Arabic B2B Marketing Services
The following article is meant to familiarize you with B2B marketing services and how they play out in the Arab world, as well as give you some guidance as to how IstiZada can help with Arabic B2B marketing and what services we can provide for your B2B marketing campaigns.
Some of our Arabic B2B Marketing Services Include
What is B2B Marketing?
In case you don’t know, B2B stands for business-to-business. Essentially, B2B marketing is a marketing strategy for businesses that differs from traditional marketing in that it involves marketing a product or service to another business, not to consumers. This other business either resells the products or services, or uses them to support their own business.
B2B marketing differs from business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing in a couple of ways. First, the target customer comes from a smaller pool of potential businesses to sell to. In addition, the two businesses (the one buying and the one selling the product), have more opportunity to cultivate a relationship than in the traditional style of business-to-customer marketing. Finally, more people from a business are often involved in a purchase- in many B2B transactions, whole teams are involved in delivering the product.
Demographics of the Arab World
B2B marketing in the Arabic speaking countries of the Middle East remains a relatively small market compared to others, however there is a lot of promise in this region. The Middle East, and especially the Gulf region, is a massive business hub. Countries in these areas have extremely high expat populations, with people constantly travelling to the region to live and work.
What does this mean for B2B? It means you’re looking at a constantly expanding and highly concentrated network of business professionals who are no doubt looking for services and products to increase their own businesses’ productivity- a perfect target market for B2B.
Business Culture
One more reason B2B marketing schemes have a lot of potential in the Arab world is the general business and personal culture of the Middle East and North Africa. Countries in this region are very social and relationship centric, and their business cultures are no exception.
Business meetings in the MENA region can take hours, with lots of time being allotted to polite, relationship building chit-chat. The only way to succeed in this region is to get on board with the social culture, and to treat your business partners more as family than customers.
Naturally, this kind of a culture translates very well to B2B marketing. Because you’re marketing an often larger or more involved product or service to a company for them to integrate into their own business, it’s a necessity to be able to build relationships in B2B transactions. You’ll likely be working more closely with your customers than you would with a normal consumer market. You also tend to have less, albeit higher-paying customers, so you have time to really cultivate a relationship with them- which is exactly the kind of thing that business-people in the Arab world are looking for.
Linguistic Challenges
Although the MENA region is a great place for B2B marketing, there are some challenges you may face. Linguistic challenges are at the top of the list. Although many of the countries in this region have expat majorities, Arabic is still the official language, and you have to be able to market and communicate in Arabic.
This may not seem like a big deal- isn’t that what Google Translate is for? Unfortunately, linguistic knowledge is also heavily tied in with cultural and semantic knowledge. There are many different dialects of Arabic, and the smallest mistake in a word or phrase can change the whole meaning of a sentence. Selling your product or service is all about convincing someone through clear and effective communication- excellence in specific translation is required to get your point across.
IstiZada’s Role
IstiZada offers several services that can help you with B2B marketing in the Arab world. We are experts in online marketing and lead generation in the Arab world- IstiZada’s team is largely made up of people who are from, live in, or have lived and done business in the MENA region. We have the culturally specific knowledge of the ins and outs of the business world that can help you work efficiently.
Our teams are well versed in SEO and website development in Arabic- as Arabic is a left- to- right script with many dialects, these tactics are hard to get your head around in Arabic unless you’re fluent and well practiced. Finally, we can help you with our technical translation services. We offer technical translation by translators who specialize in medical, engineering, financial, legal, and government translation, among others. Working with our technical translators helps you ensure that you are really communicating what you need to, in an effective way, to your client. No bland and lackluster translations here!
B2B marketing in the Arab world may seem like a daunting task in a foreign land. IstiZada provides the expertise you need, so you don’t have to waste time researching and wondering, and can focus on perfecting your product and strategy.
