During a recession, prospects behaviour and selection processes may be different. What has worked well previously may not be as effective within the current climate. Taking an agile approach to your marketing will help your teams adapt to market change more easily and quickly. A key aspect of this is experimentation.
For many marketers, when they think of experimentation they think of A/B testing, and this is one mechanism for continually improving your activity. But experimentation goes beyond this. For example, look at trialling ads across different social platforms to determine which site generates a higher number of quality leads, or look at trialling different pieces of content to see what resonates with your audience.
True experimentation starts with defining hypotheses and developing a framework and series of tests that can prove or disprove these. Understanding how these changes are impacting reach, engagement and conversion and providing insights to inform your activity and how your marketing needs to adapt accordingly.
Start by establishing an experimentation framework so that you have defined your hypothesis to prove or disprove and have set out the data points you will measure (KPI, timeframe, segment etc) to assess impact. When you are experimenting don’t throw everything up in the ai, you already know or have some understanding of what tactics, channels and topics are working with your audience. Think about what risk you are willing to take – put 60- 70% of your efforts into activity and tactics you understand and tinker with the tone of voice, images or headlines, 20% of your effort into testing brand-new tactics, adjacent audiences or more radical changes to messaging or images; finally think about putting 10% of your effort into high-risk tests such as bold new messaging or calls to action. Take the time to explore your learnings – bring the team together at the end of the sprint or experiment cycle to run a retrospective and extract all the learnings you can to drive optimisations and support the next wave of experiment setting.
Experimentation can provide data and more confidence in the decision-making process, particularly when looking to invest more in a challenge or approach that is generating results but don’t be afraid to divest if something isn’t working. Make sure you give ample time for your activity to run and generate meaningful data to inform strategic decisions on the allocation of budget. To get the most from experimentation leadership needs to foster curiosity and enable a growth mindset within the marketing team and wider business.
Advertisers who run 15 experiments per year reap proven positive impact over the long-term seeing 30% higher ad performance in the same year.
Agile marketers swear by experimentation to help them fail faster and it is an important tool in their arsenal to rapidly validate assumptions, test ideas, tactics, channels, messaging and even propositions to optimise marketing performance and deliver ROI for their businesses.
“Embedding experimentation into our marketing approach has helped us take a data-driven approach and allows for continual improvement to optimise and drive better outcomes from our campaigns and activities.” Dan Meek, CEO, LIW
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Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.
Customer and content go hand in hand, a recent report by Netline found that overall B2B content consumption increased more than 9% in 2022, with c-level consumption rising by 15.8% YOY. The stats are compelling, in part driven by the pandemic and a lack of in-person events and networking driving the need for research and learning through other means. Research from FocusVision suggests that as many as 13 pieces of content are now required before a prospect is ready to engage.
The pandemic has also cemented the link between content consumption and intent, providing valuable insights into where your prospects are within their buying cycle and how likely they are to be considering or close to a purchase decision.
This poses a few challenges for marketers in a recession – the type of content to invest in and how much?
Type of content
To tackle the types of content to invest in you need to shake down your personas, get to grips with relevant industry trends and what you’re hearing from your customers are all essential insights when looking at what topics are of most value to your audiences. Identifying evergreen topics for content will give you longevity and you can blend topical reactionary content alongside them.
Overall eBook registration volume grew by 15.5%, accounting for 43.3% of all downloads in 2021. Short-form video had the highest ROI in 2021 of any social media marketing strategy as 30% of social media marketers plan to invest in it more than any other trend in 2022. Video exponentially outperforms other content for engagement and consumption but remember to understand its role in the buyer journey and invest in the right type of content.
Level of investment
Content creation isn’t easy, many businesses often find creating content a challenge, however establishing a content theme is an efficient way to meet your audience’s needs, without substantially increasing the workload of your team, and an even better way to do this is by leveraging content you already have.
Decide on a content theme, establish an informative piece of content on a specific topic or theme that can be broken into many derivate assets, such as whitepapers, eBooks and guides. You likely already have this within your arsenal and will be simpler and faster to shatter into multiple assets.
