Don’t send a card. Send a SKYWRITER.
For my latest and final ‘milking a big report by someone else to save me a bit of work’ post, I’m going to ask you to take a leap of faith into the unknown. Expect very little at first. Jump in with both feet. Trust that your work to date has invisibly set in motion an unstoppable force of success.
Commit.
Don’t be a chicken.
A few weeks ago, if you haven’t been tuning in regularly, I highlighted a really interesting report from the B2B Institute about what makes marketing work for non-consumer brands. TLDR: it’s the same stuff that makes B2C marketing work.
Regardez: the final four of the eight. For the first four, check out my other post.
1. Be more patient
2. Go multichannel
3. Spend more
4. Brand helps short-term sales, but selling doesn’t build long-term brand
1. Be more patient
In our house there’s a cupboard under the stairs where we’ve got a series of pencil marks, showing how our kids have grown over the years. Invariably when they were younger they’d want us to measure them every couple of days. When we did, and the pencil marks didn’t move, they’d have a right old moan about how they weren’t growing.
Building your B2B brand is really the same idea. And let’s be REALLY clear about what we actually mean by brand. It’s the position you occupy in the mind of your target buyer. When they run into a thorny legal issue you want them to think immediately of your law firm because you fix the horror shows other lawyers can’t. When they lose all their data because the office labradoodle chewed through a cable at 4.57pm on a Friday, you want them to call you because they know your cloud computing business will soothe their worried brows and restore their data quicker than the CTO can say: “Get that goddamn dog out of here”.
But those associations don’t just happen because you’ve bashed out a couple of LinkedIn posts or issued a press release about your latest award win (truthfully now, no-one cares). The best performing campaigns highlighted by the research showed they ran over a period of months, even years.
You can absolutely drive some short-term sales with specific campaigns. No doubt. But the smart money says that when you switch off the campaign tap, those sales will disappear under the waves with barely a ripple. A strong brand is the vessel on which your business will continue to sail – if you’re willing to invest the time, effort and money in building it.
2. Go multi-channel
The constant pressure for short-term sales, in my view, is one of the paradoxical reasons why so much B2B work fails to deliver much beyond average. And before you roll your eyes, there’s no question that marketing needs to deliver commercial value as quickly as possible.
The research shows a clear correlation between the number of media channels used and the effectiveness of the work. I think the modern parlance is ‘holistic’, but the more straightforward version might be that one swallow doesn’t make a summer.
Having done a proper strategy based on sound research – because you have, of course – you’ll have an idea where your audience hangs out and how you might be able to reach them. For B2B, it’s not just about LinkedIn, although it’s not a bad place to start. Nor is it simply about the business pages of your favourite newspaper. There exists a constellation of options for those who spend the time to seek it out – partnerships with complementary organisations, clever sponsorship of the correct events and awards, email (the most popular channel, according to the report), digital marketing tools, print ads.
By the way, you can also go for LinkedIn and trade press if that’s what your budget allows. The data shows you’ll still see better results than if you chose only one. But the key is to be consistent over a period of time.
3. Spend more
I remember many a conversation with prospective clients over the years when we’d insist on a clear budget. Not because it was a target we would try to hit, we’d reassure them, but because we needed a rough ball-park figure with which to create a workable proposal.
Turns out that first part was bobbins. We should have been aiming for the target, whatever the number was. A lot of companies think that by providing a set budget, agencies will simply rejoice in the opportunity to line their pockets and buy fancy watches, the flash bandits.
There may be some truth in that, but the actual data shows that the more you spend, the more successful your marketing campaign will be. The biggest kids in the playground get the most sweets. They can beat up the small ones, empty out their pockets, and run off with the Haribo.
Is it fair? No. Is it a fact of life? Yep. The report talks about the concept of ‘Creative Commitment’, a three-part equation between the length of the campaign, the number of channels used and the size of the budget.
Turns out the bigger your budget, the bigger your impact. It stands to reason. If you’re the lead character in a syrupy romcom trying to win over the gorgeous-but-distant object of your desire, do you a) send a £2.49 card from Asda or b) spaff your savings on a skywriter to declare “TAYLOR I LOVE YOU” above her house? Yes, Taylor Swift. Quiet, it’s my romcom.
It would be exceedingly unwise, of course, to write a cheque for a large number you can’t afford and hope for the best. But in setting a budget, it makes sense to understand the size of the prize and commit a budget that can at least get you started. Remember you don’t need to nail it in year one, but you do need to get out of the blocks.
4. Brand building helps sales. Sales activation doesn’t help brand.
One of the key conclusions of the report is expressed in an effectiveness ‘ladder’. No wonder people hate marketers. However, it’s a useful illustration of the point.
The ladder broadly progresses from the first rung – provoking a response, something like a website or a content download – through to a strategic asset which eventually drives its own momentum and creates long-term value for the business. That could be through sales, share price, market value etc. I once had a client who wanted to be known as a fintech rather than a lender because it would increase the multiple the business might attract at a sale.
That business, like every other business, had to deal with short-term sales targets. But the ultimate goal was not meagre slivers of incremental improvement. It was a multiple-times-EBITDA showstopper of a deal which would make all the shareholders grotesquely wealthy. Which, as I understand it, they now are.
In the middle of the ladder is a sale closer, which is generally where most businesses prefer to stop marketing progressing any further. This is a great shame because, while the immediate returns are harder to prove, the data shows it’s where the real value is. If your overall strategy is right, then you can absolutely demonstrate the value over the course of time.
Still, if you can’t look your CFO in the eye and say confidently: “This campaign generated sales of X” then you’re probably in for a bumpy ride. There’s no small amount of self-preservation behind what the research reports as a decline in the various good practices it recommends.
The optimum mix is to have a proportion of your budget aimed at lower-funnel sales activation, and a similar but probably smaller proportion aimed at brand building. There will be unavoidable trade-offs. You need pretty chunky budgets to do all of this the way the report advocates. I think this is probably why most ‘normal’ B2B organisations (those which aren’t Microsoft or Accenture) struggle to do much more than remain barely visible with their marketing work, and choose instead to pursue short-term sales campaigns which have little value in the long-term.
But, as the saying goes, patience has its own rewards. In this case, it’s a stronger, more profitable business.
And there you go. Instead of reading a 40-page report with jazzy illustrations and cool case studies, you’ve possibly read about 4,500 words of my interpretation of it. I’m not sure I’ve actually saved you any time but I hope some of it was useful.
And the VERY good news is there’s more to come. I’ve got some interviews lined up with senior marketing people and some senior non-marketers, so I’ll be back in a few weeks to report on what they think about all of this.
