B2B Marketing in 2022: Marrying the Art and Science of Creativity

Editors note: This post is part of the LinkedIn Collective, which is designed to inspire excellence and success for all B2B marketers. The Collective will offer groundbreaking thought leadership and content resources informed by LinkedIn data and insights, our team of experts, and leaders across the B2B marketing industry.

Ask any 10 people how they define creativity, and you’ll likely receive 10 different answers. Despite its importance to our job as marketers, it’s no easy feat to define, inspire, or maintain the concept of “creativity” across all campaigns and communications, particularly in the B2B space.

Seeking to better understand marketing creativity across all sectors, Optimizely surveyed 900 senior-level marketers from across the global about how they encourage and define creativity, as well as how it was impacted by remote work since the pandemic began in early 2020. What we found is that, even among marketers, there is no simple answer. While 31% of marketers define it as creating experiences that drive customer action and/or engagement, 21% define it as creating ideas that surprise and delight audiences. Less than one in five define creativity as developing original ideas (17%) and being first to market with an innovation (17%), and only 14% say it is coming up with new ways to solve old problems.

Despite the lack of a clear consensus on “creativity,” a few themes emerged. Most importantly, no matter how you define it, creativity is essential for delivering exceptional customer experiences. Secondly, the impact of dispersed teams because of remote work had a significant impact on how effectively marketers develop creative ideas. And lastly, technology plays a fundamental role in how marketers drive creativity and bring ideas to life. Ultimately, our data shows above all else that when it comes to creativity in a marketer’s world, a delicate balance of art and science are necessary.

Creativity’s Role in B2B Customer Experiences

B2B buyers and decision makers?are consistently bombarded with various ads, email campaigns, banner ads, whitepapers, pop-ups, social media posts,?etc., aiming to capture their attention. And for B2B companies, it can be difficult to stand out from other solution providers and convince these buyers to engage with your brand. That’s why creativity is of the utmost importance in B2B marketing – not just in what messages buyers are seeing, but in how and when you are delivering your content to best grab their attention.

This is where art and science come together to help B2B marketers engage consumers. While art undeniably plays a role in developing compelling content, there is a science to creativity in determining what will resonate best, as well as how and when brands should deliver messages to audiences. Data-driven strategies inform marketers about the best times and channels to reach consumers, ensuring their content is not only delivered, but seen and engaged with by the right audiences – this is crucial for B2B marketers, especially those in niche industries targeting sub-sets or smaller groups of buyers. Creativity can come in many forms, and when it comes to CX – it’s essential to leverage both artistic and scientific approaches to make strong, lasting customer connections.

Finding Creativity Among Dispersed Marketing Teams

When the pandemic first hit in 2020, most marketing teams made a rapid shift to remote work environments, finding it was just as easy to remain productive working from home. Creativity, however, is a very different story than productivity, and most marketers agreed it was not as easy to achieve in dispersed work environments. As a result, both creativity and the ability to deliver strong customer experiences took a direct hit, with 92% of marketers saying remote and hybrid work impacted their teams’ ability to develop creative ideas and to optimally execute B2B marketing campaigns. Additionally, 92% also said the ability to deliver content to the right audience at the right time was impacted.

Seeking to overcome this, marketers leaned on collaboration tools, team building, and wellness-focused activities to spur creativity. Overall, the most impactful tactic for bringing creative ideas to life, according to more than half of marketers, was ensuring a seamless digital experience for their marketing teams. Whether it’s ensuring all tools and resources are accessible, leveraging data-driven strategies, or working with collaboration tools, technology plays a key role in building strong digital experiences that drive creativity in the B2B space.

The Right Technology Is Needed to Produce Creative Ideas

Even the most creative minds need a little boost now and then, especially for campaigns or content targeting sectors within the B2B space which can require technical knowledge, and that often comes in the form of brainstorms with colleagues to bounce ideas off each other. In remote environments, creativity can be a bit more challenging to come by when teams are siloed, which is where technology can support and supplement. Technology isn’t just useful when it comes to dispersed marketing teams, though. It’s necessary in any environment to bring ideas to life, experiment with new ideas, and ensure thoughtful collaboration and content delivery methods. In the Optimizely survey, 42% of marketers said the most useful technology to inspire creativity is content marketing systems to ease the creation and delivery of content to the right audiences. Meanwhile, 31% say experimentation platforms and tools to test new ideas were most useful, and over one-quarter (28%) say chat collaboration tools were most useful.

Technologies like the ones listed above allow us to take a truly scientific approach to creative marketing. Take experimentation, for example. This concept lets marketers test new hypotheses, campaign ideas and messaging before fully committing. It takes the idea of “failing fast” to a deeper level, allowing marketers to rely on data versus gut feelings – removing the guess work from marketing and leading to more compelling, effective marketing campaigns.

Bottom line: the world would be a mundane place without both the artists and the scientists of the world, working side by side in complementary ways to make the world a better and more beautiful place. Marketing is no different. Without both, creativity suffers and so does the customer experience. For marketers to succeed in 2022 and beyond, they need to prioritize creativity in all environments – remote, in-person and hybrid. Creativity that’s driven by both art and science allows us to push the boundaries of what’s possible, understand what’s not possible, and find the right balance to authentically engage and convert customers.