This reuse, repurpose and recycle approach is an efficient and process-driven way to cover all your content bases, ensuring you’re providing content that resonates with your audience through different topicality, messaging and format at each stage of the buyer journey.
“In the ever-changing world of search engine optimization and content generation, AI can give marketers the edge they need” – Todd Van Hoosear, Principal Ground Control Communications and Lecturer, Boston University College of Communications
Download the Book of Hacks
Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.
Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.
Being a customer-centric business in a recession should not be understated. Customer centricity, with a strong focus on audience development principles (building and nurturing a community of loyal supporters and customers around your brand), is a winning strategy. Building trust with your client and prospect community will help you identify and test new ways to market your products and services.
What does that actually mean in practice?
During a recession, it’s time to revisit the importance of customers within your marketing model. Marketers typically use the funnel approach, focused on attracting new leads at the top and working down to converting into customers at the bottom, which inevitably puts customers low down on the list.
In contrast, the flywheel approach puts customers at the centre, surrounded by proactive client service, marketing and sales support. Creating a holistic view of your clients by creating a cross-functional approach to your sales, marketing and client support really helps create a frictionless and positive client experience. This means all the teams working across your client touchpoints need to learn to work together to break down silos and make sure the client is always put first.
The flywheel model shifts teams from an inward focus (we want to tell prospects and customers what we want to) to a customer-centric focus (we want to listen to prospects and customers and deliver remarkable experiences), enhancing a prospect’s journey even after they’ve matured into a customer.
Customer centricity flywheel
This model helps businesses take advantage of how customers purchase today – through their network, third-party review sites and other peer networks (e.g., social media).
Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies that are not.
Putting the customer at the heart of your marketing is a key principle of agile marketing and encourages teams to think and prioritise marketing efforts to maximise where and how you add value to your customers. Becoming more customer-centric pays off – keeping a loyal customer is cheaper than net new, and a net new customer that feels valued can become a brand advocate and embark on a continued partnership in the long term.
“Changing our approach to be more customer-centric our client satisfaction rates increased by 10%, which then resulted in a 5% increase in yearly spend.” – Agile Marketing Manifesto
Download the Book of Hacks
Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.
Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.
In a recession, your marketing needs to work smarter, not harder. Use your marketing campaigns to not only sell to new clients but to expand within your existing customer base, focus on retention as much as (if not more!) than acquiring net new clients. This means getting closer than ever to your clients and using what you learn to sharpen your targeting. Identifying those market(s) or industries that you already have a proven track record within and leveraging your existing customers as advocates to demonstrate value.
To start your analysis, go back to basics and make sure you really understand what your client’s interests are, their pain points, where they spend their time and which social media channels, they’re most present on. Identifying where to connect with your target audience and remap the buyer journey and how you can help them are critical first steps. Don’t be afraid to ask your clients. Talk to your key client stakeholders, and pick their brains – after all, they choose to work with you, so take the time to explore what gave your product or services the edge.
Not only will you learn a huge amount, but clients appreciate you taking the time to listen to them, so you’ll not only strengthen your go-to-market approach but also build deeper relationships and trust. A bonus will be that you are quickly able to identify opportunities for expansion within your existing clients and new go-to-market propositions to test, this will keep you ahead of the competition.
“There is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define the target market and direct a superior offering to that target market.” – Philip Kotler
The next step is to improve your targeting and define the firmographics and demographics that your target audience share. We know buyer journeys for complex B2B products and services can be long, and procurement is led by multiple decision-makers and influencers. Do you really know your audience? Company size, location, industry? Who are the decision-makers and influencers – their typical age, gender, qualifications, profession, position in the buying process and where they find relevant information. During this process, you’re likely to identify smaller sub-segments, and when revisiting your existing audience(s), you may find that buying habits have changed, for example, one specific job title is now more involved in the buying process.
With your target audience sharpened following the process above, it’s key to reclassify your target audience by their roles within their buying process.
