Read my interview with LinkedIn about how the coronavirus crisis is changing the way businesses do marketing. Read the article here:- https://business.linkedin.com/en-uk/marketing-solutions/blog/posts/B2B-Marketing/2020/Reinventing-B2B-Marketing-for-unprecedented-times-2020
DaveStevensNow
Blogging about Profitable B2B Marketing | Branding | Digital | Team-Building
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In a world in which Marketing Week can publish its ten nominations for Brand of the Year and be content that not one of them is B2B, it can feel pretty lonely and unloved in the business marketing profession. So it’s time to give a shout out for some of the great work that B2B marketers are doing.
I thought I’d share a few examples and why I like them over the next few posts.
Next up: Dropbox for Business. The file-sharing service Dropbox has a B2B variant that it has been marketing over the last twelve months with content like this:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwOMlhas_w0.
I really like the way that Dropbox for Business goes about marketing. First, its content is very personable for a tech brand. Take a look at its LinkedIn feed to see lots of images of the teams behind the product working in offices – just like its target audience. They pick up on key events like Pride Month, Farther’s Day, and World Refugees’ Day. They have community days. they’re human!
In the same way, the content picks up on solving customer problems rather than pushing product features. Sometimes the solutions are work in progress against known problems. For example, Take a look at this blog post:- https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/work-culture/workplace-tools-making-decision-fatigue-worse?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic.
The content is reinforced by a clean design that removes the clutter and complexity common in a lot of tech marketing. Clean and bold colours and clear text prevail.
Finally there’s the sales campaign that comes with all of this. the same clean design choices come across here. But it’s the targeting that really comes across with different messages for the different needs of different target audiences. These campaigns are delivering a 29:1 ROI according to some sources so there’s a real impact on the bottom line. And that’s what all good B2B marketing should be about.
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In a world in which Marketing Week can publish its ten nominations for Brand of the Year and be content that not one of them is B2B, it can feel pretty lonely and unloved in the business marketing profession. So it’s time to give a shout out for some of the great work that B2B marketers are doing.
I thought I’d share a few examples and why I like them over the next few posts.
Next up: Earth-i. Earth-i is a satellite data and analytics firm with less than 200 employees. You can find its website at https://earthi.space.
On arrival at the home page, Earth-i’s website immediately offers me a thought paper pop-up to get its expert credentials across. I like that the site uses simple terms to define quite complex activities such as “Crunching more numbers”. Content leads on the applications for the technology driven by the sectors that its target customers operate in. And Earth-i makes much of its differentiation from its competitors: precision. The website’s news pages ground the proposition in practical insights and actions – just the sort of thing that Earth-i offers to provide to its users.
Away from the site, Earth-i has been using LinkedIn data to reach its target audience and to drive them to the web. I understand that several hundred leads have been generated as a result.
Earth-i’s marketing is a great example of what can be done on a limited budget. You don’t need Coca-Cola’s wallet to do good B2B marketing.
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In a world in which Marketing Week can publish its ten nominations for Brand of the Year and be content that not one of them is B2B, it can feel pretty lonely and unloved in the business marketing profession. So it’s time to give a shout out for some of the great work that B2B marketers are doing.
I thought I’d share a few examples and why I like them over the next few posts.
Next up: Acciona. Acciona is a Spanish conglomerate focusing on investment in renewable energy. They have been running amazing #InvestInThePlanet campaign over the last twelve months. Take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2KigmRHlvg for an example.
I think this is a powerful piece of creative for the way that it breaks through the glass walls between business and the realities of sustainability. The impact of business is shown on screens in the stock exchange and the boardroom and the office making the connection between business and the planet clear. The disconnect is underlined by the musical choice. And there’s a strong call to action which is followed up in other films in the campaign which you can see on the Acciona You Tube page.
The same juxtaposition between the office and the environment is played strongly on the home page of the Acciona website.
The Acciona videos have been viewed more than 1.5 million times across the business’s five key markets.
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In a world in which Marketing Week can publish its ten nominations for Brand of the Year and be content that not one of them is B2B, it can feel pretty lonely and unloved in the business marketing profession. So it’s time to give a shout out for some of the great work that B2B marketers are doing.
