Thread by @LouisGudema

A couple years ago @miketrap and I had this exchange about #B2B #brand and #marketing. Since then in my work as a fractional CMO, mentor @mitvms, and in my reading/research, I've looked into this. And now I’ve decided that he is right. 1/95 (in-depth thread)

But not all B2B marketing should be brand, of course. So what’s the right balance for optimal growth? That’s what this thread is about, and fortunately we have a lot of data to use to sort this out. But first, how did we get here? 2/

Over the past decade-plus marketing has gone off the rails. In part this is because of the explosion of martech that @chiefmartec has documented with his annual martech landscape supergraphic. 3/

A decade ago there were hundreds of martech vendors; today there are many thousands. Most provide tons of data and analytical tools which have created an understandable focus on optimizing short-term results. Unfortunately this is often at the expense of long-term brand building.

And as many cases and studies – based on thousands of campaigns -- now document, direct marketing (DM) and brand building are fundamentally different. And a failure to also build the brand will significantly hurt long-term growth and profitability. 5/

In the consumer world Adidas learned this when it left brand advertising to Nike and focused on digital DM because it could be optimized so well. After a few years it reversed itself because this was hurting growth. 6/ marketingweek.com/adidas-marketi…

Before I dig into the data – the evidence – I’ll describe the sources and the remarkable #marketing consensus that has emerged. And later I’ll share fun examples of the best B2b marketing and creative, too. (If you’re not interested in the sources, just skip the next 8 tweets) 7/

First there is “How Brands Grow” by @profbyron the head of @ehrenbergbass, which has been working with major brands for decades and discovered a few actual laws of marketing in the process. 8/

I know a person who formerly was in marketing at P&G. I mentioned it to her and she immediately said, “Oh, you mean The Red Book. That’s what we called it at P&G.” So this is a book that’s so influential it has its own nickname inside P&G. 9/

Another very important study is The Long and Short of it by @binetles and Peter Field. They produced important insights by looking at 1,000 winning campaigns from the UK’s @The_IPA annual advertising competition. These campaigns are judged on their objective results. 10/95

.@Effie_US president Traci Alford then hired @markritson to do a similar study of their 6,000 entries, which again are judged not subjectively but by objective results. 11/

LinkedIn joined the party by founding @b2binstitute and has put out several important studies, often in collaboration with @binetles @profbyron @ehrenbergbass and others. 12/

Jenni Romaniuk at @ehrenbergbass has done important work on brand assets 13/

And Paul Dyson and Data2Decisions, a global marketing mix modeling company that’s won a boatload of IPA and Effie awards, put out its insights based on what they have learned from their many campaigns. 14/

And there are others. So we have unprecedented insights, based on thousands of campaigns in hundreds of industries, into what really works. Now, did I take these and create some great, new unified theory of marketing? No, because I didn’t have to. 15/

As amazing as the amount of data that we now have is, is that these marketers are pretty much all in agreement. As each study came out they all essentially said, “Yes, they’re right, and here are just one or two other insights or twists that I can add to this growing consensus.”

So you’re welcome to disagree with what I will lay out here, but if you do you’re disagreeing with all of the above more than me. I’d ask What is your evidence? Because we now have the data. Not all marketers are taking advantage of it, but we have it. 17/

What is brand marketing? While varied, it often comes in the form of TV or video ads, radio, podcasts, other types of content and inbound marketing, PR, and social media posts. It may somewhat overlap with direct response by having an offer. 18/

Brand marketing is like exercise. People who exercise 30 minutes/day, 5X/week, tend to be much healthier than people who don’t. It’s not because of one run; it’s exercising day after day, week after week, year after year that produces that result. 19/

Having a strong brand has many advantages.