Reviewing and updating the decision-making unit as well as revisiting the buyer journey regularly allows you to distinguish the following roles and how you need to adapt your marketing to target them more effectively:
Users: A person that uses your product or service
Initiators: People within the organisation who first see the need for the product or service
Influencers: People who have an influence on buying or using the product or service
Buyers: People who will purchase the product
Gatekeepers: Someone who is between your organisation and the decision maker within the organisation you’re trying to partner with
Decision-makers: An individual who has final authority over the purchasing decision
Solidifying the decision maker unit (DMU), you can now apply this to your marketing funnel, identifying where each person within the DMU sits within their buying journey and look to push them through with more appropriate content & engagement tactics.
Download the Book of Hacks
Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.
Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.
During a recession, consumers and businesses alike are navigating troubled waters, so as a business it’s key that you remain consistent. There will be tough decisions to make. Whilst there will be many businesses, including yours and your competitors, reducing marketing activity, budgets will get cut and headcount reductions will happen – stay focused on maintaining and sharpening your brand creating relevant propositions and let your audience know that you’re there.
Consistently articulate the value of working with you during a downturn through clear messaging and positioning. Take every opportunity to sharpen your messaging, making it positive and relevant to your clients pain points to increase visibility, improve brand awareness and address client needs through your products or services where your competitors fall short.
Amazon sales grew by 28% in 2009 during the ‘great recession’. The tech company continued to innovate with new products during the slumping economy, notably with new Kindle products which helped to grow market share.
Keeping your marketing consistent, positive, and relevant is important to gain traction with new audiences and reassure your loyal clients. Feedback is a gift! If you’re not regularly seeking client feedback either formally via NPS or customer satisfaction monitoring or informally via your sales and client success teams you need to do this today. You cannot underestimate what you can glean from your clients to help you understand where you can help them further and identify opportunities to reframe your products or services to meet market needs and exploit a niche to drive future growth.
Download the Book of Hacks
Download Bright’s book of insanely valuable agile marketing hacks that will give you the know-how and confidence to supercharge your marketing and ride out the economic downturn.
Discover how to focus on what matters, how to get the best results from your budget, tools and people, how to demonstrate value from lean marketing tactics and how to meet your marketing goals with agile ways of working.
Whether you like it or not, you can’t deny the hype that surrounds Web3, which includes the Metaverse, Cryptocurrency and Blockchain. But how do we as B2B marketers cut through that noise and identify the opportunities for us?
Here at Bright, we’re always looking future forward, scanning the horizon for what’s next and staying ahead of the curve – which is why we’re going to digest the top three things you need to know about Web3 for B2B marketing.
Understanding Web3
History of the internet
To understand what Web3 entails, we must first look back to the beginning with Web1, or ‘Web 1.0’. It was the first iteration of what became the World Wide Web, headed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. His idea was to create open, decentralised protocols that allowed information sharing from anywhere on Earth. Web 1.0 lasted between 1990 and 2004, and featured static websites owned by companies, with little interaction between users, leading to it being known as the read-only web.
Fast forward to Web 2.0, from 2004 to the present, where the web has evolved to be read-write, increasing audience participation and engagement. This means that instead of companies providing content to users, they began to provide platforms to share user-generated content and engage in user-to-user interactions, propelled by the explosion of social networking fuelled by sites like Facebook or Twitter.
As more people join the online community, a handful of companies, such as Meta and Google, began to control a disproportionate amount of the traffic and value generated on the web. Web 2.0 also birthed the advertising-driven revenue model, meaning that while users could create content, they couldn’t own it or benefit efficiently from its monetisation. Leading us to Web3 – the next stage of the internet.
The impact of Web3 on marketing
With exciting new developments in technology and how much we rely on the internet, it can often feel overwhelming, trying to navigate the line between what’s relevant and ‘the next big thing’ and what will pass as a short phase. You can already see big brands, such as Unilever, who have utilised Augmented Reality (AR) experiences to showcase a virtual career fair using their ‘Pot Noodle’ brand, replacing its live event, which was cancelled due to Covid-19. On another side of Web3, you can see how brands like Nike or Mercedes have utilised virtual configurators to visualise products with their customisations.
This will have a profound impact on the buyer’s decision-making process, in the near future, moving towards a more personalised and visual hands-on experience, which has become imperative for both B2B and B2C marketing within the past few years.
