We have seen countless marketing campaigns and advertisements in the B2C world in the past several years with some outstanding campaigns that make you think “Wow! That’s a really good campaign or advertisement!”. Like Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign in 2010 or Nike’s “Just Do It” from the late 1980’s which still resonates to this day.
When it comes to B2B marketing, we haven’t seen the same level of enthusiasm or creativeness that we have seen in the B2C world. In fact, every Marketing workshop I’ve attended that caters to the B2B crowd still uses examples from B2C campaigns to get their point across. Why is it that they don’t have any truly great B2B campaigns to talk about?
I think we miss the most important aspect while creating B2B marketing campaigns and ads.We talk about customer pain points in the planning stage of our campaigns but during the actual execution we fail to focus on the actual end user who would be using your product at the client company but rather instead focus on the organization as the end user.
While marketing a B2B product, you need to identify two key roles – The Influencer and The Practitioner.
The practitioner is the person actually using your product on a day to day basis. How can you appeal to them with your marketing campaign and ads to show that your product will actually make their life easier, make them look good to their boss and the management team above them to eventually leading getting recognized for their efforts.
The influencer is the person who is not directly using the product but is affected but its use within the organization. Lets say you are marketing security software to potential clients, the CISO (Chief Information security Officer) is not the end user of the product but is directly affected by how the product works or the results it produces. In a similar fashion your marketing campaign should ensure that it communicates to them that your product actually helps make them look good by achieving better results from its use within their organization.
So when you are building your marketing campaigns and ads, why not appeal to the people who are the influencers and practitioners rather than target the client as a business entity. This way you can get more creative with your campaigns and be more engaging since you are targeting an actual person rather than a business entity.
At the end of the day, the businesses we are selling to or marketing to consist of people and you need to appeal to their emotions and address their problems to be more effective.