June.
What a difference a month makes… We shared some pretty gloomy B2B market insights in last month’s newsletter (Gartner called it ‘the era of less’). Then the very next day the UK government announced a date for the general election and already we’re seeing & hearing a more optimistic tone in our conversations with clients and partners.
Things can only get better, as they say.??
As ever this month we trawl the less-travelled paths and more interesting corners of the world of B2B marketing to bring you stuff you probably haven’t seen (so read on for a 99% Cannes-free experience.)
Themes emerge each month when we start reviewing all our collected sources and this month we’re focusing on the unfancied but powerful topic of content distribution, and the growing momentum behind the movement for creativity over technology in B2B marketing and sales.
Content.
Distribution: When Bill Gates wrote in a 1996 essay that ‘content is king’ I’m pretty sure that he didn’t predict that for the NEXT 28 YEARS ‘thought leaders’ would still be hacking his prediction with the old “If content is king then ‘x’ is queen / emperor / god etc…”?
And I’m also confident that he’d share my contempt for one of the worst and most memorable versions I read a few years ago:
“If content is king, then distribution is queen, and she wears the pants…”
Yuk / Ewww; a literally horrible statement in so many ways, and yet the central truth about the importance of effective distribution is so often ignored or at best relegated to an afterthought.?
We see and hear lots of reasons for this in B2B; no budget for paid (especially among larger SMEs and sales-led B2B organisations where paid media is seen as expensive and not essential.?
But this isn’t just about paid media, it’s about the effective distribution of content for both outbound and inbound. And as students of Prof Byron Sharp / the Ehrenberg-Bass institute will know, decades of data analysis show that brands grow by increasing their mental and physical availability.?
Mental availability refers to the likelihood of a brand being noticed and remembered in buying situations, which is achieved by ensuring the brand is easily recognisable and linked to relevant needs or occasions in the buyer’s mind - over time (when 95% of your potential customers are not in a buying cycle).?
This involves consistent use of distinctive brand assets (such as logos, colours, and slogans) and widespread, continuous marketing that reinforces these assets. The shorthand for ‘How Brands Grow’ is by being distinctive, visible, memorable and easy to buy. And it’s hard to achieve any of these things without effective distribution.
Our ‘take’: Actually, it’s not really our take, more a joining of the dots to bring you a handful of interesting / useful things we saw this month that can help with content distribution:
Linkedin: A couple of things to share on recent developments at Linkedin. This, via Matt Navarra, explaining that “To encourage more original content and discussion within [Linkedin], organic posts containing links will soon be made smaller in the feed - If brands want large link preview images, they'll have to put money behind their posts (or go link-free).” And this - a pivot to video for Linkedin…?
Creativity: Anyone we’ve met in the past few months will know our enthusiasm for new research that puts a value on the cost of brands being ‘dull’ by investing in formulaic, category-driven content and creative. (For new readers, we first covered this back in March). Well, the authors presented at C****s last week but if you were stuck at home you can now download the report here, or listen to Adam Morgan’s podcast here.?
New data from the Linkedin B2B benchmarks report (which we featured last month) shows that “Over two-thirds of UK B2B marketers say bolder creative is helping them improve brand engagement and drive conversion… with one of the report’s authors, Tom Pepper saying “B2B marketing creativity is having a “moment”, with marketers deploying tactics to “engage the human at the end of the marketing efforts” (via Marketing Week, subscription required).?
And in surprising news, Performance Marketing World’s take on the same report is that the majority of B2B marketers believe relationship building is key. They quote the author saying, “B2B decision-makers buy from brands they’ve heard of, which is why brand building is essential in B2B – it helps improve memorability. With so many people involved in B2B purchasing, building ‘collective confidence’ among all members of the buying group can be done effectively through bolder creative campaigns, which will be key to success in the year ahead.”
Our take: If three insights make a trend then it looks like there’s something happening out there in B2B with a renewed focus on creativity and building the brand. That’s great news - mainly for your customer! - but it’s not a binary decision; balance in budget allocation, a focus on making a clear promise to the customer, and how far you push the creative boundaries of expectation vs surprise are all even more critical in B2B than B2C.