Data-driven Marketing
One of the benefits of a blockchain, which is a decentralised, public digital ledger that is used to record transactions across desktops, is that there is complete transparency within it. You can see how much crypto a wallet address has and where transactions have been taking place. With some sophisticated analytic research, you could get a relatively clear insight into what your audience is spending crypto on online, and target that accordingly.
So, how can B2B marketers can harness Web3
Cryptocurrency and loyalty
One of the burning questions surrounding those interested in Web3, is how it can be utilised commercially. Cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum are popular in the B2C market, however, the applications around coin or NFTs as a loyalty mechanism may be more applicable to B2B – firms can establish their own ‘coin’ which can reward loyal clients and employees. This coin could be used in more diverse ways than a loyalty scheme, for example as reinvestment in future projects or joint ventures with clients.
Metaverse and virtual worlds in B2B
An area of value to B2B marketers is the utilisation of virtual experiences to showcase a product or service offering. It can be done in a way as simple as going into Meta’s ‘Horizon Worlds’ platform and designing a virtual store or using Unity’s ‘Unreal Engine’ to create a gamified experience.
How about utilising Web3 within your workplace? You could create a virtual office space to bring team collaboration into the modern age, ditching the typical ‘zoom’ meetings that gained popularity during the pandemic, or even hold a virtual event in the Metaverse.
Forward thinking firms such as Sony are working with pioneering virtual experience firms like, V-gather to create an immersive shopping experience.
Generating leads through the Metaverse
It doesn’t stop there; Web3 can be utilised to create virtual-only services for B2B, such as ads. Advertisement within the Metaverse is something we believe will explode in the coming years, as brands learn more about what possibilities lie ahead, and embark on early adoption so they don’t get left behind. It’s important to note that advertising in the Metaverse is not yet as sophisticated or programmatic as it is in the Web2 landscape.
With innovative updates and features created in the Metaverse, it’s easier for B2B marketers to find leads. The Metaverse is an avenue for B2B marketers to reduce traditional methods of lead prospecting. You can support an end–to–end engagement and commence the marketing process from lead prospecting to customer acquisition and rewards. It’s possible to interact with prospects like never before.
NFTs and gated content as a community tool
One of the hottest trends of 2021 was the hype surrounding NFTs (non-fungible tokens) which are collectable digital assets that link ownership to unique physical or digital items, such as art, property, music, or videos, and are considered modern-day collectables. NFTs could be utilised in a B2B environment by rewarding clients with your native token for using your services, like a loyalty programme; providing real tokens that they can exchange on cryptocurrency exchanges. You could produce an NFT to give to your target audience to access gated content, such as a Discord server, support channels, videos, articles, webinars, and so on, creating a stronger sense of community.
Get started by taking an agile approach
Knowledge sharing is going to be powerful; we’re keen to hear about what you think of Web3, and how you think they can be effectively utilised within the B2B marketing environment, we’ll be sharing our learnings as we venture further with clients.
Bright’s founder and Managing Director, Zoë Merchant, commented:
“With Web3, we’re getting ready for the biggest evolution yet in Customer Experience. B2B marketers need to take an agile approach to testing, learning and building on success to understand how they can harness the power of Web3 to take advantage of immersive and virtual worlds and make good use of the data they can gather to get closer to their customers and prospects.”
One thing is for sure, by taking an agile marketing approach B2B marketers can start small and set hypothesis to test ideas and learn from the data they garner to build on success. A great place to start is to understand your client’s perception and areas they would find beneficial and start to build out immersive customer experiences as well as innovative promotional strategies harnessing Web3.
Recession. Disruption. Uncertainty. It is inevitable, so what are we going to do to ride the wave?
There has never been a better time to act fast to bolster your position and win big. Especially as a technology provider.
As the recession bites, and the covid motivated pivot (and investment) into hybrid working decelerates, many SaaS companies are preparing to enter survival mode, with up to 80% of companies pausing investment in marketing and re-evaluating their spending to make cost efficiencies. Essentially it’s time to ‘batten down the hatches’ and figure out how to survive the storm and (hopefully) emerge the other side. We’re here to tell you… this is a bad idea.
