Minding the B2B Marketing Effectiveness Gap Part 2:  Recommendations for B2B Brands

Tips to increase B2B marketing effectiveness and increase your brand’s value in the long-term

Note: This is part 2 of the “Minding the B2B Marketing Effectiveness Gap” blog series. Read part one to learn what the B2B Marketing Effectiveness gap is and why its important to close it.

In our previous blog, we explored what causes a lack of effectiveness in B2B marketing and how B2B brands can improve marketing results. Now, we want to share tips to help you create an emotional connection that engages audiences when deploying a bold, large-scale marketing campaign.

TIPS TO DEVELOP EFFECTIVE EMOTIONAL ADVERTISING AND B2B MARKETING EFFECTIVENESS

B2B marketers who want to use emotional advertising to build long term value and memorability for their brands, can benefit from adding negative and positive emotion segments to their customer journey map. Brands should conduct an exercise to identify their target’s emotions at each state in the customer journey. For example, brands should answer questions like: “What is my target audience most likely feeling when they’re in need of my product or service,” and “What are they feeling when they don’t?” Once you identify the emotions of your audience, you can create advertising that appeals to their emotional state.

Use storytelling. Stories are a powerful way to connect with people on an emotional level. When you tell a relatable story, you captivate your audience and create a positive emotion. This in turn increases brand memorability and increases the chance they’ll give your brand their time and attention when they encounter it next or are in need.

Emphasize visuals and limit text. Visuals are a powerful way to evoke emotions. When you use visuals in your advertising, you are making it more likely that your audience will feel something.

Be authentic. Insincerity is glaring and off putting. Let your brand’s values and personality shine through in its advertising.

TIPS FOR DEPLOYING LARGER SCALE MARKETING CAMPAIGNS TO INCREASE B2B MARKETING

A large-scale brand awareness campaign does not directly promote your products or services, but it makes your brand more familiar to potential customers and reaches prospects that aren’t in the market. Brands often make the mistake of promoting product features and benefits that fill up ad space all along the customer journey. There is a customer journey stage and ad space in which it makes sense to do that but during brand introduction is not one of them.

First, identify your target audiences. Who are you trying to reach? Developing personas can help marketing teams understand and always keep in mind customers' needs, wants, and pain points. This information can then be used to create marketing campaigns that are more likely to resonate with your target audience.

Create valuable content. During the awareness phase, your content should be informative, engaging, and relevant to your target audience. This will help to attract new customers and build relationships with existing customers. For example, a brand can perform competitive research to identify pain points of competitors’ customers then create SEO optimized content that highlights its brand equities and solutions.  

Use the right channels. Choose the channels that your target audience is most likely to use. For example, if you’re trying to reach retailers and distribution stakeholders with information about a new product, you can leverage advertising opportunities on industry publications and associations.

Be consistent. It takes time for someone to get to know and subsequently trust your brand. Consistency increases memorability and streamlines achieving trust.

TIPS TO DEVELOP LARGER, DARING AND BOLD CREATIVE CAMPAIGNS THAT INCREASE MARKETING EFFECTIVENESS

• Out-of-the-box thinking leaves a lasting impression. Yes, there are instances of bold creative gone wrong. The good news is that you can confidently limit the potential that this will occur and maintain the integrity of the brand following a few tips.
• Understand your target audience. Before you take any creative risks, it's important to understand your target audience and what they find appealing. What are their values? What are their interests? What are their pain points? Once you understand your target audience, you can start to develop creative ideas that will resonate with them. This is another reason why developing personas is so important to strategy and content development.
• Be mindful of your brand's values. When introducing bold creative, it's important to stay true to your brand's values. If you stray too far from your values, you risk alienating your target audience.
• Be consistent with your messaging. When brands dare to be different, it's important they be consistent with their messaging. This means making sure that all your creative materials, from your website to your social media posts, are aligned with your brand's overall message.
• Test your ideas. Once you have some creative ideas, it's important to test them out before you launch them to your target audience. This will help you to identify any potential problems and adjust before it's too late. You can test your ideas by conducting surveys, focus groups, or A/B testing.

Now that you’ve learned how to incorporate emotional connections into campaigns to increase B2B marketing effectiveness, download Rhea + Kaiser’s Discovery Map. Our tool includes the questions your brand needs to ask themselves and know before kicking off strategy development. If you need consultation by experts and an outside perspective, Rhea + Kaiser can help. Contact us to get started.