B2B needs to get more in touch with its emotions
Last week I talked about a recent B2B marketing effectiveness report published by The B2B Institute and LinkedIn. The report, titled ‘The B2B Effectiveness Code’, was produced from a detailed analysis of 400+ B2B marketing campaigns which won major industry awards for effectiveness.
As a reminder, here are the eight main things I took from the report:
1. Build brand as well as promoting sales
2. Tap into audience emotions
3. Invest in creative
4. There’s no simple answer
5. Be more patient
6. Go multichannel
7. Spend more
8. Brand helps short-term sales, but selling doesn’t build long-term brand
I want to go into the first four in a bit more detail, and I’ll come back to the other four next week.
1. Build brand as well as promoting sales
Ah, the thorny question of brand vs sales.
The truth – surely and incontrovertibly – is that brand is the very thing which creates the opportunity for sales to happen. Your brand is what lets your audience know it’s you, and what they can expect as a result. The cliché that “no-one gets fired for buying IBM” is instructive when it comes to the value of brand. The clear message is that the product or service you’re buying from IBM isn’t the best available but, well, it’s IBM.
Of course, you’re not IBM. So that Holy Grail of your brand driving sales as if by magic doesn’t exist for you.
It’s important to note the equation of one, building brand and, two, promoting sales is a sum of two parts. It’s quite easy to focus on one and forget the other. The B2B Institute report gives the very specific advice that you should spend “approximately” 54% of your budget on sales activation and the remaining 46% on brand building. If you go 55/45 the whole thing won’t fall apart, mind. In fact, if you want to ease yourself in you could go 60/40. Hell, go 65/35. The point is not to sacrifice your brand at the altar of sales conversion.
As Frank almost sang, you can’t do such an effective job of one without the other.
2. Tap into audience emotions
The problem for B2B brands is that none of them – although please do correct me on this if I’m wrong – can make you look cooler, sexier, braver, more intelligent or more successful. Thus you’re unlikely to see Chris Hemsworth smouldering on an ad for Deloitte; lustful tribes of scantily-clad prehistoric models do not chase a Barclay’s banking customer along Canary Wharf.
There’s a reason fragrance ads don’t just go: “This’ll make you smell nicer for a bit. It has a bottle that’ll look good in your lavatory. It smells better than some of the other choices you have.”
That reason, of course, is that this would be a hopeless advert. And yet, quite often, it’s broadly the format of B2B ads. A bullet-pointed list of features and benefits which are useful and objectively helpful but that ultimately reduce your product or service to a commodity.
Whether you’re buying a new T-shirt or a new car or a new phone or a bottle of whisky, as a consumer your emotions come into it. This is unlikely to be deliberate on your part but it’s how it happens. I buy a T-shirt because I think it’ll make me look sportier or cooler, not because I’m alarmed about suddenly being naked (that would be alarming for everyone, admittedly). I buy a certain type of whisky because in my head I’m drinking it beside a misty loch, or late at night with Alan Shore in Boston Legal. I like all whisky, truth be told, but this one makes me feel something (and not just pissed).
It's very unusual to see this being applied in B2B, but the report highlights a couple of nice examples – Simply Business insurance with its gently humorous ‘You Name It, We Insure It’; and Dell with its heart-string tugging eSight ad featuring partially-sighted kids being able to see their parents properly. Wasn’t prepared for that one, I’ll admit it got me a bit damp in the eye-holes. Dell’s campaign led to a 61% increase in purchase intent; Simply Business booked a 1,349% uplift in brand interest. Ooft.
3. Invest in creative
Most creative work for a B2B product or service isn’t all that creative. It’s often a white paper, a bit of a jolly tone of voice, and a kid with an upturned colander on his head pretending to be a scientist.
‘Creative’ doesn’t have to mean going crazy such that you alienate your audience. Far from it. But, in that brief second when your target audience turns its gaze towards you, you really must do better than: “Erm… innovative solutions?”
Yellow Pages Australia created a hidden restaurant, which served free pizza and was only advertised in the Yellow Pages. I’m going to guess this was based on research which suggested businesses don’t consider the Yellow Pages to be a worthwhile place to find new customers. They could quite simply have run an ad or whacked out a PR survey which said: “XX% of people say they would try the Yellow Pages to find their favourite restaurant”. And nobody, but nobody would be listening.
The campaign was the brand’s most effective work ever, with the restaurant becoming ‘a social phenomenon’. Very nicely done, Aussies.
Don’t think you’re even as interesting as the Yellow Pages? In 2010 American Express USA created Small Business Saturday. The idea was that Americans would be encouraged to ‘Shop Small’ by supporting their local businesses the day after Black Friday. The next year, the brand wanted to get Small Business Saturday named an official day – they created marketing tools for small businesses, rallied public officials, got people to pledge to shop small. As well as having it declared a national day, and getting the support of Barack Obama, 103 million Americans answered the call and shopped small. By my sums*, almost half of those would have used an Amex card.
4. There’s no simple answer
Unfortunately, non-marketers, those of us in marketing have broken all of our magic crayons that turn a single ad into a bazillion pounds. It happened some time ago but it’s only now I can reveal this to you.
So instead of belching your ad / content / event into the atmosphere and opening your big trapdoor marked “Money In Here”, we’re going to have to work a bit harder.
Marketing can’t fix a bad product or service. Nor can it create a market which doesn’t exist (well, in theory it can but that’s getting really complicated). What it can and should do is conduct some research into your audience, then create a strategy, then set proper objectives, and then get cracking with the communications work which ties plainly and obviously back to the strategy. Anything else is guessing.
But if you do it then it’ll all be fixed and you’ll make loads of money. Woops, no you won’t. It’ll take time. It’ll never be perfect. There will be setbacks and mistakes and conflicting priorities and people who’ll say no all the time and stuff you can’t control.
Now – and this is serious – if you have the right strategy and if you’re prepared to accept that marketing, like most other disciplines in business, cannot wield a magic sceptre, then you’ll make progress and see results.
Beware anyone who whispers into your ear beguiling visions of immediate success. Good B2B marketing, which delivers long-term value beyond simple commodity transactions, needs proper insight and a confident strategy from which you must not deviate just because Microsoft didn’t offer to buy you by the end of the first week of your campaign.
Somewhat amusingly in the course of writing this post, I saw a good meme on LinkedIn making fun of marketers who use reports like this one to, ahem, ‘inspire’ thought leadership. Lolz, etc, but my point in doing this is that a) most people who aren’t in marketing won’t read or even be aware of this research, and b) there are some specific points I wanted to pull out which relate to the work I’m doing and the questions I get asked. So up yours, Smug LinkedIn Guy.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’d love to speak to anyone who has a view on this from the perspective of their own business. So far one person has answered the call, which means I’m going to have to start picking on people. Don’t make me do it.
*how many Americans aged 18-65 have used an Amex card in the last month as a % of how many Americans are in the same age bracket)
