How to create a successful B2B marketing strategy

Two companies offer nearly identical software solutions. One bombards you with technical jargon and feature lists. The other tells a story that resonates with your business challenges and aspirations. Which one are you more likely to remember?

Agencies are waking up to the fact that business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing follow some of the same basic tenets. While we previously considered these two opposite ends of the spectrum, the more we dive into research, the more we discover something obvious: both involve human beings.

VML’s recent statistical factor analysis study of B2B brands demonstrated only a 2% difference between the emotional needs addressed by B2C and B2B advertising. We’d argue that due to the long buying cycle, significant time and financial investment and complex market motion, emotional connection might be even more important in B2B than B2C.

Some marketing and branding fundamentals rely on building memory structures around brand assets, driving top-of-mind awareness within a consumer’s repertoire of brands. In the B2C world, consumers can easily switch between their top three brands. However, B2B purchasing cycles are much longer, commitments are more significant and prices are much higher.

Longer buying cycles mean less market availability at any given time, resulting in longer out-of-market periods. A key question is: how do B2B brands stay memorable during these long out-of-market moments to ensure inclusion on consideration lists, from which more detailed, decision-driven information can be gathered?

The answer is emotion.

With 95% of your market not actively seeking your solution, you must find other ways to be remembered. Someone uninterested in your solution won’t remember the technical data you consider a differentiator or core value proposition. Unless they’re actively looking for it and prepared to digest and compare, they simply won’t retain it.

Distinction beats differentiation, especially when differentiation is hard to ascertain without commitment. This makes branding incredibly important. But, while branding, previously neglected, has become a focus in the B2B world, other aspects of the business-to-business value chain are rapidly changing with technology.

The need for performance needs to be balanced with the long-term benefits of brand building.

One huge limitation B2B marketers previously faced was scalability. Scaling once meant call centres or spam mail delivered without knowing the recipient, their needs or how your solutions could help.

Beyond filling the funnel with leads generated through brand communication, customer relationship management (CRM) technology has advanced dramatically, leveraging AI to drive customisation, personalisation, content personalisation and even conversational marketing to drive conversion.

For the first time, marketers can scale and quickly assess, from an IP address, who visited a website and what content they consumed, and then serve hyperpersonalised content through connected ad servers. Combining this with CRM helps convert anonymous IP addresses into valuable sales-qualified leads.

AI and data analytics also enhance marketing and sales alignment, ensuring delivery of not just leads, but actual business.

This changes the scope of B2B agency work from creating boring spam to becoming an integral client partner throughout the entire process — from traditional branding and creative to supporting the marketing tech stack, working with analysts and sales to identify, score and nurture leads, and even monitoring post-purchase product usage.

It also transforms agencies and strategists into valuable collaborators, offering clients data analysis and management, business problem understanding, technology advising, content creation, information gathering for product and solution design and, ultimately, better service. It’s a shift from transactional handshake deals to tech-enabled partnerships.

Adopting these principles has successfully helped many clients achieve more than their brief requested, both locally and globally. A simple shift in focus, combined with clever use of technology, turns solutions that might have remained unused consultancy deck proposals into attainable, realistic and operational ways to add value.

Nicky Turnbull and Jade Dos Santos are strategy directors at VML South Africa.

The big take-out: A simple shift in focus, combined with clever use of technology, turns solutions that might have remained unused consultancy deck proposals into attainable, realistic and operational ways to add value.