The Business Case for Bravery in B2B Tech

When you think of B2B tech marketing, what comes to mind are solution overviews, webinars, product-focused whitepapers, and websites littered with features. They are vanilla, often dull, and full of rational features and benefits that won’t move the needle when influencing buying decisions. 

To match the effectiveness of non-dull examples, dull B2B ads would require an extra £267m of investment.

System 1: The Extraordinary Cost of Dull

B2B marketing campaigns all blend into a sea of sameness - an extremely damaging place to be. No one knows who you are or remembers what you stand for. They are neutral in emotion and don’t help build the memory structures needed when making purchasing decisions.

The Rule of Three in Every Purchase Decision shows that when someone moves into buying mode, the first search engine they use is their head. 

Typically, one to three brands immediately come to mind that they think can solve their problem. And if you fast-forward to who they buy from, in 90% of cases, they buy from one of the three brands that initially came to mind.

• Source: The Rule of Three in Every Purchase Decision, BBN, 2019
  

Don’t think this applies to you? Think again. 

Why playing it safe if your biggest risk

According to research from the B2B Institute and System 1, 77% of B2B creative is terrible. It may be delivering profits, but the media spend does all the work, not the creative. It is why your media budget keeps increasing. We’re inefficiently spending money on distribution and not leveraging the power of creative to do the hard yards for us.

Why? Because we think it’s all about the product. 

Most B2B technology businesses are product-led. It’s a great product that is the reason behind the high sales numbers. Or, if sales are hard to come by, it’s because the product isn’t good enough.

I’ve experienced this problem first-hand in marketing roles within the tech sector, and I’ve seen teams endlessly chase product perfection to achieve the aspirational growth targets and scale they’ve promised the product will deliver. 

Our product-centricity in B2B means that ads, messages, and narratives try to cram as many product features and benefits as possible into our creatives. 

Websites are full of copy discussing the intricate details of the product. Ads are more like product showcases, and we expect everyone to be interested in the latest point updates and product innovations.

But that’s just not the case. And, quite frankly, it leaves your target audience feeling bored as they trawl through rational messaging that is more likely to help them get to sleep than remember your brand. 

Interestingly, those who do take the plunge and focus on brand, excluding the product from their bold creative, see a 10 to 20 times uplift in sales. That’s according to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. 

Why? Because messaging that stands out in this way is more likely to be recalled in a buying situation. It’s what Jenni Romaniuk and Les Binet call creating “Mental Availability”.‍

What can you do about it?‍

Don’t be boring. Be brave. 

Sounds simple, but it’s not always easy. Great creative is all about getting emotional. If you can make your buyer laugh, cry, or smile, you're much more likely to be remembered and even shared. That increases your chances of being remembered, supporting your long-term growth and pipeline generation. 

You might think of brand recall as a purely consumer metric. But it’s not. The Rule of Three proves it’s just as, if not more, important in B2B situations.

So, take a step back and think - do my marketing campaigns have an emotional hook? What does our product really enable for the buyer? It’s not just “efficiency”, but things like “the confidence to get a promotion,” or “it removes the need to do manual tasks that give me a headache and prevent me from leaving the office at 5 pm.” 

Even in the days of making decisions with only the facts available, your tech buyer will have used an emotional judgment to reach their decision. This might have sounded like:

• “They offered a cheaper price” - Translation: “My boss will be pleased that I got the same product for less. I’ll keep my job.”. 
• “They are a well-known brand” - Translation: “They’re a big name and a safe bet. I won’t lose my job for making a poor decision”.

Whatever those real, human-centric benefits are will be your USPs. They will form the basis of your brand positioning. So, to make your brand the first choice, or even to be invited into a quote, you need to tap into the emotional, not the logical side of your buyer’s brain. How is your brand going to help your buyer? How will your product make their life better? Climb that emotional ladder to find your answer. 

Once you know your buyer inside out, you can take a stand on the matters important to them. This creates a powerful bond that can't be replicated with simple ‘features and benefits sales pitching’. Emotional connection creates longevity in the mind of your buyer, and bearing in mind the average sales cycle in the tech buying world, longevity is your key to success.‍

The Return on Bravery

For years, B2B marketers have been hooked on performance marketing data and platform attribution. We’ve overallocated marketing budgets on bottom-of-funnel activity because these platforms gave us the ability to justify our spend, with neat calculations that attribute a value to the leads generated from these channels. 

The problem is, we’ve been leaning more and more into short-term marketing tactics. Targeting the 5% of buyers that are ‘in market’ in any given quarter, and leaving the other 95% out in the cold, waiting for them to enter decision-making mode before we even engage.

Reallocating budget back to brave brand campaigns can be easier said than done when you’re fighting fires and battling to deliver leads into the mouths of your hungry sales team, right? Yet, the business case to do so is massive.

Why? Because brave top-of-funnel brand campaigns will make your bottom-of-funnel conversion up to six or seven times more effective.

“You get a much, much bigger performance out of these more exciting campaigns – it can be six or seven times greater for every euro, dollar or pound you put behind them”, said leading marketer, Peter Field.

For starters, reallocating budget back to high-impact, emotional brand campaigns will better reach the 95% of the market that isn’t actively buying. The goal here isn’t to generate an MQL, but to increase memorability, measured by brand lift, branded search, and increased traffic (for instance). These campaigns are about building awareness and demand.

But you can’t just focus on brand in isolation. You need to unify brave campaigns with more rational bottom-of-funnel conversion. However, instead of the generic product-pushing ads, we can connect the rational benefits to the emotional messages we’ve used at the top of the funnel, creating a cohesive, powerful experience that builds trust and makes the buying decision easier. Calls to action will reinforce our brave brand narrative, and we can attribute leads and pipeline to these efforts to prove commercial value. 

So, what does this look like in practice? 

Step 1: Identify the segment you want to target and understand the buyer persona

Targeting is important. You can’t be everything to everyone. So choose a segment with the most growth potential, identify the buying group and then create a persona for your champion. This will define the rest of your campaign.

Step 2: Create a brave campaign idea

This needs to be an emotionally driven campaign that plays into the motivations and needs of your buyer persona. You could challenge an industry orthodoxy or expose a common pain point or category entry point.

Step 3: Drive top-of-funnel awareness

Launch the campaign across high-visibility channels (podcasts, thought leadership, PR, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc) and prove its value by showing the resulting increase in branded search queries and direct traffic.

Step 4: Convert bottom-of-funnel buyers

Use intent signals and retargeting campaigns to serve more rational bottom-of-funnel campaigns to convert those in market, tracking things like sales velocity and stage conversion rates.

Step 5: Let it run

Consistency and longevity are key to successful campaigns. If you’ve done your research and created a distinctive and brave campaign, let it do its work. Research shows that effective campaigns run for two or more YEARS. Not months! Yes, you can “refresh” campaigns and optimise them, based on learnings. But for campaigns to have the room to be effective, you need to stick with them and ensure consistency across all of your channels.

Being brave in B2B marketing isn’t about coming up with a recklessly creative campaign. It’s about making a strategic investment in memorability, then watching as it creates a better, more efficient lead engine. Does that lsound ike a plan you could take to your CEO?

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