And this means that a strong brand can significantly increase your profits. 20/95

In terms of profits, here’s an example from CVS. Advil and Ibuprofen are chemically identical. And here they are right next to one another. Yet Advil can command more than a 30% higher price solely because of the strength of its brand. 21/

Direct marketing on the other hand – or as they call it in the UK, activation campaigns – tends to be in the form of search ads, email, and direct mail. Central to its effectiveness is a call to action with an offer. 22/

To continue my analogy, direct response marketing is like surgery, or cancer chemotherapy, or getting your COVID jab. It takes care of the immediate problem. Indeed, it may save your life. It can be very important. But it doesn’t produce long-term health and wellness. 23/

So direct response produces sales, but brand marketing produces profits. More on this shortly. 24/

In @The_IPA study they described the different types of messaging used in direct response activation campaigns and brand campaigns. DM tends to use rational messages like 20% off or download our ebook. It can be immediately effective but otherwise it is quickly forgotten. 25/

Brand marketing, on the other hand, tends to use emotional messages. And later on in this thread I’ll show you some outstanding and fun examples of B2B brand marketing. 26/

For effective brand marketing it’s essential that you understand the emotional triggers of your influencers and buyers. For example, customers of a B2B company selling accounting software will have different emotional triggers than those of a company selling social media software

Making these emotional connections are crucial. 28/

This critical chart from @The_IPA study explains the relationship between direct response campaigns with rational messages – represented by the yellow jaggies -- and brand campaigns with emotional messages – represented by the purple staircase. 29/

The direct response messages have a big, immediate impact but they are also forgotten almost immediately. Many direct response messages do not build on one another; they do not build the brand. 30/95

OTOH emotional brand messages tend to have less of an immediate impact but degrade far slower. If seen regularly they build over time. They don’t hit peak effectiveness for 2-3 years and can be sustained at that level for a long time. 31/

So ultimately, emotional messages have a bigger impact on how people feel about the brand.

And these brand campaigns also make direct response campaigns more effective. The reverse is not true. 32/

For mature B2C companies the recommendation is to have a 60/40 brand/direct response split in their marketing.

For B2B companies more like 50/50.

And for startups a heavier emphasis should be on direct response – roughly one-third brand and two-thirds direct. 33/

The problem, though, is short-termism. As @markritson asks, How are you going to say to the CEO that you should spend a third or half of your marketing budget on brand programs that won’t have their full impact for 2-3 years? 34/

(Later I’ll show you some metrics that you can use to demonstrate the progress that you’re making in building your brand in the first year or two.) 35/

This is all based on the idea that the #1 job for marketing is building mental availability: the likelihood that a buyer will think of your brand when they are in a buying situation. 36/

byronsharp.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/men…

Consider this: For most B2B companies only a very small part of the market is looking for that solution at any one time. DM can help you get in front of them. 37/

marketingweek.com/ehrenberg-bass…

But the much bigger opportunity is building mental availability with the entire market so that 3 or 6 months, or 1-2 years from now when the others are ready to buy, you are top of mind. This is critical because their shortlist may be very short. 38/

A few years ago @RealStoryGroup Managing Partner @theresaregli surveyed the customers that had recently acquired a digital asset management system (DAM) to understand their buying process. Less than half of these enterprises considered more than one vendor. 39/

Leading brands in other industries have also reported that they are often the only vendor considered when they win much of their business. That’s what a strong brand and WOM can do for you. 40/95

While it’s important to get in front of companies that plan to buy soon, the much bigger opportunity is to build mental availability with the entire market so you’re top of mind when they’re interested in your type of offering. 41/

B2B sales reps typically only win about 1 in 8 of the deals that they bid on because so many vendors are being considered. But what if you could win 1 in 2 because you were the only vendor being considered because of the mental availability you built with your brand marketing?

