Using All Five Senses in B2B Marketing

Our clients bring amazing things into the world. What fuels us as marketers—on top of our client's ingenuity—are the thinkers, practitioners and creators who are showing us a new way. In this space, every few weeks we share what is capturing our attention—big or small.

1. Why Dropbox’s Work in Progress is an Ongoing B2B Marketing Classic

Do you sometimes feel marketed to death? Marketing is on our delivery envelopes, our sugar packets, and above the Uber line at the airport. Once in a while, it would be nice to read a good story, something uplifting and positive about someone doing some interesting work, with a seamless but unobtrusive tie back to a brand.

The data vault Dropbox –?a mainstay in B2B operations for moving and storing huge files – clearly has been listening. Their light-touch marketing campaign Work in Progress, now in its 16th year, has published more than 750 articles. Work Culture pieces tend toward cultural takes on topics like using AI to preserve fragile languages, while Customer Profiles zoom in more directly on creative uses of Dropbox, like warming up cold cases.

What makes Work in Progress so good is not just the quality of the writing – one of their regulars also publishes in The New Yorker and The New York Times –?or the tasty graphic design, but the way they shine the spotlight on the story or the issue while keeping the brand in its proper supporting role. As a result, unsurprisingly, you feel more positive about the brand. B2B marketers usually swing wildly and miss on this point. Their outreach strategy is also smart, via channels like Facebook sponsored ads.

Although its web address is a blog – blog.dropbox.com – Work in Progress is more like an online digital magazine. It’s smart, interesting, and deserves to go on for at least another 16 years.

PJA Author: Hugh Kennedy

2. Tapping Into Our Senses?

Most of the B2B campaigns you've seen probably relied on sight: vivid creative on a billboard, a sleek landing page, an engaging video ad, or smart thought leadership articles and eBooks. But what if our other senses were in the driver's seat? Would that help us remember our experiences better? These three campaigns lean into our other senses as their primary way of engagement through sound, smell, and touch in memorable ways that are hard to forget.?

Accounts Deceivable?

Medius , a global provider of accounts payable services and anti-fraud solutions, recognized that they needed their buyers to believe fraud could happen to them and was a threat to their business before they were open to buying their solutions.?

So they launched a hard-hitting true crime podcast that examines the impact of financial fraud and white-collar crimes. The limited series highlights true stories about the devastating and real impacts of this type of fraud hearing from both the victims and criminals. And by using true crime podcasts, a genre people love to dive into, they opened buyers’ minds that this could happen to anyone. The podcast has charted in the top 150 business podcasts and just launched season 2.

Smells like McDonald’s?

Walking down the street in the Netherlands, you can let your nose lead the way. 麦当劳 created a "smell billboard," diffusing the iconic scent of their fries into a seemingly plain ad that visually was only red and yellow with no copy or logo.?Those walking knew right away that the smell was McDonald’s fries. The boards were strategically placed near McDonald’s locations if people were now in the mood to grab a snack.?

Why D2L built a desk?

D2L , an online learning platform, recognized that traditional desks in the classroom don’t work for every student’s individual needs. They created a customizable, flexible desk that can?be shaped?to best fit the student.?It can turn into a lounge chair, a fort, or a bench, depending on how students want to learn.?It brings a tactile element of play to the very traditional school desk. This desk, like many of our clients in complex B2B markets providing comprehensive solutions, aims to do everything for its users rather than one thing.?

Innovatively tapping into our senses can open new avenues for how brands can stick, stay in our brains, and turn our senses on their heads.?

PJA Author: Jennie Osber

3. Unconventional thinking, B2B edition

From Highway to Heal, and Contrarian Thinking for B2B

I’ve long been a fan of the LinkedIn B2B Marketing Institute. Heads of R&D, Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg , bring a rigor (through their partnership with Ehrenberg-Bass Institute) and a refreshing POV on what works in B2B marketing. My favorite content franchise is Contrarian Advice for Marketers. One particularly valuable (and yes, contrarian) perspective they consistently advocate for is the importance of brand marketing in B2B. Brand investment often loses to pipeline marketing in B2B, and it’s usually by a rout. But as Linkedin data-driven arguments point out, when only 5% of customers are in the market for what you sell at any given time, demand generation alone is missing most of your addressable market. By all means, make sure you’ve got the ABM programs in place to find those precious buyers who are in-market. But building “situational awareness” among potential buyers (in other words, making sure you’re hardwiring your brand in their brains to the big problems they are trying to solve) is the most important job for marketing to do. Which invites disciplines like long-term thinking, out-of-the-box creativity, big bets, and building franchises back to the table. Bookmark this link—I’m betting you’ll return to it often.

PJA Author: Michael O'Toole