Is our need to be quantifiable preventing us from taking risks?
Rory Sutherland, vice chairman, Ogilvy UK, opened the Ignite conference urging B2B marketers to step away from rational thinking and proven outcomes. He asked, is our need to quantifiable preventing us from taking risks? “A huge amount of B2B success is from random luck,” he said. “We’re obsessed with quantifying the value of advertising. The attempt to quantify it undermines it.”
Rory used radio advertising as an example of this. “Word of mouth and being a famous B2B company is unquantifiable,” he said. “I’ve never come across advertising that doesn’t work, it just might not work in the way you expected. But things happen you weren’t expecting.” While you can’t guarantee radio advertising will guarantee success, there’s more chance of an upside if you do it.
He also underlined the importance of taking chances that can’t be measured. “If you don’t do things that expose you to positive asymmetric outcomes, you won’t get lucky. We should use marketing to inform what we do, not decide what we do.”
Warning against the ‘highly rational’ approach to marketing, Rory advises against relying too heavily on data to make creative decisions. “Efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing,” he said. Efficient advertising might help identify existing customers, but inefficient advertising might help you find new customers.
The only way to get anything done, Rory explained, is to pretend to be highly rational, and present it to people for approval. But, it doesn’t work the other way round – someone highly rational never presents their work to creative people to see if it’s viable. Where’s the logic in that?
“Someone highly rational with a spreadsheet will use data as a drunk uses a lamppost – for support rather than illumination. If you don’t do anything random, it might not be catastrophic, but you’re never going to get lucky”
The future of life: B2B engagement and experience at hyper-speed
Six years ago, Tamara McCleary took a risk at Thulium, focusing its global marketing solely on social media. Paired with AI, it’s been a powerful approach to gaining meaningful insights.
AI is now so powerful, we often can’t tell the difference between a computer and a human. This is because we’re constantly projecting human emotion onto robots, she explained. “With Alexa and Siri people feel someone is listening to them,” Tamara shared. “It’s very natural. These are the relationships of the future.”
Yet most B2B marketers are not up to date with tech strategies. “We’ve had smartphones for a decade and are all glued to them. Sixty five percent of us sleep next to our mobile phone – more than those who sleep next to their significant other – yet we’re not tapped into the power of marketing through mobile.”
Similarly, 80% of all internet searches are for videos, Tamara explained, yet many are not tapping into this area. Only 9% of the Ignite audience had an AR/VR strategy and most had very little budget for social media.
“We combined social media with video and ended up being the most engaged non-media organisation at Davos this year. Reuters were the only organisation to come close to that.” With an organic reach of over 500 million, Thulium saw 4,400% ROI from that event.
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Budget blueprints for account-based marketing
With ABM, it’s important you’re realistic about what you can achieve with the resources you’ve got to avoid spreading the budget too thinly. You also need a carefully planned out programme to avoid squandering any of your precious pennies. Leanne Chescoe, senior manager, field marketing EMEA at Demandbase, provided the blueprints for small, medium and large budgets.
The small budget blueprint: 10k or less
At this stage, you’ll be starting out with ABM. It’s likely you won’t have buy-in, so you’ll be using your budget to test and prove the strategy as a pilot, and ultimately gain company buy-in. It’s unlikely you’ll have budget for additional support and often marketers will be running a pilot as a solo or extremely small operation.
A 10k programme campaign:
- Repurposing and personalising existing and generic assets for accounts.
- Personalised emails and landing pages.
- Use forms and digital advertising to gain account insight.
The majority of your budget will be spent on advertising and media.
The medium budget blueprint: 35k-99k
You’ll begin to think about scaling here. It’s most likely you’ve accumulated more budget for ABM following a successful pilot. Now you’ll be working more closely with sales, with the aim of extending your target account list to those who are less of a priority or may not be existing customers. You may also think about technology, but Leanne said it’s imperative to know when technology is appropriate to use in your programme. “At this stage, you need to understand when to leverage technology and internal resource,” she said.
A 35k-99k programme campaign:
- Targeted emails with personalised content.
- Drip campaigns for those who aren’t ready to engage.
- Personalised sales streams for key accounts.
- Targeted ads to traffic from competitor websites.
- Personalised chatbots.
Budget may be divided between advertising and media (35%), agency execution and planning (40%) and technology (25%).
The large budget blueprint: 100k
Here your ABM programme will have been in full swing for a while. Your organisation will be aligned with ABM, giving you’re the budget to spend big. Most will look to use this budget to optimise and scale. You may be looking to use to tech to optimise content and use metrics to identify areas of improvement. “Your strategy will become more sophisticated at this stage. Your efforts will start to extend into lead nurturing tactics, field marketing, and up-sell/cross-sell strategies.
A 100k programme campaign
- Website personalisation.
- Exchanging deeper insight into accounts with the sales team.
- Specific VIP events for target accounts.
Budget may be divided between events and experiences (15%), advertising and media (25%), agency execution and planning (25%) and technology (35%).
"Be really focused around aligning a set of target accounts, agree on metrics for success and ask what realistic timeframes for this are"
Managing your bloody stakeholders
Doug Kessler, creative director at Velocity Partners, spoke about how to get great work past your stakeholders. “When I look at work that inspires me, I used to think about craft and execution. Now I think about how they created the conditions to get this work approved.”
Most marketers are talented with great ideas, but most marketing is shite, Doug said. Why is safe, mediocre work so much easier to get approved? Because we try to do something special and flop 5% of the time, and the other 95% of the time we don’t even go for it. Ideas are a dime a dozen in marketing, he explained, the big idea is the starting line, not the finish line.
If you want to get innovative, risky work endorsed by your stakeholders, you’ve got to give them what they want. But marketing’s job is to make them want the right things. This is change management. “Put as much work into stakeholder alignment as the work itself,” Doug said.
He also recommended choosing your stakeholders carefully. “Find a champion, one senior person you can take out for coffee and explain what you’re trying to do.” Surface any misalignment early and remember to become your company’s customer advocate. The customer is more senior than your most senior stakeholder.
“Market your successes,” Doug said, “and be prepared to get fired or quit.”
“You might find yourself in a company that doesn’t have the same view of good marketing, or you’re stuck under a bully. You need to go somewhere you can do great things.”