Your cost of sale would be much lower and your sales and profits much higher. That’s a strategic advantage that the CEO and head of sales might embrace. 43/

One way to gain market share is by gaining extra share of voice – the share of voice that’s larger than your current market share. On this chart the blue line represents market share. If your share of voice is above it, you tend to grow. If it’s below it, you tend to shrink. 44/

One of the biggest multipliers of marketing is size, so the industry leaders can often be below the line and still maintain their market share. And startups and others with very small market share need to be significantly above the line to have an impact. 45/

This is why established software companies, for example, typically spend about 15% of their budget on marketing, while software startups will spend 30-40% of their budget on marketing. The VCs are investing in rapid growth and marketing is the path to that. 46/

Share of Voice can – and should -- be created with many forms of content across many marketing channels. 47/

That martech supergraphic from @chiefmartec, for example, has been huge in building Scott Brinker’s brand. Its release is highly anticipated every year. And companies on it often write about and amplify it. 48/

The @Gartner Magic Quadrants and Hype Cycles are two other viral infographics that are spread by many. 49/

.@MailChimp not only created an effective, easy-to-use tool, it also produced very readable blog posts, ebooks, and other content about how to market better. Ultimately, a privately owned company with no VC investors, it was acquired for $12B. 50/95

Thousands of people look forward to each new episode of @marketingbook because @douglasburdett does the work of reading each book from cover to cover every week and coming up with insightful, unique questions -- and builds interest in his agency along the way. 51/

Industry research and surveys, like this one from @creativegroup @roberthalf, are likely to travel far. 52/

Global shipping leader @maersk is great at creating emotion-driven messages and videos and distributing them across its social media channels. 53/

.@databoxhq crowd-sources many of its blog posts from hundreds of contributors. They, in turn, amplify the posts that their comments appear in. Some form of user-generated content is a great approach to amplification. cc @pc4media 54/

Video is a very popular form, and many Whiteboard Friday talks by @randfish at Moz were highly anticipated and got tens of thousands of views each. 55/

The examples of great, viral, B2B marketing are endless. What will you do that’s new and unique, and that will leave the competition wishing that they had done it first?

You are seeking salience: the quality of being especially noticeable and prominent, even famous. 56/

Now let’s look at brand a bit more. 57/

What is a brand? Some people think of it as the logo and colors, but it goes far beyond that. A brand is essentially a combination of all of the experiences and interactions that customers have with it, including marketing, products, services, support, and everything else. 58/

That martech supergraphic has 8,000+ vendors and a lot of them have very good products. If you look on software review sites, a lot of the vendors get good to great reviews. Any good new feature will be immediately copied. So differentiation rarely exists or is where you’ll win.

I’ve done workshops for 100s of startup and SMB CEOs and when I ask if what they sell/do is truly different from their competitors, in private 99% say that it isn’t. They like to think that they’re better, but they’re rarely different. 60/95

Differentiation is rarely important to marketing effectiveness.

True, meaningful differentiation may be more important in the sales process where you have more of the customer’s attention.

Brand may be the only sustainable differentiator for many companies. 61/

Differentiation isn’t usually important but distinctiveness is. One way that companies establish mental availability is through their unique brand assets or codes, which can include their logo, colors, images, fonts, sounds or jingles, smells, characters, and others. 62/

Sometimes, as with the Salesforce logo, a logo represents something important about the brand. But often, as with the Starbucks logo, they’re less obvious. But after having seen that logo many, many times, it now means “Starbucks”. And that’s all that it needs to mean. 63/

And when your brand is distinctive and very well know, like @mcdonalds , you can have fun with your brand assets. 64/

The distinctive @dunkindonuts font is so well identified with them that they often don’t even have to say their name. 65/

According to @EhrenbergBass characters are even more distinctive and impactful brand assets than logos, followed by typography, product form, and several other types. 66/

We all know this distinctive character; we immediately think of @GEICO. Jenni Romaniuk of @EhrenbergBass describes its power. 67/

B2B companies traditionally haven’t used many characters except for spokespeople and CEOs.
However, Salesforce recently adopted a whole group of characters, so I’m sure that we’ll be seeing a lot from these folks. 68/

You can’t overuse your brand assets in your ads and other forms of marketing if you do it right. While marketers may be shy about starting their online videos with their logo, and think that that will reduce viewership, studies have shown that it doesn’t. 69/

This is a @Tide Super Bowl ad from 2018. It mentions Tide over and over. It’s entertaining and effective, and since it was shown early and often during the game, they essentially hijacked the Super Bowl. 70/95

