B2B marketing disciplines

Thirty-six disciplines make up corporate website marketing as it is actually practised. This directory lists all of them, grouped by the stage of the buying process they serve and cross-cut by the two categories that decide how a marketing budget gets argued about: bringing buyers to a corporate website, and deciding what the site does with them once they arrive.

Every profile follows the same structure, because the same questions are worth asking of any discipline. What is it, precisely, and what is it routinely confused with? Why does it behave differently in business-to-business marketing, where cycles are long, the buyer is a committee and the addressable market may be a few hundred companies? How does it work mechanically? What has to be true elsewhere before it can work at all? How is it measured, and which of its usual metrics are flattering rather than useful? And, the section most reference sites omit, when is it the wrong investment?

How to read the directory depends on why you are here. If you are diagnosing a specific problem, go to the funnel stage where the symptom appears and read the measurement and common-mistakes sections first; most underperformance turns out to be a dependency failing upstream rather than a fault in the discipline itself. If you are planning a programme from a standing start, read the foundations group in full before choosing any channel, then the two category pages, which set out how the channels relate to each other and in what order they are worth building.