Connect Assist provides telephone and online helplines for charities and other voluntary organisations. In the past, the marketing team routinely bought prospect lists, prepared direct mailshots, and placed advertising campaigns in the press. Today this has all changed. Now the marketing team sends out a weekly blog, which it continually promotes through various social media channels, and each quarter it supplements this with a new discussion paper.
It is a radical shift in the way that Connect Assist markets itself, and it is one that a great many B2B companies are making. Increasingly, marketers at these organisations are abandoning their traditional tools, such as advertising, direct mail and email campaigns, and are turning instead to tools, such as online search and social media, that involve constant dialogue with customers and prospects. In fact, this is happening to such an extent that some observers and practitioners have declared the B2B marketing campaign is dead.
Not everyone agrees, but without doubt B2B marketing is changing. As 2010 draws to a close and we look ahead to 2011 and beyond, it is becoming clear that the B2B marketer of the future will need to be able to do more than produce traditional campaigns. It is a significant opportunity, but also a significant challenge, and a great many B2B marketers will need to rapidly acquire new skills if they are to compete in this radically altered environment.
A dying breed?
It is hard to get definite statistics about the extent to which campaigns are a dying breed, but you do not have to look far to find B2B marketing experts who are convinced that it is happening in a big way. Bryony Thomas is a B2B marketing consultant and Connect Assist is one of her clients. She is convinced that the campaign’s days are numbered.
“I would say that a balance these days would be 80 per cent ongoing activity and 20 per cent campaign work,” she says. “And, when I say ‘campaign’ I only really mean development of a new core item of content, with the promotion of that being undertaken in the ongoing activity.”
Marc Keating, head of digital at B2B marketing agency IAS, agrees, “Clients are more aware of the power of pull channels,” he says. “They’re using search engine optimisation and pay-per-click techniques to promote their brands, not only as part of campaigns that have a start and an end, but also throughout the year. Without doubt we are seeing clients shift their budgets in this direction. In some cases 6080 per cent of campaign budgets are now being spent on this sort of ongoing activity.”
New climate, new ideas
There are several reasons why the campaign is no longer such a central concept in B2B marketing as it once was. Firstly, online marketing – most notably search marketing and social media marketing – has made it possible. Secondly, the recession has restricted the budgets of all but the very fortunate few marketers. The days when we had the budgets to bring in creative agencies, spend a week on a shoot, and splash the resulting images all over the pages of a glossy magazine or in an intricate mailshot, are now little more than a fond memory. In the age of austerity there are simply not the budgets for the blockbuster campaigns of old.
Some argue that these were never wise investments anyway. Graham Sharp, strategic planning director at B2B marketing agency Information Arts, says, “Essentially many B2B brands are not high interest and high engagement purchases. No one wakes up and excitedly decides to change their ISP or their fuel payment method, in the way they might decide to book a holiday. So hitting them with a glitzy campaign at that point makes very little difference. You’re far better off maintaining a low-level presence, so they know where to find you when they have to buy your product or service.”
Indeed, Keating argues that the shift towards ongoing activity is not particularly related to new technology, financial pressures or the nature of B2B marketing – it is simply a better idea. He explains, “When we push our message through traditional channels there’s only ever going to be two or three per cent of the market that will be ready to purchase at that moment in time. With pull channels, on the other hand, you’re continually there for the prospect so they’ll always know where to find you.”
No such thing as an ideological future
Few are so ideological as to suggest that campaigns will have no place in the future. For launches of new products, director at Elemental Communications, Tim Gibbon, is a passionate advocate of online marketing, especially the social media elements, but even he was amazed at the dogmatic insistence from one of his clients on marketing in this space.
Gibbon recalls, “We recently worked with a B2B sales and marketing team whose focus was very much on social media. The key players were adamant that their audience resided on social media, and they were absolutely correct in that assumption. However, they failed to appreciate the fact that their audience also read, valued and placed credence on traditional media. The result was that our client was stubbornly ignoring important marketing channels and so limiting the return from their own marketing investments. Time after time we see this failure to understand how the offline and online marketing channels can and should work together. It should be improving, but I’m afraid it’s not.”
The importance of the idea
The message for B2B marketers is clear: you need to understand the potential and the limitations of both traditional campaigns and ongoing activity, and you have to be prepared to use each as appropriate. The first step – and by far the most important one – is to put time, effort and ideally inspiration into developing a marketing idea, message, creative and collateral that will resonate with business buyers. However you choose to disseminate your message, if this is not spot on, then no campaign or ongoing dialogue will help you.
As Keating says, “Ongoing activity tends to involve encouraging buyers to visit your site. This means that creative engagement has never been more important. The time that the user spends engaging with content and web tools, can be more powerful than them being exposed to a one-off 30-second ad, so you have to make sure that they’re impressed.”
Crucially, these ideas must be transferable across both the one-off campaign and your ongoing activity. Keating adds, “Campaign creative now has to be multi-dimensional and capable of working as a big campaign idea, but also capable of being integrated with the social web and working as something like a white paper. Agencies and brands have also got to look at how push and pull techniques can work together and how campaigns can be used as a way to encourage prospects and customers to engage with your ongoing dialogue.”
Once you have done all that you can start thinking about using social media as effectively as you can. A remarkable number of B2B organisations still keep these tools at arms reach, seeing them as little more than toys for geeks. You should get to grips with the possibilities here, decide how you will use them to your advantage, and start training all your staff on how to use them. Enable and encourage all of your employees to become your social media marketers.
Adapt and integrate
Integration is an over-used word in the world of marketing, but here it is absolutely crucial. Don’t make the mistake of believing that social media, SEO or automated programmes are silver bullets that will solve all your marketing problems in one swift, low-cost hit. The big one-off campaign may no longer be the entirety of the marketing department’s work, but rumours of its demise have been exaggerated.
As Heather Westgate, chief executive at direct-to-digital agency TDA, concludes, “Suggesting that visual creative-based campaign marketing is living on borrowed time denigrates the concept of integration. The best marketers are those who are not tied to one approach, but who can intelligently analyse an individual situation and produce striking ideas that are integrated across platforms. Those are the campaigns that in the future will produce the best results.”