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Community.
Regular readers will know that the team at Volume are evangelists for B2B brands building communities to build more meaningful relationships with their customers. Fostering and enabling peer to peer connections pays back over time by delivering a clear understanding of what the people in your market want, leading to higher satisfaction and LTV.?
So we were keen to read the new report from Mindshare - “Creativity and Community in the Intelligent Commerce Era.” Although heavily B2C in focus there are simple human insights in there about the value people place on being able to connect with and learn from ‘people like me’ which are equally relevant in a professional context.??
Our take? In the Venn diagram of ‘Community’ the term often overlaps with ‘Influencer’ and ‘Creator’. These cultural or social mavens have often built their business and brand on the principles of community from day one. And as Goldman Sachs predict that the total creator economy could roughly add up to $480 billion by 2027, with 70% coming through brand deals (where) Creators offer a way for brands to participate in communities through authentic relationships built on cultural relevance and shared values…” it’s perhaps no surprise that a media agency is researching the space.?
Also worth a read is the newly-published State of Digital report from LUMA partners - slides 59-67 in particular which break down the economics of the Creator Economy and how personal brand, influence and audience is a very real threat to the established / traditional media company model and ecosystem.
And a shout out to Chris Peters of the B2B Marketing Excellence newsletter we featured last month who has this month launched Moon at Dawn - a community and content hub where you can ‘learn from your B2B peers about how to approach influencer marketing.”
AI.
Back in 2011, Marc Andreesen of Silicon Valley mega VC A16Z wrote a prescient WSJ article “Why Software is Eating the World”. So it’s probably worth reading the view from inside A16Z on how gen AI software is advancing marketing and sales.?
Tik Tok has launched Symphony AI Avatars, a new creative tool that enables brands to create content using a catalogue of stock avatars and also create bespoke custom avatars based on talent and spokespeople within a business. The B2B applications for this are mind boggling - imagine the PR team creating synthetic content for the C-Suite, through to AI powered commercial teams creating sales videos at scale. This solves that problem of getting the sales team engaged with digital and social…
Team VOLUME.
VOLUME podcast incoming: We’re really excited to announce the launch of our very own podcast, with the first episode dropping in July!
TPWB2B is a podcast for everyone in B2B marketing, interviewing practitioners working in B2B to discuss specific problems each of them has faced, to learn exactly how they fixed it.?
We’re identifying the topics keeping B2B CMOs up at night - the biggest issues, emerging threats and talking to those who’ve either been through it successfully or are at the forefront of developing answers to new problems.
We’ve got a fantastic run of episodes ready to share - including interviews with thought leaders from Google, Deloitte, Soho House and Knight Frank. Keep an eye on our socials over the next few weeks for the first release!
?
This month at the CMA B2B Summit AI x Content was inevitably on the agenda. SJR ?previewed their ‘GX Engine,” essentially a LLM that brands can use to create “unique, dynamic content for individual clients (or members of a buying committee) based on intent data”. The promise? Going from queries to conversations. Sounds wonderful and looked impressive but the lunchtime talk centred on the cost to develop something universal like GX and therefore the pricing when re-selling the tech to clients. Also, we are aware of several professional services brands that are developing their own LLMs? - driven by two key factors; data / privacy concerns, and because the accessible nature of the technology means they can develop this in-house, rather than outsourcing to a traditional marketing services or tech consultancy.
Our take: There are few good use cases available so far, and so no clear winning approach. We will continue to track and share examples in the NextGenB2B newsletter as we see and hear of them.
Roundup.
Digital strategy leader @ EY | Human-centred strategy, design and technology | Neurodivergent advocate
8 个月The AI avatar area is interesting - the potential for this in growing global/local reach, and combining this with better AI translation technology is value-adding. A few notes on that linked here might be of interest: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/dpwilliams_contentstrategy-translation-generativeai-activity-7200934471615885312-4sUU