And don’t do comparative advertising that shows the competitor’s logo; that just gives them a brand impression and confuses the audience. Do what Apple did. It didn’t compare its Mac to a branded PC from Dell or Lenovo or someone else, but to a generic PC. 71/

I mentioned earlier that size is the most important multiplier of marketing, by far. For those working with startups and SMBs, that’s unfortunate. But the good news is that creative is the second most important multiplier. So use great creative to produce great impact. 72/

I first saw this video by @TimWasher several years ago. Tim has an MBA and has worked on staff @IBM and @Cisco, and also for @nbcsnl and @ConanOBrien A video for a router has to be pretty good for me to remember it several years later, but this one is. 73/

Here’s another great tech ad by @Dashlane. They sell to businesses and individuals. This ad basically sets up the problem that they address. 74/

This is an ad that @UKVolkswagen used to appeal to small business owners. It barely even shows the product. It produced an 11X return on ad spend, which is very high. 75/

And @BostonDynamics has had really great videos for its robots for some time. It could have shown this robot lifting boxes in a warehouse or something, but this is far more memorable. 76/

You don’t have to spend a fortune to be creative and achieve great results. I worked with @RaySecur, which helps companies deal with mail-borne threats. RaySecur’s mail scanner uses a new technology that is more effective for detecting these threats. 77/

We had created effective product-led messages, content, and ads, and then I created this 24-second commercial which has more of an emotional message. 78/

We used that ad in targeted LinkedIn ads and elsewhere. And even though it was intended primarily as an emotional brand message, it generated a 600% higher response rate than product-led messages. And it only cost me $500 to produce for them. 79/

Since it was so effective, we also created a print version. Marketing messages are more impactful and memorable when seen in many places. 80/95

Since customers will remember so little from your ads, use emotional messaging to make your message stick. And you’ll be way ahead if they just remember these three things:
-What you provide
-What problem it addresses
-Your name
81/

.@Maersk is very good at these emotional brand messages and tying their shipping service to outcomes for their customers. Their home page and Facebook page could have shown big container ships, but instead they show a farmer presumably using their app on his iPad, and others. 82/

And this is one of their ads. Of course, they do have ads that also describe their services, and those ads are made more effective because they are about a brand that people already know and have an emotional connection to and trust. 83/

When I had my marketing agency we did this campaign for a company that provided 1031 Like Kind Exchange services. Rather than have a 300-word ad that explained that and why you should use it, and why Apex is better than anyone else at doing that, we created these ads. 84/

The ads had the contrarian message that you’ll learn to love the IRS when you see what Apex can do for you. And they had only a couple sentences of copy. We ran these ads in magazines read by accountants and CFOs. You can imagine how they stood out. They were very successful.

This ad is a classic B2B ad from the 1960s. It’s an ad for B2B advertising. It’s very impactful, and people still remember it 50 years later. 86/

This ad, OTOH, may produce a few downloads, but it won’t be remembered five minutes later. 87/

Advertising that effectively builds mental availability requires
-Creative that engages the emotions
-That is clearly branded
-And runs for a long time
88/

B2C brands are good at running campaigns for many years – decades even. B2B companies rarely do, and so they don’t build as strong brands as they could.
89/

Almost done. Earlier I asked the question: How can you show the CEO that you’re producing an impact and using your budget wisely if brand marketing can take two to three years to reach peak effectiveness. Here are some measurements that you can use along the way.
90/95

Google Trends tends to be a good measure of Share of Voice. You can see that back in 2010 HubSpot, the blue line, was neck and neck with two competitors, Act-On and Infusionsoft. And then it left them behind – far, far behind.
91/

Organic search traffic coming to the website is a good proxy for brand, and at RaySecur it was up 6X in less than a year.

Backlinks to the site, another indicator, were also up sharply.

92/

Growing social media mentions may be another signal of growing brand strength.
93/

But there’s this from @randfish too. 94/

It isn’t that brand marketing is better than DM, it’s about correcting the imbalance that has become so common over the past decade. Use both to achieve optimal growth at your company. 95/95