Light Little Fires: How to Win at B2B Marketing (clue: it's all about brand)
We've been doing a fair bit of B2B brand storytelling at Stranger Collective of late, which reminded us of a particularly valuable panel at last year’s Festival of Marketing . The B2B Institute at LinkedIn's Head of EMEA and LAR Mimi Turner and AV Consulting’s Annabel Venner talked about the common pitfalls of B2B marketing and how smart brands are seeing the opportunities to do things differently. We’ve referred back to the discussion they had and the insight they shared countless times since, so thought that almost a year on, now would be a good time to revisit it in detail and summarise four of its key takeaways.
The headline? Brand building for B2B businesses is an untapped opportunity and B2B is a huge growth area. There’s real scope for creativity.
In the Festival of Marketing panel, Turner started by explaining that at any one time, in a typical B2B cycle, only 5% of buyers are actively in market. Which means that 95% of potential customers aren’t. This knowledge should make a huge difference to how you’re communicating. If you’re only speaking to that active 5%, you’re responding to demand instead of thinking about how your messaging could be reaching prospects.
Turner pointed out that if you want to secure future cashflows, you have to speak to future buyers, because your valuation is actually based entirely on the future – not on this month’s sales, or this quarter’s figures. That means priming for and focusing marketing messaging on the 95% of buyers is of critical importance.
"Mental availability means understanding that marketing should be hinged on owning the decision-making moment, whenever it comes."
Venner illustrated this by talking about her experience with Hiscox Insurance.?When she worked there, they calculated that someone who punches ‘professional indemnity insurance’ into Google would cost Hiscox 20 times more to convert in marketing terms, than someone who punches in ‘Hiscox’ – proving that a brand awareness campaign drive would be more cost efficient than an aggressive SEO campaign. It was the evidence they needed to make a business case for focusing on brand marketing. And it led to innovative creative campaigns for the brand, that really delivered.
2. Do not fall for the product delusion.
So much of B2B marketing is a love letter to products and features. This isn’t how B2C does things but for some reason, it’s what a lot of businesses believe B2B decision makers need. Turner used the example of Coca Cola and how different its campaigns would look if it sold its product based on it being "99% fizzier than its competitors". Of course that’s not how Coke markets itself, she said, because it understands the idea of "mental availability". All of its messaging is about understanding that marketing should be hinged on owning the decision-making moment, whenever it comes. “A fundamental truth is that human memory works the same way regardless of the product you are selling,” she explained. “It’s all about creating that sense of recall – and that doesn’t come from telling your buyer about your 57 exciting product features.”
People want to know more before they buy from you. They want to understand the reputation of your brand, they want to know that you ‘get them’ and their industry. And if you and all your competitors take the same staid product features route, how are they going to know who you are, let alone be able to recognise and choose you in a brand line up?
However, as Turner also highlighted, part of the challenge with this approach is the continuing need to sell the importance of brand building internally. Marketers in B2B often have an uphill struggle when it comes to internal engagement, constantly educating across the business about why brand marketing matters, what it does, how it works and the impact it can have.
“A fundamental truth is that human memory works the same way regardless of the product you are selling. It’s all about creating that sense of recall – and that doesn’t come from telling your buyer about your 57 exciting product features.”
Having that conversation with your executive team, or CFO, is vital. And being able to show that brand health today equals financial health tomorrow, is paramount. Luckily there is a bounty of valuable research and insight available at The B2B Institute to help with this.
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3. Understand the real drivers of decision making
B2B decisions are driven by rational decision making, right? Not quite. The truth is that B2B decisions are tied up with emotional and social considerations in a way that we don’t really think about. Turner qualified this by saying that 95% of us spend 95% of our time in a sort of "consensual hallucination" that it’s logic and professional thinking that really work. Many B2B Marketers spend all their time there, because that’s where they think other people are.
Underneath the decision to focus on products and features, or logic and rational thinking rather than brand creativity, are huge amounts of risk around social and emotional considerations. Brave marketers need to think about how to confront and tackle the concerns they might have about going down the brand route –much more murky questions below the surface like, “will my boss think well of me for making the decision, how will I sell this to the team, will I get blamed for this if it goes wrong?”
Venner then expanded on this point by suggesting conversations with your customer or prospective customer can really help. She explained that B2B marketers need to get in front of their customers more and listen to them, because it’s in those conversations that they might say something and give you the ‘aha’ moment which becomes an original?idea – backed up by valid insight that you can talk about with your team.
“Sometimes the biggest internal conversation is around investing in brand,” she explained. “I hate saying brand vs. acquisition but it often is, in terms of how to build your brand, how to invest for the future and for the longterm. It’s about securing the investment and holding people’s hands to get the creativity through. Often it’s starting small. Lighting little fires and get small wins in the business to show the difference creativity and brand thinking can make, and then you can make it happen.”
4. ?Short term vs. long term
Permission to think long term is so important. But how do you get it? Turner had some thoughts. Last year, the B2B Institute at LinkedIn collaborated with WARC and Cannes Lions on a huge piece of work around creative effectiveness, published in The Effectiveness Code whitepaper. Through the research, they looked at 435 B2B case studies over a ten year period to work out what the levers are that really make a difference, considering budget, channels and duration. And the results were interesting.
B2B over-indexes on direct marketing and email marketing, and under-indexes in the bigger, high reach media spaces including PR, social, online video and print. B2B also relies extremely heavily on the highly informational/educational, partnership driven comms and strategies that our brains don’t really like (over-indexing by 175% in that space), and doesn’t generally use storytelling, brand character, humour, sustainability and emotional triggers that our brains are able to give more mental availability to and that stimulate recall.
“For the longest time as human beings, 70,000 years, we had a couple of ways of communicating with each other – paint me a picture, sing me a song, tell me a story. That’s what we did. That’s how our brains work,” Turner said. “Multiplying the levers you use in this way is always going to be a far more successful idea.”
She continued by explaining that as part of the research they also ranked the hierarchy of effectiveness of these B2B campaigns from least commercially impactful to most commercially impactful. “What was incredible was that only 5% of businesses from all the case studies we looked at delivered the kind of advertising that was actually the most effective and got the highest returns. 76% were stuck at level 1 advertising relying heavily on response triggering. If you want to stand out and be remembered it’s better not to be stuck in a space with the 76% doing pretty much the same as you. Instead, go higher up, where only 5% of other businesses are trying to play.”
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Check out The B2B Institute at LinkedIn for loads more free insight of the power and value of creativity in B2B marketing.
Find out more about the work we've been doing to help our B2B clients find and tell their stories in impactful ways.