The need to be entertaining with marketing activity is now greater than ever thanks to shortening attention spans. But how can B2B marketers achieve this? Suzy Bashford investigates
Imagine it’s mid-summer and a heat wave has hit, making working conditions practically unbearable. You’re sitting at your desk, sweltering, wishing there was some way you could enjoy the weather, but also get your work done. Then, suddenly, a team of people from your conference call company sweeps in to your office, moving the entire floor onto your roof terrace, so you can do just that.
Would you find this turn of events entertaining? Or would you write the stunt off as a PR gimmick? Whichever you choose, you’re bound to remember the name of the company behind the idea.
It was, in fact, Powwownow. And this act was part of its #PowwowHELPMEnow campaign and followed a tweet from someone at The Office Group complaining of being too hot and wishing they were outside. Powwownow has tried to run social media campaigns in the past, alongside traditional outdoor advertising, but they’ve failed to take off. But according to Jacqui Keep, content marketing manager at Powwownow, the results of this campaign are ‘phenomenal’ with many media outlets, from national newspapers to bloggers, picking up on the quirky acts of help. The campaign reached an estimated audience of over 170,000,000 (the equivalent of spending more than £42,000 on mainstream advertising) at a cost of only £1500. She believes the success is because B2B marketing is at a tipping point: “As consumers in our personal lives, we expect creativity to capture our attention in advertising, but there hasn’t been this expectation in business marketing. However, as we’ve changed the way we live and work, there’s more blurring between work and home life and that is changing how we need to communicate with people in the B2B world.”
Another reason behind the success is that Powwownow dedicated more resource to the campaign, with a few people from its PR agency working fulltime on the campaign to respond to tweets, start conversations online and keep the buzz going.
Keep predicts this trend for B2B brands to be more entertaining is only going to continue and that marketers will have to work much harder to engage their audiences through creating interesting content, rather than running hard-sell, interruptive campaigns.
“At the end of the day, businesses are people,” she says. “Just because they’re working doesn’t mean we can’t be entertaining or that we have to be serious. However some B2B marketers use this [the fact it’s B2B] as an excuse not to be creative.”
Now or never
It’s natural for B2B brands to feel daunted at the prospect of having to ‘entertain’ their customers and to make the seemingly seismic shift from media buyer to content creator. According to Ariel King, content strategist at Arena Media, the B2C industry felt similarly overwhelmed when first faced with this challenge but has since risen to it. Some brands, like Red Bull and Unilever, have embraced the challenge so much that they now describe themselves as ‘media owners’ and ‘publishers’.
Does she think this should be a focus for B2B brands too? “Absolutely. It should 100 per cent be an objective,” she says. “When we talk about ‘entertaining’ content we easily confuse this with the need to create comedy videos, or big TV ads that make us cry at Christmas. Entertaining content doesn’t need to ‘win over usefulness’ nor does it need to be big, shouty and only done for the sake of getting a laugh. It simply means that the content is engaging with the consumer in a useful and memorable way.” She cites GE, IBM, Volvo Trucks and Cisco as examples of B2B brands doing this well, adding that key to cracking content is thinking “from an audience-led perspective, not a brand-led one.”
Cisco’s head of marketing for UK and Ireland Jackie Nixon agrees that B2B lags behind its B2C sibling but that creating entertaining content is the future. The brand is renowned for its humourous approach; with its 2009 ‘Valentine’s gift’ ad still lauded as a groundbreaking example of B2B content marketing. This black and white film tells the story of a man buying his sweetheart the perfect present to say ‘I love you’; the ASR 9000 router. While this was produced out of the US, other markets like the UK are also getting more creative with content.
Relinquish control
As a sponsor of the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games, Cisco wanted to promote its name but was mindful that it was a sporting event and people would not be in ‘work mode’. Consequently, it produced a series of four videos that told the story of how Cisco’s technology was helping the games run behind the scenes. In one execution the camera pans a buzzing TV studio creating the expectation that an athlete is about to be interviewed but, instead, it turns out the ‘person’ talking about the importance of teamwork is actually an animated piece of network infrastructure.
“As B2B marketers we need to get smarter and speak in the language people use rather than corporate speak,” says Nixon. One of the hardest challenges is nailing a brand’s tone of voice, particularly on social media when, in Twitter’s case, you only have 140 characters.
Nixon’s advice on this front is: “Making sure your corporate voice sounds human is incredibly difficult. We do a lot of listening on social media to understand what our audience wants from us first. You have to be authentic. You have to remember that the person you’re speaking to is not just an IT buyer. They’re a person. They need to be really engaged. Why would they want to look at something dry and corporate?”
Nixon’s PR background undoubtedly helps her in this brave new world of marketing communications. She understands the importance of a good story and that in order for a story to fly, you have to relinquish some control. That’s why she encourages as many colleagues as possible to take Cisco’s corporate media training, so they can understand the different communication platforms, how to best engage an audience and how to convey the brand’s personality.
As she puts it: “You have to let go of your inner control freak and trust you’ve got the right people working on your social media. We are happy for people to get on social media and amplify what we’re talking about. It allows our messages to travel further.”
