Great marketing campaign ideas are rare. Great B2B marketing campaigns are even rarer. So what are the elements that make our favorite marketing ideas stand out?
Is it an eye-watering budget? Maybe. But whether you’re flush with cash or in the grips of a marketing budget cut, there are core elements from these great B2B brand marketing campaigns we can all learn from. Check out the key B2B marketing ideas to take away after each feature. If you’re looking to kick off your next email campaign, a new cycle of killer social content or anything in between, the best practices we’ve identified here will work for you!
1. Spotify – Wrapped for Advertisers
The B2B campaign overview:
Every Spotify user knows about Wrapped. The streaming service’s highly personalized, highly sharable, snackable B2C campaign has been running every November since 2015, creating more and more organic publicity each year. So to answer “what makes a successful B2B marketing campaign?”, Spotify looked at what had worked with their customer base.
Wrapped for Advertisers takes the same data that consumers love to see about themselves, but this time offers businesses access to these extraordinary insights. And they do it in a way that makes user analytics look exciting by focusing on opportunities and understanding.
What makes this B2B marketing campaign work?
Associates their B2B product with a familiar B2C campaign
Showcases statistics to enhance claims
Features social proof, with testimonials and positive reviews
Maintains brand tone of voice
B2B marketing ideas to take away: use analytics to drive performance
Spotify knows that audience insights are the major selling point of this B2B marketing campaign. In fact, capturing insights and measuring performance is a key feature of all of the best B2B marketing campaigns.
Having access to meaningful insights allows you to improve your campaigns and communications continually, and this applies to much more than audio adverts. You should analyze every element of your marketing campaigns to identify what is working and needs improvement.
2. Upwork – “Hey World”
The B2B campaign overview:
Upwork, a marketplace for freelancers to showcase their work and connect with clients, dared to do the impossible and combine personalization with mass marketing.
The campaign included a series of short animated videos and rented eye-catching out-of-home assets like billboards, which name-dropped high-profile individuals (like George R R Martin) and household names (like Amazon). The campaign capitalized on the power of personalization, and particularly scalable personalization – not just using names to catch audience members’ eyes, but also ensuring their ad copy is relevant to the name or business attached.
Turtl calls this technique ‘deep personalization’. This approach goes further than just adding first names, instead tailoring content even further, and getting enhanced results in the process.
What makes this B2B marketing campaign work?
Personalized campaign
Scaled assets to maximize outreach
Eyecatching designs
Pushes the boundaries of traditional B2B campaign content matter
B2B marketing ideas to take away: personalize for results
Personalization isn’t a new concept for marketers. But it still isn’t always easy, even as most of the best B2B marketing ideas are predominantly digital. Unless you’re thinking outside the box, like Upwork did, it pays to make sure your B2B marketing platform is capable of simple, scalable personalization.
3. Slack – “So yeah, we tried Slack…”
The B2B campaign overview:
Riding the coattails of popular sitcoms like The Office and Parks and Recreation, Slack created this funny, mockumentary-style video ad to show exactly why they’re better than other forms of professional communication.
The video follows the company Sandwich Video, one of Slack’s real customers, as they introduce Slack to their office – technically, making it a testimonial-packed case study as well as a genuinely entertaining piece of media.
What makes this B2B marketing campaign work?
A humorous approach to their B2B marketing campaign
Packed with information relevant to their audience
Targets audience pain points
Light touch approach to branding
B2B marketing ideas to take away: you’re allowed to be fun
Injecting some fun into your B2B marketing campaign is no bad thing. More and more businesses are attempting to make their B2B adverts entertaining, but Slack found the perfect balance, even managing to squeeze a long list of integrations into their advert.
The communications your business produces play a big role in establishing your reputation externally and, as Slack’s video points out, can impact company culture internally too.
4. General Electric – “What matters”
The B2B campaign overview:
One thing many B2B companies struggle with is getting audiences to care. Even if the product or service they sell is widely-used or an essential tool, they often don’t actively view it as beneficial to their lives.
So, GE played up to this. They created an ad that uses short but powerfully told stories to acknowledge that, while people and businesses care more about their own existence than what this company does, the service GE provides is important – and they want customers and other businesses to know this.
What makes this B2B marketing campaign work?
Effective storytelling
Awareness of reputation
Use of statistics
Human/audience-centric
B2B marketing ideas to take away: emotions are important
Responding to stories is something we all do instinctively as humans. Well-structured, well-told stories connect storytellers and audiences and trigger chemical reactions that make both parties more likely to influence each other.
B2B marketers that can capitalize on this, and create marketing collateral that plays into the fact that B2B decisions are emotional decisions will have a real advantage when it comes to convincing audiences to choose them.
It becomes very important, therefore, for storytelling marketers to choose a content platform that captures attention and drives engagement with your marketing collateral.
5. Airbnb – Become a host
The B2B campaign overview:
Airbnb understands that the businesses the hospitality firm are marketing to are unconventional. The audience they’re trying to engage might not even be considered businesses by some – they’re homeowners! But if this dive into the best B2B marketing campaign examples has taught us anything, it’s that non-conformism is often the key to success.
In their campaign to turn homes into businesses, Airbnb keep their messaging simple. They understand this particular business decision is a personal one. This B2B marketing campaign speaks to this, appealing to hearts before minds, leading with visuals, and keeping copy light.
The image-first approach captures attention quickly, and encourages those curious enough to find out more for themselves. Statistics, details, and compelling arguments are reserved for the content that follows up the out-of-house elements of the campaign.
What makes this B2B marketing campaign work?
Visual first format
Target audience pain points
Focus on benefits for their audience
Encourages exploration of more detail
B2B marketing ideas to take away: focus on your visuals
The best B2B campaign ideas don’t try to do too much, too quickly. Remember that your top-of-funnel content doesn’t have to contain your whole pitch; it just needs to create intrigue and make your audience want to find out more.
Creating intrigue is something that imagery is perfectly suited to, especially when balanced with the right copy. So for campaigns beyond the world of bespoke ads, choosing a visually focused content platform that grabs your audience’s attention and also provides them with the opportunity to find out more is an effective way of maximizing your B2B marketing campaign’s chances of success.
The Turtl Takeaway: Find the balance
For each of the successful campaigns we’ve listed here, dozens didn’t find the same success. Don’t be afraid to fail, and don’t be afraid to try new things. Marketing campaigns have historically been full of unknowns – like ‘How exactly is the campaign content performing?’ ‘How long should a particular campaign last for?’ And this has often been their downfall.
The Turtl format gives marketing teams the opportunity to implement the difference-makers we identified here with the additional benefit of being able to track exactly how campaign content is performing.
Successful B2B marketing campaigns go much further than the flashy billboards we saw here from the likes of Upwork and Airbnb. The best are backed up by longer-form content that steers audiences through the marketing funnel and towards conversion. In just the same ways, these should also:
Personalize – add eye-catching personalization to your B2B marketing collateral
Stand out – Choose a channel or platform that gets your carefully created content the attention it deserves
Tell stories – build relationships that let you influence your audience
Lead with visuals – Leading with intriguing visuals encourages your audience to find out more on their terms
Analyze endlessly – Explore precisely how each element of your marketing collateral is performing, and understand how to improve
So whether you’re looking to add to your own killer B2B marketing campaign, run a digital newsletter journey that gets big reads, or get your content noticed, see what Turtl can do for you – book a free demo now →
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