Brand and demand work better together.
For years B2B companies have been balancing the disciplines of brand and demand marketing. Whether integrated or run separately, these programs aim to tell a unique brand story then lead a customer through the sales journey to convert on a particular product or service. Of course brand activity has traditionally been harder to quantify than its more numbers driven counterpart, particularly with the emergence of technology companies providing us with more performance metrics than we knew what to do with.
We’re seeing things pivot.
Performance is under more pressure than ever before:
Both the pandemic and the current global economy are pushing executive leadership to double down on challenging sales KPIs in an era where data protection and the death of the cookie makes measurement and attribution are ever more complicated. This is pushing B2B marketers to a pivotal dichotomy – if KPIs don’t change then marketers will still prioritize the status quo. This means continuing to buy into programmatic channels and data sets that just don’t work as well as they used to. It means not leveraging the high spending audiences who consume content on IOS devices and Firefox browsers. It means ever decreasing performance of target audience segments and digitally sourced leads.
We’re all living in this reality. You know what it’s like….. you spend hours perfecting your messaging and content before launching a highly targeted campaign… then you don’t hit your targets. Target customers are viewing the content, but aren’t as willing to undergo a value exchange and leave you with a meaningful, bottom-funnel interaction. In this beautiful, complicated (and yes sometimes horrible) world of ours, they want to know why they should engage.
Demand generation will only get you so far:
To deal with modern data challenges, B2B media and marketing is moving beyond the “data-driven” status quo and getting creative. We’re thinking strategically about how to engage with whole people – not data segments. Brand is being highlighted again as fundamental when influencing how much time someone is willing to spend engaging with your content in the first place.
To understand a brand’s values, millennial consumers are looking beyond the product. More than just a collection of words to describe yourself, your brand must effectively demonstrate ‘why’ it exists – and, by extension, why it deserves your audience’s time and attention.
Contact us today to find out more about balancing brand and demand activates to cut through the noise and get better customer engagement.
hello@realmb2b.com