B2B Excellence - Why Brand Awareness Matters

B2B Excellence is a weekly newsletter that curates the best B2B marketing content from the brightest minds in our industry.

?We include the perspectives from a variety of enterprise marketers, stories from fast-growth businesses challenging the conventional ways of working and thinking, and the top 1% of B2B marketers shaping modern-day practices.

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?For more content, you can follow me on LinkedIn.

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?Article 1 - Lessons from the world's largest software company?

?Smart conversation between the brilliant Jon Evans and SalesForce VP of Global Marketing.

The importance of truly understanding how B2B buyers when thinking about your marketing investments.

Key snippets.

• The vast majority of customers are not in market now (the 95:5 rule)
• Most vendors on short-lists are already known (80-90%)
• The vast majority of winning vendors were there on Day 1 (90%)
• More than three quarters of B2B Ads have no brand building potential (78%)

B2B brands are blending into one. Learn how SalesForce decided to stand out.

Key lessons they learnt from hosting the world's largest software conference.

He puts it down to 4 things.

• Learn - briefing people on the most important topics of the day
• Connect - a unique opportunity to connect with your customers
• Having fun - you'll remember it more if you had fun attending
• Giving back - a chance to make a real difference

Article 2 - Purposeful Provocation - How good is demand-gen marketing at actually creating demand?

I posted this on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, challenging the conventional wisdom of creating your own demand. It caused a healthy debate and some good questions and opinions.

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Article 3 - Why Brand Awareness Matters

This post by Dale Harrison.

?If you ever needed credible, reliable and insightful sources to help reinforce your next budget argument and the need for brand investment, this is it.

?Key Headlines

?????????????? ???????????????? ????????????, “What B2Bs Need to Know About Their Buyers”? – “Just as important, 90% of them will choose a vendor from the day one list.”

?????????????? ???????????????? ????????????, “What B2Bs Need to Know About Their Buyers” – “80% of B2B buyers have a set of vendors?in mind before they do ANY research.”

?????????????? ?????????? – “Close to 40% of B2B buying?decisions end in no-decision”?

The B2B Institute - “On avg only 5% of your customers are ever in market at one point” (my key addition)

?Article 4 – Ad reach & frequency are not independent variables

Another brilliant post from Dale.

This is a perfectly articulated breakdown of the media distribution process and the relationship between reach and frequency.

It’s important to understand the science and practicality behind the common media objective of reach.?

“Frequency is the tax you have to pay to achieve comprehensive Reach!”

Conversations, posts or articles I liked this week

?Some fun creative from LinkedIn

Brand differentiation is primarily a financial optimisation strategy?

8 reasons a CFO should care about marketing

Hard v.s. soft metrics in B2B Marketing

GTM strategy without customer research and historical growth analysis is a FRAUD

Paid media works best when two key work streams happen in concert

Optimal media mix - brand vs performance

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