Is It Time to Divorce or to Renew Our Vows for B2B Marketers and Their Customers?
This byline by Jenny Stanley, Founder and MD Appetite Creative will talk through how to educate, handhold and to personalise the creative messages to retain commitment from your customer.
In a digital world in which “if you want loyalty, buy a dog!” (Little Axe), it is becoming increasingly critical for B2B marketers to show their true commitment to their customers. It is interesting that half of B2B marketers are 18 - 35 year olds. This requires a new approach to personalise marketing messages to their needs and reach them in the way that they want.
Make the solution that is relevant to objectives that they’re trying to achieve to ensure that the marriage is one made in heaven..rather than one heading for divorce!
We live in an environment where data comes from all directions: social media, email, and websites. In this complex marketing environment, brands are finding it difficult to maintain a consistent strategy and there is a need to educate and given that we are 7 x more likely to respond to marketing that really speaks to us, marketers must personalise the message to each audience member and not just the audience group.
It is essential to break down the digital marketing plan, starting with branding and continuing all the way to growth strategy. Once the strategy is built, then you need to focus on how to market the project to the customers. It is important to start from the objective of increasing revenue and decreasing bounce. Invest or restructure in digital transformation and then measure, evaluate and adjust. Invest in people and places to make sure activity is happening. Marketing needs to be a voice of authority and support buyers by informing them; explain the problem that they are trying to solve and first, you need to educate and second, to brand to them.
Don’t keep technology and creativity in separate rooms.
To reach wider audiences, marketers need to utilise fully responsive liquid skins, interactive formats and games. Work with AR to deliver the most dynamic experience where customers can interact better with the product; thus enhancing their experience. Creatives such as liquid bots show how technology and creativity can be married together to reach users through a creative interaction and engagement format.
Investigate how you can use augmented reality, live chat or an interactive virtual booth. Tech should not limit creativity; in fact, it will enhance it. Use chatbots, FB messenger, engagements, sign ups and connect website visitors with business development teams to demonstrate the product.
What do you know about your target audience?
Remember though that consumers are fickle and your creative need to be dynamic.
Provocative or tongue in cheek campaigns can hit the spot. A great example of this was an army campaign that ran in The Drum that was about ‘me, me, me’ and was targeted at millenials and the mockery worked well in the context of the ad and resonated well with the target audience.
Take creativity and make it as good as it can be; producing run of the mill creative isn’t going to work. Take data and insights and build creative on it. Get the data to work with the creative and deliver and integrated vision and belief in the data and creative. Also, ask yourself if the sheer amount of data diluting real marketing decisions and pick the right tech with the right campaign.
There should be a call to the industry to make more compelling creatives and in the same breath, to also call to the publishers to re-think completely how they place ads on their site.
Brands need to track and measure and become more tactical of where they run ads - making them run on relevant sites to the customers most likely to buy.
The IAB produced the LEAN guidelines which are:
- Light, data light
- Encrypted, improved security
- Ad choices
- Non intrusive
To make a marriage made in heaven, turn this on its head and create a brand new fun, engaging and trackable creative strategy which delivers a new LEANER approach:
- Laughter
- Engagement
- Actionable
- New
- Educational
- Real
Aim to create super fans of your brand by using creative to make your brand the preferred choice; get them to have an opinion of your brand; encourage them to feel emotion about your brand. By allowing users the ability to interact and start a direct conversation immediately, these ad formats go one step further than a standard dynamic ad format. Marriage counsellors often cite communication as the most important part to ensure a happy marriage and this is true of brands and consumers; the more we listen to what our customers need, we can deliver what they want and live happily ever after!