Gone are the days when B2B marketing consisted solely of trade shows, trade pubs and sales collateral. Smart B2B marketers know the reality of a longer buyer’s journey—and are embracing modern integrated marketing strategies that include tactics traditionally seen as only for their B2C counterparts.
What does modern integrated marketing for B2B mean?
Integrated marketing 101 tells us that by combining paid, earned, owned and shared media to promote our products or services will have greater impact and establish a more uniform brand message across the campaign. More importantly, there are no silos in an integrated strategy. We know that truly integrated marketing plans help us:
- Gain efficiencies and ROI - From graphics to ad copy, building campaigns cost money and time. However, when you integrate your campaigns, your assets can be repurposed and distributed across multiple marketing channels, enabling you to get more bang for your buck.
- Improve campaign results - Your brand will naturally reach a wider audience when you add multiple channels to your strategy which in turn can lead to a greater likelihood your prospects take a conversion action.
- Uniform brand image and voice - Running a fully integrated marketing strategy ensures your prospects hear and see a consistent message and understand your value proposition which is further reinforced across all campaign channels. This in turn builds trust with your prospects, which is necessary in this digital age.
Emerging traditional B2C strategies B2B advertisers should have on their radar
When it comes to integrated marketing plans, some B2B marketers historically shied away from tactics that were traditionally seen as B2C only. But times have changed in the last decade. For instance, B2B brands have embraced Facebook advertising in droves over the last couple of years, traditionally seen as for B2C only, to promote their brand, educate their audience and gather leads. So what’s next on the horizon? Here are a few emerging trends that are still primarily used by B2C brands, but with which B2B advertisers are beginning to find success:
User-generated content and influencer marketing
Over the years, social media platforms rose and fell due to changing consumer preference. For example, MySpace and Vine are discontinued platforms that were once taking the world by storm. Now, Facebook, which overtook MySpace, is seeing increased competition as demographics shift and popular apps such as Instagram and TikTok are gaining in popularity. Even our computer and smartphone technology have evolved to meet these shifts. At the click of button, everyone turns into a creator. As a result of this emerging trend, user generated content (UGC) has become the next big thing in content marketing and it is something that every business has the capacity to take advantage of.
The big power of the UGC is the humanizing factor, which helps potential customers to connect with the brand better, making it a great source of customer research as it allows users to share experiences and exchange their views about a brand in the form of photographic content, reviews, feedback, ratings, etc.
Traditional TV has gone digital
Many consumer behaviors shifted for long and short term during the COVID-19 pandemic. One long-term shift was the leap forward towards subscription OTT, digital video and digital remote services, also known as connected TV.
Connected TV (CTV) is a television able to serve programming through a connection to the Internet, either directly—a Smart TV—or through a hardware device like a Roku or Apple TV. The good news for brands is many connected TV apps are ad supported. While you might be thinking this channel is better suited for consumer brands, savvy B2B marketers are getting in early on this trend.
Take TransUnion for example. TransUnion came to us wanting to amplify their ShareAble for Hires product limited-time offer message and add a mass-media layer to existing campaigns components. During campaign planning, we recognized that the benefits of connected TV were well suited to achieve these objectives.
Though the campaign was short, it yielded impressive results: 157 signups. An important ingredient to this success can be attributed to the ability to serve ads to a specific/granular targeted audience. Therefore, programmatic TV buying can accommodate brands and budgets of all sizes – especially B2B!
What does the future hold for B2B integrated marketing? Recent consumer trends have shown that strategies traditionally seen as exclusive to B2C can be applied to B2B. So really, the opportunities are endless!