I thought I’d share a few examples and why I like them over the next few posts.
Next up: Xero. Xero is that rare B2B business that has chosen to market itself on television in prime time – something that would have not have been considered by anyone a few years ago, but which now reflects the way in which the barriers between B2B and B2C are breaking down. The ad consists of a group of people replacing a tyre on a car while it is on the move and you can see it here:- https://youtube.com/watch?v=uJblkooJyxc.
The central point of the ad reflects the proposition: here is something that won’t get in the way of the central purpose of your business. Accountancy is an enabler of your business not its main point.
Xero’s website reflects the messaging of simplicity and imagery from the television ad and backs it all up with a free trial on the proposition to emphasise the hassle-free approach. I like too the way that client feedback is emphasised on the home page, where all too many businesses make the reader work to find testimonials.
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In a world in which Marketing Week can publish its ten nominations for Brand of the Year and be content that not one of them is B2B, it can feel pretty lonely and unloved in the business marketing profession. So it’s time to give a shout out for some of the great work that B2B marketers are doing.
I thought I’d share a few examples and why I like them over the next few posts.
Next up: Airtable. Airtable is software that allows business teams to organise work.
Airtable’s Glorimax Returns film can be found on YouTube at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7aeqnzZYrdl. And it’s a rather lovely piece of creative.
I like this video for a number of reasons. First it tells a story that I want to stay with through its two minutes duration. The characters are drawn in an effective short-hand that gets my attention. I’m interested in their charm, their faults, and the divides in the team that they form.
It’s these same fault-lines and the fact that all of the characters are young children that infer that the software that they market is easy to use.
And the story gives Airtable’s multiple use cases chances to shine: collaboration, inventory management, idea curation, project management and so on.
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In a world in which Marketing Week can publish its ten nominations for Brand of the Year and be content that not one of them is B2B, it can feel pretty lonely and unloved in the business marketing profession. So it’s time to give a shout out for some of the great work that B2B marketers are doing.
I thought I’d share a few examples and why I like them over the next few posts.
First up: 3i Group. Take a look at this case study they released from a few months back… It’s the XLT video at the bottom of the page https://www.3i.com/media-centre/video-library/.
I think the 3i marketing team have a tough job. 3i is an international investment company focusing on private equity and infrastructure meaning that by definition much of what they market is intangible. So all power to them for working to find some nice visible outcomes from their work that would be meaningful to a wide range of their customer base.
This one leads with some powerful comments from the customer – far too few businesses lead with their customer in their marketing – and then goes into explaining what interested 3i about the project, so giving the viewer a sense of their values and whether we might have an opportunity that could interest them. There’s a nice emphasis on the customer relationship in the project. Good to see use of captions to make the video work in social settings too.
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Unlike many marketing people I’ve spoken to, I’ve been a long-time fan of the GDPR rules that came into force last year. The rules brought with them larger fines which encouraged many firms I know to pay attention to and take seriously data protection rules for the first time. As a result many businesses came out of 2018 with smaller databases but much better customer experiences than they went in. Marketers in particular were incentivised to grow the value of the content that they sent out so that customers would want to opt-in to receiving them.
So I welcome the news of a new ePrivacy Regulation to replace the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations due in the middle of next year. This one deals with how personal information is used to contact customers and prospects and will impact B2B marketers more than B2C (the principal target for GDPR).
On the current timeline from summer 2020, B2B marketers will need opt-in to e-mail, text, and telephone business contacts and prospects. Cookies are likely to be controlled and blocked at browser level to prevent tracking of internet users.
This is good news for good data protection practice and customer experience and B2B marketing should embrace it. Like GDPR, the regulation is a welcome opportunity for marketers to re-establish direct relations with their customers and prospects. Good B2B marketing is relationship-based and marketers would do well to remember that. If a customer does not want our communications, we have no relationship. The rights of the customer are and should be king and technology should not be allowed to erode that. Customer profiling without proper consent is simply not fair. Nor is the murky sharing of customer data with secondary organisations. It’s time that the marketing profession properly cleaned up its act.
The only downside in my view is that we are looking at another data protection change quite soon after the last one. I can’t help thinking that it would have been better to deliver two changes at the same time.
