Shift your thinking from campaigns to journeys & ‘shatter’ content to make thought leadership more effective
We might be escaping a recession by the skin of our teeth, but the UK’s growth remains painfully slow, behind most of the G20, and well below inflation. Edelman’s most recent B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report revealed clear consequences for sales and marketing teams: 64% of C-suite executives say their organisation’s procurement process has been made tougher or more rigorous in response to the challenging economic times. Plus, 44% of decision-makers say that they will be personally less receptive to sales calls and marketing outreach in an economic downturn.
In other words, it’s harder to cut through, and it’s harder to win.
The good news is that thought leadership still works, 61% of decision-makers say an organisation’s thought leadership can be moderately or a lot more effective at demonstrating the potential value of its products or services compared to traditional product-oriented marketing. And 50% of c-suite respondents say the impact of high-quality thought leadership goes up, when economic times are tough. After all, this is when people need ideas and answers the most.
However, delivering high quality, relevant thought leadership takes real effort. Material must be finely tuned to prospects’ individual economic realities and their industry - and prove how the vendor can help them improve margins, minimise losses, retain customers, or outperform the competition to win market share.
So, with these pressures and demands in mind, what are some of the ways marketers can break through to buyers?
Keep calm and carry on (investing in brand salience)
First, it’s important to recognise that some things don’t change, regardless of the economic climate. In my experience B2B brands tend to focus too much on demand and lead generation, and not enough on brand building, which includes purpose and awareness.
Success requires a balance, because 95% of potential buyers are not in the market to buy a brand’s products or services at any given moment. Investing in brand comms helps businesses stay salient when potential customers do begin actively looking.
I love the above diagram as a way of representing how the cumulative benefits and ROI from investing in brand campaigns, alongside demand gen and digital, are more powerful than doing one or the other in isolation. Maintaining top of mind presence and relevance at moments of interest requires great content to drive engagement - with a multi-channel publishing strategy, supported by always on paid search, display, and lead gen. Maintaining marketing spend during a recession typically drives excellent results as soon as economic growth returns - outstripping the competition who cut back.
Shift from campaigns to journeys
For many B2B companies, it’s likely that budgets will tighten while sales cycles will extend, which supports taking more of an Account Based Marketing (ABM) approach, which is inherently longer term. This means thinking in terms of specific high value customers or prospects, and the journey you need to take them on to win their business. Carrying out a gap analysis, using anecdotal data if needed, can help you assess where a customer is - compared to where you want them to be, in terms of their perception of your organisation.
Trying to rush things is often the last thing you should do with a high value prospect. It’s often better to map out a 6-to-12-month process, considering what kind of high quality, relevant content and experiences you can credibly offer, that will respond to a decision maker’s unique needs and views. This might be bespoke video case studies, it could be a networking event with a few of your other happy customers, or it could be research-backed thought leadership that relates to their biggest business challenge… Shifting your mindset in this way, to use content strategically and tactically to target a single customer - or at least a smaller group of prospects - can be a game changer for new business.
Tight integration with your sales team is essential, as they naturally operate with longer term relationships (with real people) in mind. Ideally, you can combine sales teams’ relationship building skills and deep individual customer understanding with marketing teams’ expertise in content and comms, to agree the right type and cadence of material, format of engagement - and individual narrative, that will win over the prospect in question. Without overwhelming or confusing them.
Shatter content for salespeople and high value prospects
Marketing and thought leadership also have an essential role to play supporting salespeople’s offline or 1-2-1 conversations with high value prospects, and one of the most effective ways to support this is to create a variety of content formats.
For example, if you have created a substantial piece of quarterly thought leadership material, ‘shattering’ it, to produce a range of bitesize content in different formats, helps sellers use it in a broader range of situations - and extracts more financial value from the material, too. This could be visual assets and diagrams, a summary of key take aways in a leaflet or a few PowerPoint slides, or even a one-page bespoke executive summary that explains the most relevant insights and actions for a specific prospect. There are multiple ways to draw people in and give sales teams the tools they need to engage.
We all have shorter attention spans these days, so it’s very easy to underestimate the amount of work required to ‘sell’ thought leadership after you’ve created it. You’ve got to persuade very busy people to make the time to read it, first, before it can have any chance of persuading buyers to consider you, next time they issue an RFP.
This also why a multi-channel publishing approach helps – because different prospects will favour different channels, so effective distribution through social media, email, and peer-to-peer relationships is a must. Again, using a variety of content formats that help explain what people will learn from engaging with your material in the first place.
VOC programmes and advisory boards offer gold-dust insights
One initiative that’s proved immensely valuable at Fujitsu is our range of advisory boards. A select group of customer contacts (and prospects) join by invitation and typically sign up to a board for a year, and come to quarterly discussions we host, each covering a topical, relevant issue. It could be about a major technical or strategic challenge facing an industry, or even a new solution we’re thinking about investing major R&D budget in. Bringing people together under Chatham House rules helps everyone involved talk freely and offers brilliant first-hand insights into what challenges customers and prospects are facing. This is gold dust – real quality insights a business can learn from, and act upon, to offer new real-world solutions that win business.
If you can tailor your material for individual customer journeys, shatter it to help salespeople and engage customers through a range of formats and channels, as well as invest seriously in listening to what customers and prospects have to say - you will find thought leadership to be an invaluable tool; One which will help you find a way to win - in all market conditions.
Andrea Clatworthy is the Director and Head of Europe Marketing Transformation at Fujitsu.