Savvy B2B marketers know how much technology has evolved the way that customers interact with businesses. With a multitude of channels to think about and an endless amount of noise to compete against, digital is the backbone of effective marketing strategies. Creating thoughtful B2B marketing campaigns and original content that can differentiate your company, and b2b data licensing from trusted data vendors is much more than just hitting on the next viral sensation. However, that would be great too.
The bread and butter of digital marketing in the B2B landscape include social media, email, blogs, B2B Lead Generation Services, b2b data licensing and many more. Generating interest, leads, and revenue, each element of your B2B marketing campaign has the opportunity to make a huge impact on your company. However, it’s hard to stay inspired when we get stuck in a bit of a rut.
As a B2B marketer, you know that B2B marketing campaigns are most effective when they are more relevant to your entire audience, not just the ones on your B2B email list. According to MailChimp, relevant campaigns that are targeted to the right prospects have a 75% higher engagement rate. And according to SiriusDecisions, relevant campaigns that are targeted to the right prospects can increase the selling price for your product by 35-40%. But, being relevant and highly targeted is only possible when you have access to the right data with b2b data licensing from B2B Data List Provider and tech intelligence.
Demographics and firmographics data can serve as a starting point for targeting. However, truly generate qualified leads, increase engagement, and finally drive increased revenue, B2B marketers depend on quality B2B Lead Lists and technographic insights. While the intelligence from technographic data allows B2B marketers to see clearly what hardware or software technologies their leads or accounts have installed so they can segment their audience more precisely, it also helps them to better inform their messaging or the messaging of their outsourced B2B Lead Generation Services, so they can create highly relevant and effective B2B marketing campaigns that generate more revenue.
The last few years have seen a renaissance in humorous, creative, personality-filled B2B marketing, especially for B2B Lead Generation. Now, it’s no longer a radical idea to state that B2B marketing campaigns for B2B Lead Generation don’t have to be boring. Instead, it’s more than B2B marketing campaigns can’t be boring if they are to be effective.
What is a B2B Marketing Campaign?
A B2B marketing campaign is a systematic, targeted set of efforts designed to achieve a specific goal. This could be B2B Lead Generation for an existing product or service, generating buzz and awareness around a new product/service launch, a response to major industry regulations or news, a company rebranding, or just about anything else.
A B2B marketing campaign is not just a tagline, some pretty creative, or a few print ads. If you are not thinking about the complete buyer’s journey, from initial engagement and identification through the close, then you’re doing it wrong. While creative can’t be the entire show, it is very important to the success of a B2B marketing campaign, even if you have millions of dollars to spend. While a creative-only tactic may work in B2C, the dog-eat-dog world of business-to-business marketing is far beyond that.
Now, the savvy B2B marketers are pushing the envelope for what successful B2B marketing can be. They’re adding strategy and creativity to earn attention, reach audiences, and inspire action.
Here are five typical B2B marketing campaigns, which B2B marketers can easily set up and launch quickly;
Competitive Take Out:
Identify the accounts using competitor products and then target those accounts directly by clearly showing how your product or service addresses well-known pain points.
Complementary Targeting:
Find your target accounts using a complementary product or service to yours and highlight how you can enhance their current product or service with your own product or service.
Up-sell:
See which of your target accounts are using unsupported or old solutions and then engage them with campaigns that encourage them to consider or upgrade to a better alternative solution.
Cross-sell:
If you have a line of products and/or services, identify accounts who could be a great fit for one of your other products or services as they have nothing similar installed.
Opportunistic News Driven:
Recent end-of-life (EOL) notice or a bad review on a competitor product or service is a great opportunity to reach out to the organizations considering a new product or service.
Examples of Successful B2B Marketing Campaigns:
A successful B2B marketing campaign needs to be based on content that is quickly digestible by the prospects, catches their attention instantly, and then offers them a quick way of engagement that seems innocuous.
And if you want to grab the attention of a decision-maker at a company, you need to appeal to their reasoning and intellect, and also to their aesthetics.
In B2C marketing, the message is, essentially, buy our product or service and live a better life. On the other hand, B2B marketing is more about solving problems or pain points. A good B2B marketing campaign takes the problem or pain point and then presents in a more appealing manner.
To help you better understand successful B2B marketing campaigns, we’ve put together some examples from B2B marketers. These B2B marketing campaign examples highlight how creative, cleaver design and great content can come together to create something that’s much more than just the sum of its parts. Also, and drive some pipeline, too.
Following are some of the examples top B2B marketing campaigns that we’ve purposefully selected;
Slack entertains and informs with video marketing:
Slack is a very popular team collaboration tools and services that we use to keep our teams and employees instantly and constantly connected for organizational communications. How many team collaboration tools and services are out there? It’s a crowded market, to say the least.
