Making brave B2B tech marketing a reality: lessons from the latest Brave Collective Breakfast

Nearly a year after the launch of our Brave Collective community, we’ve been busy reflecting on what we’ve achieved together. A scary amount of croissants consumed, 3 in-person events, 4 fantastic panel guests, 1 piece of industry-first research (our Mental Av-AI-lability Index if you want to check it out), and countless hours of conversation. 

Our 125-strong Collective community has given us a lot in return, sharing their honest thoughts and feelings about the state of B2B tech marketing, and sparking some eye-opening conversations that have genuinely changed how we approach things. 

So, after hours of discussion about the problems facing B2B tech marketers in this brave new world of AI, we wanted to share some potential solutions for those issues. Hence, the theme of our latest Brave Breakfast: Remedies. 

As you’ll likely have already seen, we had a wonderful panel of pros on the day. Chaired by our very own Head of B2B Marketing, Ash Lockett, and featuring Global Top 100 CMO Sarah Roberts, a fierce champion of the B2Human mindset, and Founder & CEO of Demand Genius, Tom Rudnai, who works on the front lines figuring out how AI search is reshaping the B2B buying journey. 

Not only did they share some amazing tips for marketers trying to build a brand that resonates with humans, but that is also structured perfectly for the algorithms that are dominating the B2B buying process (which you can read all about here). They also spilt the beans on how marketers can actually turn these plans into a reality, gaining internal buy-in, and new avenues to prove brand ROI. 

If you missed out on the day, don’t worry - we’ve summarised some of their top tips below. 

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Getting brand from paper to practice 

We’ve all been there at one time or another. After weeks and months of careful work, you create a truly great brand position and messaging house, filled with emotional storytelling - which, as we’ve already discussed, is ideal for both human mental availability and LLM visibility. You’re set to go, right? Wrong.

Now comes the hard part. Getting the wider business to buy into your vision. Because all that positioning is useless if it’s not reflected in the culture and in the experience your customers receive when engaging with your organisation. The second your message is inadvertently contradicted in-house, or externally,   bam, your authenticity is gone. 

And that doesn’t just go for those in-person interactions. What about where those business and personal channels overlap, as they do on LinkedIn? An employee might post with good intentions, but if it contradicts the messaging elsewhere, customers and prospects will notice. As Sarah Roberts argued on our panel, this is precisely why PR and marketing teams should become ‘best friends’ with HR teams. The messaging that you create shouldn’t be designed in isolation; HR and culture teams should feed in, ensuring that it aligns with wider business values and making it easier to engage internally. 

After all, you can push messaging out across all the channels you like to try and sink the new direction in with customers, but there’s one channel you know they will all eventually (if the pipelines work!), come through - and that’s your sales teams. Embed messaging there first. 

And Sarah’s top tip for this? Go speak to someone else in your business who has insight on customers, maybe someone you’ve never even spoken to. Ask them what their perception is of the customer and their needs. And if you’re feeling really brave - ask them to articulate the brand to you (although be prepared to be scared of the answer!). 

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Why brand ROI still doesn’t work - but could there be AI alternatives? 

It’s a long-lamented issue in the B2B marketing space - brand ROI is notoriously hard to attribute and determine. And, we’re sorry to say, AI isn’t going to magically change that. But there are different approaches to take when trying to prove the value of brand. 

As Sarah Roberts shared on our panel, marketing leaders could go down the route of metrics. Sitting down with the finance and strategy teams to dig deep into the business metrics and figure out where and how these can align with marketing metrics. Then, in those all-important exec meetings, you can talk in terms of business metrics, explaining how they are being impacted by marketing and brand activity. 

In Sarah’s experience, it’s also all about how the conversation around brand ROI is framed. 

Brand is intangible, but is reputation? Arguably, you can’t have one without the other, as Sarah believes. So when a CEO is struggling to understand brand, tie it back to reputation. Brand is the vehicle by which you build reputation in the market, so tie the conversation back where possible to revenue and customer relationships. 

While AI might not have been used to create a brand ROI tool (well, not yet anyway), it can provide an alternative answer to the question of ROI. As Tom Rudnai explained on our panel, he believes LLMs are often mischaracterised as a channel, and that their real use is as a brand reflection tool. For the first time, your CEO can open a chat and experience the same perspective or perception of your brand that all of your customers get. 

Using this as an insight source, you can show brand sentiment changing over time, alongside other more tangible metrics such as share-of-voice, to explain and demonstrate your work. It won’t perfectly translate to revenue, but it will show those more intangible changes, made visible for the first time now that your CEO can have the same view of your brand as a customer. 

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(Not quite) a brave new world of AI 

Probably the most important takeaway of our latest Brave Collective Breakfast? AI might have changed a lot, but it’s not changed the essentials of B2B marketing. If anything, it’s a distraction, pulling marketers and PRs away from what matters most - emotional brand storytelling. 

Similarly, it’s also pulling attention away from what has the most impact on your brand - the people. The salespeople and teams on the ground are just as crucial for your brand as the work you do externally; don’t forget them. 

If anything, the one place where you’d wish it’d have some impact, it hasn’t. With all the AI tools already out there, one is still yet to be created that can measure B2B brand ROI. But if used creatively, AI can still provide new insight into your brand's perception amongst customers, helping to persuade unconvinced CEOs of the power of brand. 

That’s it for now, but if you want to hear more insights from our fantastic panel, check out their appearances on our BacktoBrave podcast - Sarah’s episode is linked here, and Tom’s here. 

And in the meantime, if you’re not already, sign up to join our Brave Collective - so that next time you can join in on the conversation in real time! 

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