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Mary Meeker’s annual technology report is now available online at https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/11/18651010/mary-meeker-internet-trends-report-slides-2019. As ever, it’s great value – but it’s a long read at 333 slides and you won’t be surprised to see that again all of the news reports about the Meeker Report talk about its consequences for B2C marketing. What should B2B marketers take from it?
The context is of GDP growing in the US, China, and India, and falling in Europe. There is high global concern about unemployment, albeit not in the US or Germany. US consumer confidence is at a 65 year high. Meeker argues that this relatively rosy picture is aided by B2B online (the growth of real-time platforms such as payment processor DoorDash; the growth of e-marketplaces like on-demand staffing platform Wonolo). These are good markets for B2B businesses to be in.
The number of remote workers in the US is growing slowly but steadily: 5% in 2018. That’s where collaboration tools to enable remote working come in. Collaborative tools for use in enterprises like Slack and Dropbox continue to grow their numbers of users and paying users. Again a key area for B2B businesses to focus.
It’s great to see that B2B organisations are show-cased in the report for enabling their customers to collect data to understand end customer wants and to improve their products, processes, data and analytics, and relationships:- for example Qualtrics (and customer, Salesforce (and customer Adidas), Stripe (and customer Slack), Plaid (and customer Betterment), and Slack (and customer HelloFresh). These are all strong examples of how B2B companies are enabling businesses to apply data to their everyday workflow processes.
Then there are the consumer trends that will doubtless work their way into how B2B marketing operates over time. Internet use is being driven by China (21% of all internet users are Chinese). Americans are spending more time with digital media than ever: 6.3 hours a day in 2018, up 7% from the year before. Indeed time online is beginning to become a concern that may be worth watching.
In the US, mobile internet usage continues to grow (up 5% on the previous year), but desk-top usage remains steady and makes up around 2/5 of all internet access (so marketers shouldn’t write off the office PC just yet). When it comes to online platforms, it’s YouTube and Instagram that have grown most in users over the last year. Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp are the top three platforms for users. And ad spend on these platforms is growing.
Video users have doubled in the last year, podcast users in the last four years, gaming users in the last two years. Imagery is becoming more important than text. More than 50% of Twitter impressions now involve posts with images, video or other media.
Online privacy is a growing concern to watch. In Q1, 87% of global web traffic was encrypted, up from 53% in 2016.
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The entrance to the British Library’s latest exhibition on writing is marked by three artefacts: an Egyptian figurine, a label for an Egyptian mummy, and a Mesopotamian clay object. All dates from 2000 years ago or more. And together the items articulate the three reasons why humans developed writing: communicating, naming things, and accounting. Yes, marketing and finance have long been bedfellows.
But they are uneasy partners. A Cranfield School of Management survey of FTSE top 500 FDs found that they saw marketing directors as “unaccountable, untouchable, slippery, and expensive.” And on the face of it, marketing and finance sit at opposite ends of the board table: one saves money and the other spends it.
That shouldn’t be the case as each function needs the other and a partnership is one of the most effective ways of improving efficiency and ROI.
How to improve the relationship? First, co-build an ROI model with the Finance team. This can help both teams to make better decisions addressing customer lifetime value, improving the rate of product adoption, reducing customer churn, and lowering acquisition cost.
Next, report on the outputs of marketing to your CFO on a regular basis. Not everything in marketing is measurable of course. Good marketers balance the long-term with the short-term. And if you create objectives for everything you stifle creativity, the bed-rock of marketing. I’m reminded here of the story of Bjarni Herjolfsson, a man from Oslo who is hardly now a household name. But he could have been. Bjarni was the man who almost discovered America. But he sailed on past it in 986. Despite the pleas of his crew. Why? Because his right objective was to reach Greenland. Objectives for everything stifle curiosity. But you do need some objectives and you do need them to be measurable and to report on them.
Third, equip your finance team with your marketing content, so they know the stories you are telling. Use the team as a further sales team. That way they get to understand the job that you are doing in marketing. Perhaps the finance team can also help create content and thought leadership too.
A recent EY survey suggested that CFOs thought that their collaboration with CMOs was improving. A recent Allocadia survey of CMOs also reported a growing connection with Finance. That’s all good news. We are all in this together after all.
DaveStevensNow 