Data-Savvy Marketers Will Spearhead the Future of Brand Building

Editor's note: This was originally published on the LinkedIn Collective.

The more we understand about B2B buyers, the more one thing becomes clear: B2B marketing is, at its core, a quest for memorability. When 95% of your potential buyers are not currently in market, marketing can’t be about making a quick sale. Multi-thousand dollar business solutions are rarely impulse buys.

Your brand’s helpful thought leadership, brimming with empathy and credibility, delivered through boldly creative content, earns real estate in your buyers’ minds. And when they’re ready to leave the 95% and make a purchase, your brand has a head start.

Of course, B2B marketing requires creativity with a purpose. Your brand’s creative content needs to be relevant and useful to be memorable in a productive way. In our 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark, marketing leaders told us that creative, data-driven marketing — bringing art and science together — leads to success.

Here’s what we learned. 

Why creative marketing matters

The best creative B2B marketing is more successful than the average campaign. The B2B Institute produced hard evidence of the business value of creativity, demonstrating how top-performing brands achieved a 10-20x boost over their less creative counterparts.

The 2,000 marketing leaders we surveyed for the Benchmark offer more proof that creativity is key. They report that creative work earns:

• More brand engagement
• Greater share of voice
• Increases in earned media coverage
• Improved brand sentiment

With results like these, it’s easy to see why 88% of CMOs we surveyed are advocating for bolder, more creative campaigns. And marketers are delivering on these demands: 73% say they developed creative that stood out this year.

But creativity by itself isn’t enough — we’re marketing, after all, not just entertaining. This is why the Cannes Lions awards for Creative B2B require both impressive creativity and provable results. And that’s where the art and science start to blend.

How data, technology and analytics empower creative marketing

Strategy and execution turn a creative idea into successful marketing. Data-savvy marketers are using their skills to make the magic happen. 

Our respondents said that technologies like CTV (connected TV) and GAI (generative AI) are helping them improve targeting and personalization, as well as increasing the brand experience. 

Channels like CTV ads make it easier to deliver a great idea to the most relevant audience. The data you get from running a CTV campaign can help you fine-tune your message to better suit your most valued customers. This makes CTV an ideal testing ground for creative ideas. In our survey, 46% of respondents said CTV was good for creating an engaging brand experience, and 40% use it as a place to test ‘bold new creative.’

GAI makes it possible to personalize to individual members of an audience at scale, using insights gleaned from AI analysis of customer data. Our respondents said GAI helps increase productivity, accelerate content creation, power better campaign ideation/optimization, and more:

How creative marketers prove the impact of their efforts

Brand building with bold, creative and memorable content is a clear winner for marketers. However, the C-Suite still needs help understanding the rationale for this type of top-of-funnel marketing. This is another point where data-smart marketers can help creative marketing succeed.

In our survey, nearly three-fourths of respondents said they can demonstrate the business impact of thought leadership to the C-Suite. In addition, 59% said they have the right measurement tools at their disposal to deliver what their management expects. 

These responses are a step in the right direction, but that still leaves 41% of marketers struggling to prove their results. Creative brand building has a unique set of metrics that marketers must embrace. Moreover, it’s marketing on a longer timeline than many executives are experienced with — an attempt to prove ROI too early is almost certain to fail.

In order to demonstrate the success of creative marketing, marketers need the right metrics, time for campaigns to mature, a more complete customer journey map, and the ability to see all of their customer and campaign data in one place.

With the right tools in hand and metrics on board, marketers can show that creative, bold marketing earns their brand the top spot in potential buyers’ minds.

Ongoing learning helps marketers blend creativity and data

When we look at the top skills added to LinkedIn profiles in 2024, Data Analysis is at the top of the list. It’s clear that marketers are seeking to round out their data skills in order to boost the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Creative marketers know that a great idea is only the beginning, and that data is what transforms a great idea into a bold campaign that gets results.

See how today’s top B2B marketers are planning for the future: Get your copy of the 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark.