The campaign used to wear the crown of B2B marketing, but is its reign over? Will Green investigates the state of the campaign and asks what, if anything, will rise to take its place
Perhaps it speaks to the rapidity of change in the world of marketing over the last few years that it has almost become a cliché to declare a formerly key facet of the industry ‘dead’: ‘email marketing is dead’, ‘direct mail is dead’, ‘outbound is dead’. You can probably think of a dozen more examples off the top of your head. Certainly, many of the old certainties no longer apply and it’s unsurprising that even the most fundamental element of B2B marketing – the good old-fashioned campaign – should eventually receive its terminal pronouncement.
“The B2B campaign is dead. Gyro declared this some years ago,” says Kate Howe, MD of Gyro. Ben Wood, head of digital at Hallam Internet, agrees: “The notion of a singular marketing ‘campaign’ has been dead for a few years now. I cringe when I hear clients talk about a social media ‘campaign’ or a content marketing ‘campaign’.”
When we think about how the buying cycle has changed in B2B recently, it’s very easy to understand this thinking. According to Forrester Research, the B2B sales cycle has grown much longer, with buyers as much as 90 per cent along the cycle by the time they reach out to a sales representative. This means that seeing a singular ‘campaign’ as the starting point for engaging prospects is somewhat defunct.
In the past, the buyer’s journey started when a prospect reached out to a salesperson, who responded with a phone call, the mailing of a brochure or a meeting – quite possibly, all three. In the digital age though, prospects will search online, visit websites, consult product review sites, engage on social media, consult forums and, see myriad forms of digital advertising, before they come close to emailing or phoning a salesperson.
Technology has also changed the buyer journey: today’s buyers consume information across a wide range of channels and devices, from smartphones to tablets to PCs and even wearables. This means that marketers must communicate effectively with buyers whenever and wherever they are online.
With such a diffuse and multifaceted buyer journey ranging across so many sites and devices, how can a marketing department hope to use a one-off campaign to attract prospects? Thus, the campaign has been declared ‘dead’ and, in its place, the usurper ‘always-on marketing’, where the prospect receives targeted messaging at the right time when they are in the right place, is lauded as its rightful heir.
As Wood describes: “‘Always on’ and indeed omnichannel marketing are effectively killing the idea of the traditional marketing campaign. These days, businesses may be trying to promote their services simultaneously via what they’d term mobile advertising ‘campaigns’, display advertising ‘campaigns’, engaging social media ‘campaigns’, and indeed on their website. By creating separate campaigns though, target customers won’t end up with a seamless experience and consistent messaging across each channel – thus, the idea of separate ‘campaigns’ is no longer feasible.”
The full story?
It would be foolish for marketers to use pre-digital and pre-social techniques and expect them to deliver the results they did in the past. As Rich Wilson, CMO of Relative Insight puts it: “People expect engagement to be different. A single mailshot won’t do anymore.” But lots of marketers are nonetheless more circumspect in declaring the campaign to be truly dead and buried.
Katy Halewood, head of Maxus for Business, argues: “B2B campaigns are no more extinct than B2C campaigns – it’s simply that the communications landscape has progressed so rapidly (and continues to do so), that it is more challenging than ever for brands to deliver stand-out campaigns.”
But despite these difficulties, Doug Mow, CMO at Ness Software Engineering Services, still sees a place in B2B marketing for campaigns: “The rumours of the death of the B2B campaign are greatly exaggerated. Yes, campaigns include far more elements and moving parts [but] they provide very important components to any B2B initiatives for companies to compete in the digital economy.”
To illustrate this point, Brandwatch analysed five top performing B2B campaigns from the last year by the response they received on social media in terms of mentions, sentiment, hashtags and demographics. The ‘Mailmen’ campaign for Royal Mail MarketReach by Publicis Chemistry (below), for instance, shows how a targeted campaign provides a distinct peak in online interest over the time period of the campaign which marketers can then build ‘always-on’ tactics around.