When they go low…
We, as seasoned marketers know all too well, marketing is too often seen as a cost centre to a business and lacks directly attributable metrics to demonstrate revenue generation or customer retention. This makes it vulnerable and it’s easy to cut costs in the short term without truly understanding the long-term impact on both client acquisition and retention – which are both essential to maintain through a recession. Let your competitors take the easy path – cutting costs, activating survival model whilst you take the opportunity to evaluate how best to attract their customers, showing that you are a steady ship – not waivered by the storm and are a safe pair of hands they can turn to when their existing provider has stopped investing in communicating with the market and them! That’s one sure-fire way to make customers feel neglected and lost.
Businesses that demonstrate resilience and spirit will thrive beyond these tough times, showing that they’re invested in developing new products, solutions and services that add value to their customers and prospects during a downturn economy, putting them front and centre of everything they do.
Take away: The winner takes it all, if you can demonstrate your resilience
Brand vs. Lead
We understand that making changes to be more efficient is necessary in times of economic uncertainty and marketing teams will be under scrutiny to deliver more, with less budget, make efficiencies yet deliver more impact, with less resource (and morale) than during buoyant times. This often leads marketers to act erratically – focusing on tactical, short-term gains over long-term growth.
The brand is the lifeblood of technology-providing firms, running through the veins of customer success, business development, communications and most importantly, the sales funnel. If marketers divert their brand-building resources into short term & tactical lead generation in the pursuit of “more leads, and quickly”, then the pipeline will fill with lukewarm, unqualified leads, who want a quick fix, unlike those leads who have been enriched and nurtured through a meaningful and relevant brand-led experience, who understand the full value of your service.
Which lead would you rather have? One that arrives quickly and requires 1% of your service offering, driven by low price and speed of delivery, or one that spends longer in the pipeline and understands the holistic benefits of your service offerings and values your relationship as a longer-term partner?
Erratic lead generation can lead to extreme peaks and troughs in the sales cycle, creating bottlenecks and diverting valuable sales resources from focusing on leads that matter and are qualified. You also risk confusing your target audience at best or at worst eroding or damaging your brand equity and reputation. Steady and intentional always-on brand-building activity will smooth these curves enabling a free-flowing pipeline and a motivated, satisfied sales team as well as focus on prospects and clients that are strategically important to the business.
Neglecting your brand will have a significant negative effect on your long-term business. Yes, we know “If I don’t plug the short-term revenue there won’t be a long-term business”. We aren’t saying don’t do any lead generation, we are saying don’t stop your brand-building activity, it will benefit you significantly in the medium to long term. Lead generation and brand building are symbiotic; you’ll maximise the value of your lead generation activities by running brand building alongside to maintain and enhance your brand in the markets you operate and with your key vendor partners such as Microsoft.
Takeaway: Don’t skip out on brand building in favour of low-quality leads.
Time for change
Don’t keep on, keeping on. Times have changed and so should you. In periods of turbulence, your focus may need to change, and you’ll need to master adapting at pace to stay relevant to your target audience. To ensure that your brand remains valuable, agility is key to success. The Covid pandemic taught us that brands who responded quickly and acknowledged the changing needs and priorities of their customers won hearts and minds and built trust with their clients; as well as engaging their dithering competitor’s customers too. If you don’t keep in touch with your ecosystem’s priorities, maintain trust, and minimise customer frustration they will quickly become disengaged and dissatisfied.
During the height of the pandemic, businesses relied on their providers for guidance and support like never before. This period of global uncertainty enabled strong and more agile businesses to cement relationships and repeatedly demonstrate value to the customer. These relationships will stand the test of future uncertainty if those providers continue to adapt to the market changes and give the reassurance and stability clients need.
Address the elephant in the room, validate your strategies with your clients and prospects, and change when there is a signal for you to change which will create further opportunities to evolve your value propositions, product, and service offerings.
Takeaway: Re-evaluate your target personas needs and keep up with the changing landscape.
