The recession has seen businesses putting expansion plans and financial investments on ice, however the one thing a small business should always keep warm is its relationships with customers and prospects.

The economic climate has encouraged businesses to become far more value orientated and companies are keen to make sure their marketing activities and budgets are drawing maximum returns.

However, by putting too much focus on marketing to gain immediate returns, businesses risk falling behind their competitors when the economy picks up.

By concentrating on long term as well as short term relationships with prospects, businesses are ensuring they are in the front line when customers are looking to invest once more.

When a new prospect is first identified and engaged, they are probably still in the research stage of the purchasing decision and not yet ready to talk fully with a member of the sales team.

It is crucial to nurture these leads, develop relationships and collect data during these early stages of research. The stronger your relationship is with a prospect, the better positioned you will be to apply this knowledge and offer them services and products they might actually want at an appropriate time.

SMEs have the potential to enhance their customer relationships, and therefore their data, with every communication sent out. So make sure each one counts.

Collecting and maintaining good data should be considered a strategic move allowing you to deal with current customers better and enable you to address the potential needs of prospects. Any touch point can be used to collect information including mail-outs, click-throughs and white paper downloads.

To avoid putting strain on new relationships and alienating potential customers, SMEs should aim only to ask questions to which the answers will be beneficial.

To work out which questions are most important to ask, a business will first need to establish what its desired outcome will be and work backwards to see the fewest questions that can be asked to gain this information.

By using prospects responses, data from any contact points and applied customer analysis, companies can predict what a prospect (or an existing customer) could buy in the future rather than purely concentrating on what they might buy tomorrow.

A relationship developed over a period of months, or even years, rather than just a few weeks will be in a strong starting position when prospects are again ready to purchase.

This is the first of a series of guest blog posts from Simon Lawrence, ceo of marketing agency Information Arts, on business-to-business marketing.

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If I said to you I’d worked in B2B marketing for the past 17 years, would you understand what I do? And what does B2B marketing mean anyway? Back to basics? Blue to Black? Beggar to Billionaire? No, it actually means business-to-business. In other words you’re a business selling your products or services to other businesses in order to grow (and who knows, hopefully go from beggar to billionaire).

Yes, it may not be the sexy side of marketing especially when you look at the big consumer advertising campaigns – we couldn’t justify making an advert on an idyllic Caribbean beach like a certain personal finance company. But it is never-the-less an essential part of the business planning and growth process and an important and fast growing sector in its own right.

When I’m asked what I think the main difference is between marketing to a business and a consumer my reply is simply “businesses don’t do retail therapy!” It’s not all about how pretty your imagery is or that you’ve paid thousands of pounds for an advert in the break of Coronation Street. At the end of the day it comes down to the fact that you need to know your audience; why they spend money, how they spend money, when they spend and who ultimately makes the decision.

To put it another way business to business marketing is all about the intelligent application of strategic insight and creative thinking to generate business growth. Your customers and prospects are your company’s lifeblood so it makes sense to invest in the information that will help you develop and manage these relationships for commercial gain.

Broadly speaking, in my opinion, there are five main elements to consider when creating your marketing campaign:

- creating a single view of the customer;
- building a prospect database;
- developing customer and prospect insights;
- formulating a retention and acquisition programme, and;
- maximising your return on investment.

I’ll go into each of these in a little more detail in the next blog post in the series.