Slack allows companies to set up teams and topics so that teams can keep an organized string of information, making it much easy and quick for everyone to see what’s going on with the project and to find information instantly. The user experience is truly lighthearted and fun.
Even their name is very lighthearted. Who would think of calling a productivity tool, “Slack?”
Slack positions itself as a communication tool for organizations which is quite fun to use, but also very powerful, replacing text messaging, email, file storage, phone calls, and even meetings. What better way to communicate this than a video?
Slack’s video marketers, Sandwich Video came up with a campaign titled, “So Yeah, We Tried Slack…”. Almost instantly, the video sucks the viewer in by showing them disconnect that we all experience.
The campaign video’s narrative is about Sandwich Video that just happens to be one of the customers of Slack. “So Yeah, We Tried Slack…” doesn’t just present a case study, it also acts as a customer testimonial.
This Slack campaign video is lighthearted and quite fun to watch. And the jokes included in the video have been used to call attention to Slacks’ features in an almost “mockumentary” style. Case studies are a powerful tool, presenting them in a fun and engaging way is priceless. It’s very clever.
Asana Makes Productivity Easy:
Asana is a work tracking and project management solution designed to improve team collaboration that enables users to create collaborative workspaces and dashboards for projects, tasks, and conversations. Asana is a cloud-based platform allowing employees to access it from anywhere with an internet connection.
Asana has scores of pro-add-ons available for almost everything from using it as a CRM to invoicing customers. Asana allows organizations to add team members, assign deadlines, create projects and tasks, track progress, and a slew of several other useful features. So, how do you get all that across without it sounding overwhelming?
Asana created an email marketing campaign directed at prospects, those who may be facing issues getting things done in an organized and timely fashion. The email is quite simple and elegant and also poses the question, “What would you like to get done today?” The email copy provides a simple three-step process, create a task, assign it to yourself, and mark it as complete when you’re done.
Basically, this tactic takes a hairy, big, highly robust system and makes it seem so simple and user-friendly to use that even a child could easily manage it. Asana could have easily used a bunch of industry jargon and buzzwords to explain it all, but that’s the kind of content that gets an audience to glaze over and move on. That is why this is a great example of inviting someone to engage instantly and easily.
Dropbox Gives its Dropouts a Nudge:
Dropbox is a file hosting service that enables users to contain work in one location, sync across all devices, and share files with Dropbox and non-Dropbox users, and also to create and coordinate a collaborative workspace. Again, a highly crowded field. It’s also a field with a lot of dropoff and churn.
So what do you do when you’ve got millions of tire-kickers out there that just need a soft reminder to come back? You just give them a gentle nudge.
This Dropbox campaign is quite similar in nature to the one explained above, which was implemented by Asana. It utilizes a friendly, simple graphic that lets viewers quickly understand the message that Dropbox is trying to convey. It’s focused on people who signed up for the service but then abandoned it eventually.
The campaign message implies that the abandoned Dropbox is missing its owner and is quite lonely. It then provides some very simple worded reminders of what Dropbox does and also gives a link to a quick refresher tour.
Dropbox could have easily done a competitive differentiation, elaborated on all its benefits, repositioned its competitors, but it chose this friendly and simple campaign instead.
Shopify Educates to Up-sell:
Shopify is one of the most popular-commerce platforms out there on the web. Shopify offers online retailers with all the tools they need to open an online store at a very competitive price.
This webinar announcement from the Shopify campaign invites people on their email list to attend a class on how to leverage social proof. These days, webinars are very common, however, Shopify does a great job of making this seem very valuable and easy.
The content design of this campaign is such that it can be easily used as a landing page, in an email, or as social media content with a few small tweaks. It has a few different call-to-action (CTA), including an -like “Yes/No” button as opposed to just another sign-up button.
It has a very powerful and clear headline that fixes a problem users didn’t even know they had. Shopify could have easily included much more information about the webinar, however, that usually causes viewers to put a B2B marketer’s message aside until they have more time to look it over, usually, they never come back.
And Then There Is Always Google:
Maybe one of the best native advertisements ever created, Google has been running this campaign for the last ten years. Year in Search as Google calls it began back in 2009 after “Zeitgeist,’ a report on top 10 searches on Google during that year. Google transformed its top ten search list into a three-minute video.
This video is a startling reality of the dependency of people on Google search engine. Google 2017 video is a strong proof of how much people need Google to get information on everything. Google in its video told the world that it cares about the sentiment that people care about the company. The video from Google includes different emotions; however, Google somehow manages to unite its entire audience in the end.
Conclusion:
To create highly successful B2B marketing campaigns and B2B lead generation campaigns ; first, identify the issue, then find a user-friendly, simple approach to frame the solution, and finally make it easy and quick to engage. Then you should be able to see great returns not just on your B2B Lead Lists or b2b data licensing that you get from your B2B Data List Provider but your entire B2B marketing investment.
