a they should market to an influencer quite differently than they market to a decision-maker and the other players in the B2B sales funnel.

Here’s a graphic from a webinar I recently conducted with Oktopost that highlights the different players B2B marketers have to contend with when developing their marketing campaigns.

Target Markets in the B2B Marketing Landscape:

As you can see, the B2B landscape includes Initiators, Users, Influencers, Deciders, Approvers, Buyers and Gatekeepers.

The B2C landscape is somewhat simpler — in many cases, there’s just a buyer/user, although there are some B2C scenarios that have an influencer as well as a buyer/user. [In my youth, I developed marketing campaigns for Franco American SpaghettiOs, and we would advertise to the influencer (the child) as well as the buyer/user (the parent) to ensure we covered all our bases].

10 Questions Every B2B Marketer Should Ask Before Launching Their Next Campaign

What follows are 10 questions I posed to the B2B marketers who tuned into the Oktopost webinar. I’m sharing them with you because I think they’re a great starting point for any B2B marketing campaign.

The questions above can help you lay the foundation for your next B2B marketing program. B2B marketing tends to be a little more complex than B2C marketing, so the questions can be used to sort through some of the fundamental issues.

If all of this talk about B2B marketing is of interest to you, you might want to take a look at the SlideShare deck I’ve included below. It includes several B2B marketing secrets, some of which include the following:

• The Second B in B2B is Actually a C
• People Buy for Emotional Reasons and Rationalize Their Purchase with Logic
• Sometimes People Buy for Reasons that “Reason” Will Never Know

My favorite secret in the presentation is this one:

• Women are Smarter Than Men

Of course, that’s not really a secret because most women know this already and the men will catch on eventually. But it highlights a key point of the entire webinar — in order to succeed in B2B marketing, you need to speak to your prospects as individuals, not as mass entities.

Okay, ready to check out the slides? Terrific. Here goes.

How to Use B2B Consumer Behavior Secrets to Grow Your Sales and Revenue

Jamie Turner is the CEO of the 60 Second Marketer and 60 Second Communications, an Atlanta-based advertising agency and digital marketing firm that works with national and international brands. He is the co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile” and is a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.