Marketing as your recession superpower
The recession is the big red R word, occupying news channels, social media feeds and board room conversations. Yes, it’s going to be tough for everyone. Especially those with licenses to sell and accounts to grow. At Bright, we see a growth mindset and agile marketing expertise as our superpowers, enabling us to reframe situations from ‘oh no’ to ‘what if’ and continually improve outputs and outcomes from marketing investment.
The recession will provide a unique opportunity for savvy B2B marketers to disrupt the landscape, knocking complacent marketers off their game and pocketing their customers and prospects while they look the other way.
Get started by investing in understanding your persona’s needs and building that into a brand-rich marketing strategy to build deep connections and loyalty which will, in turn, deliver better business leads throughout the recession and safeguard and retain your client base as you weather the storm.
Never Give Up Day is all about cultivating a mindset of determination, which helps us get through difficult challenges that life throws our way. This mindset aligns closely with Bright’s values, specifically Spirit – which is defined as being energetic and resilient, using grit and determination to achieve our goals – both professional and personal.
To mark Never Give Up Day this year, we chat with our Senior Marketing Executive, Nicolai Stampfer, who has just celebrated his first year at Bright, as he shares how the mindset of resilience and determination has helped him learn and grow as a marketer.
How would you describe your first year of working at Bright?
During my first year at Bright, I was encouraged from the start to experiment with new ideas and nurture a curious mindset. It’s been a constant journey of learning and sometimes failing, but the spirited Bright mindset means that we’re not afraid of failure – but to fail fast, learn fast and don’t fail the same way twice. This mantra has been very helpful for me to grow as a marketer and become more comfortable with some of the activities that were quite daunting and foreign when I first started at Bright.
What’s the single most important thing you’ve learned in the past year
The single most important learning from my first year at Bright is to be resilient and to keep the mindset that with testing and learning, things will improve over time. When we begin new projects, the full scope of work can be quite daunting, but by working as a team, we can break down the challenges, plan the milestones and keep pace to naturally progress and solve our clients challenges.
One of Bright’s values is ‘Spirit’ – this quality is described as energetic and resilient using grit and determination to achieve goals – but always with a smile! How has living this value informed your experience of working at Bright?
This mindset has come into play when there are some days when there seems like there is so much to do, feeling overwhelmed, and you can start to question yourself about your capability to achieve what’s possible. For me, the spirit value has been amplified and lived through as a team spirit. It’s so much easier to be empowered and motivated when the team around you is living the same values and working towards the same goals.
When one of us has a bad day or one of us has an emergency outside of work, the team rallies around because we’re all in it together. This community spirit has helped me through tough times, especially last year during the Christmas period when I got COVID and couldn’t go home to my family in France. The team supported me through this time, and it was mentally very helpful, making an unfortunate situation more bearable!
How does agility in ways of working, or an agile mindset, help you to remain resilient and overcome challenges?
An agile mindset helps us to not get stuck in a rut and enables us to embrace pivoting when we need to shift pace or modify our approach. It has changed my perspective on change and allowed me to become a more versatile marketer.
What does Never Give Up Day mean to you personally?
Never Give Up Day represents my career in marketing so far. When I started out in marketing for tourism and hospitality, the pandemic struck, and I could have taken that as a sign that this career path isn’t for me. By having a resilient mindset, I explored other industries and different ways of using my skills, and that’s how I landed where I am at Bright today.
On a more personal basis, I manage ADHD and Dyslexia on a day-to-day basis. When I am under pressure, I could use this as an excuse to give up, but I don’t let this define me and I never give up every single day.
Developing a mindset of resilience and agility has never been more important than it is right now, with the necessity to react to our uncertain economic environment.
Learn more about how agility can transform your marketing team and beyond with Bright’s training and transformation training programmes.
Recreating the art of communication in a digital world
Has technology made us lazy in how we communicate? Technological advances mean we can communicate more widely and more quickly over a variety of channels and now algorithms can monitor and predict behavioural patterns to improve understanding of a customer or prospect’s buying habits.
Sounds great, so with all of this new intelligence, why is it that so often B2B communication campaigns fail to hit the mark?
