3 Things Binet and Field Can Teach B2B Marketers
Good marketing is targeted, direct, and quick to convert. This is and has long been the standard to which business-to-business (B2B) marketers are held by their superiors—and all for good reason. Targeted campaigns win probable leads. Direct messaging resonates with spec-minded buyers who know what they want. And—most importantly of all—conversions are what deliver impressive return-on-investment (ROI) figures at the end of the quarter.
The only thing missing from this paradigm is the realization that B2B buyers are every bit as human as their consumer counterparts. Whereas business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing concerns itself with trust, rapport, and emotional impact across buyer journeys that can span many years, B2B marketers tend to overlook the most powerful drivers of human decisionmaking by treating their audience as a small pool of purely rational in-market prospects.
Any B2B marketer would therefore do well to learn from Les Binet and Peter Field about what effective human marketing should look like. Binet and Field are two of the 21st century’s foremost advertising effectiveness experts, and while their studies have centered primarily around business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, their conclusions are invaluable to a world of long sales cycles and high stakes where trust, rapport, and emotional impact often makes the difference.
What follows are three of Binet and Field’s most fundamental principles of marketing to human beings, adapted for the B2B marketer.
Principle 1: Balance Activation with Brand Building
Binet and Field’s famous “60/40 rule” suggests that businesses should distinguish between their brand building efforts—long term emotional connections—and their activation efforts—immediate conversions—by dedicating separate strategies and budgets to each. Doing so ensures that a company is always building “mental availability” among early stage prospects and converting already primed prospects into leads and sales. They found a 60% brand, 40% activation budget allocation to be a good rule-of-thumb for B2C.
Many marketers would benefit from placing more emphasis on the former category. Since B2B purchases tend to involve risk-averse committees and lengthy sales cycles, even a stellar offering can be overlooked or dismissed if the company waits until buyers “enter the market” to begin fostering trust. Marketers can start by steadily rebalancing their budget to incorporate thought leadership and public relations campaigns—Binet and Field recommend a 46% brand, 54% activation split for B2B—that sow the seed. The rest of the budget goes toward reaping the harvest as always, only with a much more plentiful crop than before.
Principle 2: Emotion is Effective
One of the central findings from Binet and Field’s extensive research is that emotional messaging is more effective than rational messaging as a rule. Emotions form long-lasting memory structures, granting the mental availability that gives one brand an advantage when a purchase decision arrives. Rational messaging remains necessary only as a means of converting buyers who have already been emotionally primed by memorable brand efforts.
But do B2B buyers not approach their purchases from a more rational, informed, specification-minded standpoint than consumers? Indeed they do. This fact does not change, however, that emotions remain the strongest drivers behind human decisionmaking. Emotional B2B campaigns have been shown to yield 7 times more very large business effects than rational campaigns. Marketers should introduce themes of trust, status, and reassurance to their long-term messaging campaigns and reserve rational arguments for the conversion stage.
Principle 3: Invest in Breadth, Not Just Depth
Binet and Field have shown that tightly targeted campaigns can sacrifice brand building opportunities by missing potential buyers who do not yet fit the buyer profile. The percentage of buyers who are in-market at any given time varies drastically from industry to industry, but it is almost always the minority. By only targeting the ideal buyer, companies waste the better part of their exposure while failing to nurture new ideal buyers.
Businesses tend to have especially long buying cycles. According to a research paper by LinkedIn and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, roughly 95% of B2B buyers are not in-market during any given quarter. This means that future buyers are entirely uninterested in targeted sales messaging for the vast majority of their buying cycle. By broadening both channels and content to interest out-of-market buyers, companies can ensure that they are top-of-mind when those buyers eventually do enter the market.
Bottom Line
All three of the principles discussed above follow one common idea: B2B buyers are human, too, and building the confidence that underlies their purchase will always take time. Targeted, direct, conversion-driven marketing means nothing if the company does not begin by investing in its audience. Binet and Field have merely put hard research behind the long-known, ever-illusive truth: people buy from people that they know and trust.
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