The benefit of this open, freer approach is that invariably you will find some employees who relish the opportunities to write and run with them. For instance, Cisco’s UK and Ireland enterprise network director, Sarah Eccleston, has discovered a passion for blogging and writes in depth about how the brand is changing the world for the better by, for instance, writing about her experiences of using technology to stop elephants from being poached.
Make ‘em laugh
Another brand that has found humourous content results in deeper engagements, an ability to reach a new audience and lasting impressions is domain registrar GoDaddy. Its Superbowl campaign last year pushed the boundaries of creativity in B2B by using the shock factor: the ‘Puppet master’ execution featured machine engineer Gwen Dean who quit her job live on screen to start her own business (her boss, Ted, who she directed her message to, was at the game) with the help of GoDaddy.
The brand is a pioneer in B2B marketing, first advertising at the Superbowl in 2004 and, since then, leveraging the power of digital and social to engage customers in a more direct and innovative way. In local markets it has started to focus on creating content that is tailored specifically for the tones and nuances of humour and culture. For instance, in the UK it ran an irreverent ad last year called ‘head in a bag’ using a talking head to show how easy it is to build an online identity: “We wanted to speak to our audience at a level that is straightforward without being condescending, while in keeping with the overall GoDaddy tone of voice,” explains Stefano Maruzzi, VP EMEA at GoDaddy.
He believes at the heart of genuinely entertaining marketing is an appeal to “the basic traits and needs that connect us all as humans”. If you don’t create content that expresses humour, identity, sympathy, empathy or nostalgia, for instance, Maruzzi argues that it’s unlikely to be shared, which is vital for success in today’s socially networked society.
Social media is also reducing our attention spans – whether at work or play – which means B2B marketers must keep content short and snappy. “This has resulted in the ‘content snacking’ phenomenon of instantaneous consumption,” says Maruzzi. “So, if it doesn’t grab your attention immediately, it will simply get passed up for something more appealing. Video is a great option as it allows you to produce content that is engaging and easy to digest, and research by Axonn found seven in 10 people viewed brands more positively after watching interesting video content from them.”
Another increasingly popular form of marketing-as-entertainment is games. Cisco has used this strategy several times. For example, last year it created a game called ‘Net Invaders’ where the player’s mission is to defend ‘Cisco security island’ from attack by enemies like viruses and spyware, using weapons such as firewalls and other security products. As one reviewer says, it has “no annoying ads and in-app purchases” but is “fun to play, while still learning a thing or two about network security”.
Maintain relevancy
Fran Brosan, chairman and co-founder at Omobono, a digital agency specialising in business brands, says gamification is a useful tool: “Particularly in B2B, where the product itself may be less than riveting”. But she cautions against ‘putting lipstick on the pig’: “Gamification and entertainment will only work if what you are entertaining people about is relevant to your product and doesn’t create false expectations or too large a gap between the appearance and the reality”. It’d be very easy to get distracted by the need to entertain and forget the wider aim of the activity. While showing the personality behind your brand is vital to humanising it, marketers can’t forget the need to be relevant and useful. Time is something most customers do not have much of, so be entertaining to get their attention but make it useful for them as well and you’ll be more likely to win their business.
Ultimately what all entertaining marketing is trying to do is forge an emotional connection with a prospect or customer, so they remember the brand and consider it when making a purchasing decision. Paul Marsden, consumer psychologist at digital agency SYZYGY Group, believes that as this trend continues to take hold, corporate involvement in art will become an increasingly popular option too: “A way of creating genuinely entertaining marketing is art. Why? Because art connects us intuitively and emotionally, rather than using persuasion and reason; it gives marketing a direct hit to the heart.”
According to Marsden, digital content marketers are beginning to see the potential of art as an effective content marketing solution, citing retailer Debenham’s ‘The art of interpretation’ campaign for its bra fitting service last year as a good example. For this, the brand commissioned illustrators to interpret a line that was – unbeknown to them – actually taken from a guide to good bra fitting. These ranged from the “band is riding up the back” to “the cups are overflowing” and led to a raft of unusual and intriguing interpretations. According to Debenhams, the project aimed to explore what happens when the boundaries we normally associate with a brand are removed. This campaign was deemed so successful that the retailer plans to work with the artists on further campaigns this year.
While the jury may be out on whether corporate art will take off in the way Marsden predicts, one thing is certain: the era of forcing your target audience to sit through shouty, boring, interruptive broadcast messages, which don’t resonate, is over. This is as true for B2B as it is for B2C and all marketers need to adapt.
According to Grant Halloran, global vice president of Infor Marketing & CRM Group, which helps clients shift the focus from brand-led to customer-led communications, brands who don’t adapt will wither.
“An entire generation of consumers who became adults in the always-on era will be the engine room of the economy within a decade. Will your brand be relevant to them? Will your brand even exist?” he asks. “Too many companies will fail to properly address this paradigm shift in society but those brands that do will become dominant in their sector within five to 10 years.”