Exploring the hypothesis
Email fatigue and digital noise are often cited as two main reasons why some B2B marketing campaigns flounder. When campaigns fail to deliver, it is invariably marketing that gets the blame as the organisation is “disappointed” in performance.
In an age of hyper-targeted messaging with “persona development” and extensive analysis of the “buyer’s journey”, both driven by data and research, why is it that the message often fails to resonate?
Digital communication is not a silver bullet, but it is a tool to share messages and is essential to modern marketing. To be successful, all communications need to be customer-centric with the audience in mind, be topical, relevant and provide the audience with factual, actionable information or tell them something they may not know or have not thought about. A good example of this is when communications apply current trends or new technologies to pain points to solve specific challenges.
Content is key, yet all too frequently, it is little more than a “sales pitch” which rarely solves real-life challenges and in today’s unsettled world, often can come across as tone deaf.
People are at the heart of communications
In the B2B world, people buy from people, they work for people and with people. With this goes all the human traits, such as happy, sad, angry, stressed, rational and in today’s world – irrational behaviour, too. AI may have revolutionised the way we track behaviour, but technology cannot replicate human emotion. People are not robots.
When developing content, one size rarely fits all. Organisations with business challenges, such as change, digital transformation or cost reduction, also employ people. All too often, whilst automation will alleviate many issues around accuracy, speed, and reduced cost of manual intervention, there is very little mention of the impact on people, other than you can redeploy them to do more productive, creative and interesting work. Appealing in theory, but where is the actionable information that helps them with how that is implemented and how it should be communicated?
People need real and actionable information in communications to help them make informed decisions, manage change, and retain and attract staff – which is a massive global issue. We should also not forget to consider the “what is in it for me?” factor. This applies to all of us. We are human beings.
A final point to bear in mind is to differentiate between an organisation’s buying journey and those “humans” involved at different stages in that process. Those who initiate are not always the same people as those who research and select suppliers, those who validate proposals and those who make the final decision.
As people, they will use a variety of ways to gather information – peers, personal networks, websites, searches, analyst reports, etc. One thing is for sure, most of these “humans” will check out your website. What they want is proof that you understand their challenges, know how to solve them and can ‘walk the talk’. Importantly and often overlooked, it matters if people ‘like’ your organisation, relate to its core values and if they will enjoy working with you. In B2B marketing, customers rarely browse aimlessly, they have an objective to meet and a job to do – they are looking for something specific, so accessibility, brevity and speed are of the essence.
Taking the next steps
Keep it customer-centric: Put people at the centre of your campaigns from start to finish. Do not get side-tracked by pressure to talk only about your organisation’s offerings.
Test, learn, optimise: Validate your content with your personas with a small test pilot and refine accordingly. Taking an agile marketing approach reaps rewards as you can test and fine-tune to understand what comms and channels really drive engagement.
Ask yourself:
Would I read this?
Do I think this is boring?
What is in it for the audience and why would they care?
Is it topical, relevant and actionable?
Do you have the right data to make a difference?
What do I want the audience to do – call to action?
If the audience wants more information, can they find it easily and is it accessible?
Does your website really deliver the right experience?
Use everyday language: Think about how you personally communicate with other people. Does it pass the human test?
Remember data and research are essential in mapping out personas but if your answer to question 1 is no and to question 2 is yes, then think again.
Finally, don’t be lazy: Utilise the intelligence provided by technology to guide you and get your message out, but use your common sense to humanise.
Communication that drives behaviour
Bright is an expert in B2B communication and understands how to balance data-driven insights and human-centric messaging to communicate with the right audience at the right time, in the right place, and with the right tone. Discover how to inspire action and drive change with impactful communications – drop us a note to chat further today.
Learn more about Bright’s content and creative services, guaranteed to get your audience fired up to interact with your brand.
At Bright, we pride ourselves on being B2B marketing experts that drive results through marketing agility. We embed an iterative and data-driven approach, leading the charge to better results and the ability to adapt and change at pace.
Shine a light on your marketing campaigns with Bright.