Commenting on these findings, Joel Windels, VP inbound marketing at Brandwatch said: “The data we pulled shows that the B2B marketing campaign isn’t dead just yet, and should still be thought of as a valuable tool in creating real conversations between brands and their customers. Each of the campaigns we analysed kick-started online conversations mentioning or tagging the brand, and this conversation was sustained beyond the end of the campaign.”
The Brandwatch data shows that campaigns can still fulfil two very important functions. First, they provide a focus for messaging and timing. Good campaigns have a thematic element upon which messaging and content can be based, which is crucial in making content marketing, in particular, relevant. As Mow says: “This is particularly helpful for companies that suffer from the ‘shiny ball syndrome’, which makes their messaging diffuse.”
Second, campaigns are also useful for companies by providing a feedback loop for businesses to assess the direction of their marketing strategy, providing insight into questions such as who is the target market, what are their pain points, what do we offer, what value do customers get by engaging us?
As Tom Ball, director of digital at Immediate Future, says: “The conversation about a brand, industry, theme or topic never stops and we have to move to a model whereby this conversation can be facilitated, adding value in real-time as part of the nurturing process. However, the reality is that business models have not changed and budget/resource allocation is still aligned to peak periods of activity, events or ‘campaigns’ in whichever format they come.”
Audience experience is key
B2B campaigns, therefore, occupy a strange position: in their traditional role where marketers talked at customers, campaigns are outdated, part of the world of old-fashioned salesmen, catalogues and uninspiring trade press adverts. But done well with the appreciation that marketers need to be in conversation with customers they can be a crucial part of the modern marketing armoury. As Halewood puts it: “With the evolution of programmatic, mobile, video, to name a few, B2B marketers can appear as the luddites of the marketing world. But for those brands who are doing it well, there has never been more opportunity to deliver excellence in B2B campaigns […] Proof that B2B campaigns are still very much alive and kicking come from brands such as Volvo, Santander, UPS and Shell, who are successfully executing fully integrated campaign activity, a truly cross-platform approach and synergy between PR, creative and media.”
Perhaps, then, it’s much more a case of evolution rather than revolution with marketers using the targeting ability of a focused campaign with an appreciation of all of the tools and techniques that modern marketing brings. As Andrew Davies, CMO and co-founder of idio puts it: “The value of a well-planned and executed campaign has not been lost, and marketers who have shifted entirely to reactive and real-time messages risk chasing their tails rather than driving action towards a defined and measurable goal. This is where the campaign must evolve, rather than die. The campaign becomes an overarching narrative that guides and delineates ongoing activity across channel and approach – it is planned based on customer insight, executed, and measured against results and comparative campaigns.”
Ball adds to this, arguing that while the prolific rise of social has changed campaigns beyond all recognition, it has, in fact, made them even more useful than ever: “Social has, for a long time, been an after-thought, a tack-on, or a broadcast channel. [But it] provides an opportunity to create better campaigns than ever before – laser targeted, rich storytelling, ongoing storytelling, integrating sales and marketing with measurable returns.”
The rise of the new campaign
In other words, ‘the campaign is dead; long live the campaign’. As in the traditional proclamation of royal ascendancy, as the old monarch dies, the new monarch immediately inherits the title. The new B2B campaign rejects much of what the old order stood for: facts and figures, dry statistics, the shunning of emotion, campaigns directed at faceless companies. But it also takes its best elements – messaging focus, timing, strategy and measurable feedback – and applies them for the new age of engagement and customer-centricity.
Above all, the new campaign is conducted with people in mind. As Bhavesh Vaghela, CMO at ResponseTap, says: “Campaigns which are incredibly successful are creative and appeal to human emotions.” Gareth Evans, business development director of Five by Five, agrees, concluding: “There’s no reason to assume that B2B campaigns are dead. If anything, they suffer from the time-honoured misapprehension that in marketing to a business, you are communicating with a faceless, corporate mass rather than individuals with specific characteristics, lifestyles, and, dare I say it, a sense of humour. Perhaps instead the institutionalised B2B marketing terminology and definitions – and suspicion of ‘new’ channels – should be killed off, making way for a new, integrated and humanised approach to B2B campaign development.”
