Why B2B Marketing Needs to Get Better at Embracing Balance
Written by Barry Maginn, B2B Business Director
A balanced diet, a balanced life, a balanced mind – few would disagree that achieving a sense of balance is an inherently good thing.
However, in B2B marketing balance is too often missing in some pretty fundamental areas. And that lack of balance can all too quickly lead to campaigns that miss the mark and fall short of achieving their goals.
In this article, I want to cover two of the biggest culprits in this B2B balance misalignment, namely:
Long-term versus short-term thinking, and
Talking versus listening to audiences
Long-term versus short-term
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. In the debate between short-term ‘sales activation’ (or ‘performance marketing’) and long-term ‘brand building’ marketing, one is not better than the other.
But an excessive pursuit of one at the expense of the other is a sure-fire route to sub-optimal results.
In simple terms, if you just do short-term sales activation, you’ll initially get quick sales spikes when you press ‘go’. Over time, though, your initial base audience will get their fill of your offer, but your comms activity won’t have encouraged many new people into the funnel. Sales will eventually flatline or even decrease with no fresh demand.
On the flipside, brand-building activity may create ever-increasing affinity and belief in a brand, but without short-term sales comms working alongside it, there’ll be no clear signposting to convert newly aware audiences into paying customers.
So, we need to make both work with each other.
For most B2B brands, that means placing more attention on the long-term thinking; because in practice, the marketing challenge with most B2B organisations is an over-reliance on short-term sales activation.
That, in turn, tends to happen because the timeframes against which B2B marketing campaigns are set (and must prove themselves within) are themselves too short. Only 24% of B2B marketers even run campaigns that last longer than six months, for example.1
The challenge with that, as Mark Ritson states in his fascinating 2020 Ogilvy lecture2 , is that within that time period sales activation can appear to be the most productive approach. It’s only when you take a longer-term view that brand-building activities come to the fore and prove their worth.
That’s particularly true in B2B sectors, where buying cycles are often measured in the months and even years and where research has revealed that only 5% of buyers are typically ever ‘in market’ at any one time. 3
So, how does this misalignment happen?
Well, short-termism in marketing budget and objective setting is typically something that flows down from the top level of a business (which can often view marketing as a ‘cost centre’).
But the irony is that what the Board wants to achieve and what good marketing can deliver are actually very closely aligned.
Board directors are, in essence, focused on increasing shareholder value – and shareholder value is inherently measured by the projected future value of a business. After all, if shareholders only looked at the value of a company a few months down the line, the likes of Facebook and Tesla would likely not exist today.
So, marketers need to get better and more compelling in convincing their Boards to allow them to take the same multi-year view that those Boards members themselves do.
To do this, marketers need to talk their language more – focusing on and explaining the long-term investment potential of marketing.
That means communicating that, much like other investment strategies, marketing needs to be planned out in the long term. And that if it is cut at the wrong moment, it loses its ability to mature and deliver its full potential. 4
Listening vs talking
Marketing truly is a discipline of two halves. Understanding people (listening) on one side and influencing people (talking) on the other.
The influencing part is perhaps seen as the more fundamental because that is the part that has the clearest link to the results we as marketers want to achieve.
Marketing is, after all, essentially all about encouraging people to change a certain set of current behaviours or beliefs in a way that is favourable to a particular organisation.
And the proactive tools for making that happen are the ‘marketing activities’ we undertake to push messages out to audiences, with the aim of (re)shaping their opinions and actions.
So, unsurprisingly marketers want to get to that tactical activation part quickly and start making an impact.
But in the rush to do that, the other side of what they need to do to effectively affect change – the listening side – too often isn’t given enough emphasis. This is a major oversight because you can’t truly make an impact on someone without first understanding their existing views, behaviours and priorities.
That’s particularly true of B2B audiences, which are by nature often extremely niche. Indeed, their worldviews and aspirations, their hopes and fears, and their spheres of influence and trust can be incredibly hard to pin down.
But without these insights, we simply can’t talk to them meaningfully and effectively. Because it is through this listening that we uncover and can embrace the humanity, the emotion and the passion that drives and motivates our audiences. 5
And without that, it’s difficult for a brand to create content and campaigns that really hit home and build deep affinity and relatability.
For some B2B marketers, this may mean a reset.
Before launching their next campaign, they may need to consider if they really do understand their audience or if their comms are driven by presumptions and a preoccupation with what a brand wants to say (rather than what its audience wants to hear).
Fortunately, listening doesn’t need to be a major, costly exercise. Dedicating just 10-15% of marketing budgets to insights gathering – whether that be conducting focus groups, analysing online communities, commissioning audience surveys and perception tests, or a mixture of them all – can boost the value of subsequent comms strategies innumerably.
Balancing act
So, there you go. Two sources of imbalance that, if rectified, can have major benefits to B2B comms campaigns.
It’s not always easy to embark on the change needed. But, on balance, it’ll be worth it.
1. Field and Bennett 2019 research involving 600 B2B marketers
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98gfXVurfzI
3. 2021 research from Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s Professor John Dawes
4. Note - The likes of attribution modelling might be good for proving the value of a distinct comms channel to deliver immediate ROI, but they are ironically terrible for proving the value in nurturing future customers and brand perception over time.
5. Examples of what listening uncovers include - The stories of how and why B2B audiences got into their professions in the first place, what they love, what they worry about, what they care about, what they trust, what they want to see more of and what they really think about different brands.