How many times have you, or someone in your team, spent hours crafting a piece of content? Agonising over the right phrases to use, making sure the content looks visually appealing, that the format is seemingly easy to consume, only to find that when it goes live, it doesn’t get the ‘big bang’ results you originally anticipated?
We’ve all been there, trying to uncover why it isn’t landing, maybe a shorter headline will help? Maybe a different graphic on the front cover? Is it cutting through the noise? Unfortunately, there is not just one right answer, it could be a whole host of reasons.
It may sound simple, but the way to create truly compelling content is by understanding your target audience, through this understanding you’re able to create something that is truly of value to them.
Where do you start when writing compelling content?
Something that is often overlooked when it comes to creating compelling content is relevancy. To get the traction you were looking for, your content should be timely and speak directly to your target audience and their pain points, regardless of if you’re creating a compelling case study or short social media content.
Understanding your target audience through developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Persona(s), you can collate unique characteristics which can help uncover average revenue, number of employees, number of customers, budget, industry, geography, and purchase process but it should include other information such as pain points around their role and industry, but also personal fears, aspirations and needs.
Once compiled, you can then tailor your content to specifically address these points – without this level of information, you can end up speaking about a subject matter that has very little relevancy or is of little interest. For instance, if your ICP includes HR businesses with 10 people that only operate within the UK, it is probably best to steer away from trends in the US…
Have you kept your audience in mind?
Now you’ve established your ICP, it’s pivotal to consider how you’re already communicating with your prospects, and at which stage they are within the buying cycle. For instance, if you’ve only recently started to communicate with them, it’s likely that they’ll still be in the awareness phase, so creating compelling content that keeps you front of mind for them will be key.
Considering what stage they’re at within their buying cycle isn’t the only thing to keep in mind, going back to your ICP and based on the information you collected, you should also have an understanding of what makes them tick and what motivates them day to day. Knowing this information will inform which format the content should be presented – for example, you should probably steer away from creating a whitepaper for time-sensitive individuals, and instead may want to opt for more snackable pieces of content that they can get value from in short doses.
Pinpointing how they typically like to consume content will also have an impact on how you leverage this and the channels you utilise. For instance, if through your ICP development you know you’re your audience typically spends a lot of time on Facebook, then you may want to target them there.
Are aesthetics important?
So now you’ve established your ICP and done your research about what makes them tick and considered how and where they typically like to spend their time, we should now shift our attention to the content itself. How many times have you read something that was completely lacklustre and switched off after the first paragraph? Well, you’re not alone…
The human element to your content shouldn’t be understated, in B2B it’s easy to forget you’re talking to another human behind their screen, so don’t forget to show some personality, sometimes being a little controversial or incorporating a light-hearted joke can help to attract attention in the saturated B2B market and become memorable, keeping your business front of mind.
Finally, don’t forget about your content’s curb appeal, your copy may be elegantly written, and personalised to each individual business but if it visually doesn’t look great – you may see that your audience hits the exit button quicker than you’d like. Ensure that the format and layout of your content flows and is easy to follow, include relevant imagery and eye-catching visuals, and sometimes it pays to think outside of the box, it’s not just B2C that can be fun!
How do you measure your content?
Now your piece of content has gone live, how do you know if it’s compelling? At this stage, it’s important to separate feelings from the facts and resist making educated guesses.
The data and insights from your website content will help you identify if the content is compelling in the eyes of your audience. Bounce rates, dwell times, downloads, conversions, and heat maps are a great place to start… but beware of vanity metrics! For instance, if your content has a high bounce rate, this may indicate that the information within the content isn’t providing added value, or if a heat map is showing a cold spot on your eBook, it may be a sign to switch up the format of the page.
It’s important to continually test and learn, further optimising to hit the sweet spot and leveraging that data-driven insight moving forward.
Learn more about Bright’s content and creative services, guaranteed to get your audience fired up to interact with your brand.
At Bright, we pride ourselves on being B2B marketing experts that drive results through marketing agility. We embed an iterative and data-driven approach, leading the charge to better results and the ability to adapt and change at pace.
Shine a light on your marketing campaigns with Bright.
