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6 Successful B2B Marketing Campaigns to Inspire Your Strategy
Updated: Jan 15
You’ve probably heard it before: ‘B2B marketing campaigns are boring!’
B2B marketing campaigns are notorious for lacking creativity, being boring, you name it, it’s not good.
Let’s face it: B2B marketing isn’t easy.
There are many factors and variables to consider. And with the increased competition as well as the misguided advice to post content every day, B2B marketers are struggling.
(We see you, we get you. And we have something for you 😊)
You may have seen too many bad, boring, or cliche B2B marketing campaigns recently. Or maybe you're just too scared to get creative with your B2B brand. The good news is: There’s a light at the end of this dark tunnel.
Over the years, several B2B brands have decided to lift the bad b2b content curse and created unique and successful campaigns.
In this article, we’re showcasing the best and most successful B2B marketing campaigns out there. But before we dive in, we’ll explore the challenges of marketing for B2B audiences and what makes a B2B campaign successful.
Challenges of B2B Marketing
B2B marketing often starts with a sigh.
The challenges businesses struggle with are intensified when you want to create content for a B2B audience.
To get a clearer idea of how and why the top B2B marketing campaigns were successful, it’s important you’re clear about the challenges plaguing B2B marketing in general.
1. Defining Success & Managing Leadership Expectations
What is marketing success?
Defining success is an essential element in all of your marketing campaigns.
The answer to the question will differ from one business to another, even if they’re in the same industry with almost the same target audiences.
B2B marketers find that measuring the return on investment (ROI) of their activities is one of their biggest challenges. Nearly 30% of B2B marketers in a HubSpot survey cited measuring ROI as their biggest challenge.
Your success could be growing sales revenue and growth, reducing cost per lead, maximizing conversion rates, increasing the lifetime value of a customer, making a specific return on marketing spend, and/or more.
By defining what success actually is for each campaign you run, you can better manage expectations with all stakeholders and leadership.
2. Being human while being B2B
One of the biggest problems marketers struggle with is being human when creating B2B content. And we get it. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’re talking to a ‘company.’
But B2B content should always be directed to a person.
Because at the end of the day, who makes decisions in companies? Till now, its people.
But unlike a B2C audience, these people aren’t solely moved by emotions. They take many other elements into consideration such as product value, pricing, flexibility, and others.
In other words, they’re moved by how your product or service helps them and their business.
3. Understanding your content marketing needs
Content creation for B2B audiences isn’t easy. B2B marketers, regardless of industry, know that. In B2B, you can’t create anything and just hope for the best. That’s like throwing away your budget.
To ensure, you’re reaching your customers, you need to create content that
Educates your target audience
Helps your audiences
Builds authority and supports your brand’s positioning.
What you don’t want to do is:
Create content that talks about you or your business (and that’s the hard part!)
The B2B customer journey is a long and far more complex one than a B2C buyer’s journey.
Creating content that helps and entices your B2B customers should come from a clear understanding of your target audience. Get the most out of your efforts by following B2B content marketing best practices.
4. Differentiating between demand generation and lead generation
In B2B, there are important and related concepts you need to be aware of. That’s demand generation and lead generation.
Demand generation is about creating demand or interest for your product or service. Demand generation is a long-term strategy that involves reaching a large number of people.
On the other hand, lead generation involves using marketing campaigns that focus on collecting ‘leads’ or information from potential customers. The next step is to begin qualifying these potentially interested customers.
Both demand generation and lead generation rely on content marketing to build awareness and generate leads.
5. No one size fits all
With B2B marketing, there’s no one-size-fits-all. What works for your competitors might not work for you, which makes your marketing efforts even harder.
But knowing this, means you have room to experiment and A/B test.
By pinpointing your target audience(s), you can begin to create content and marketing campaigns that fit this particular audience and not any other.
Essential elements of a B2B marketing campaign
Now that you’re aware of the top B2B marketing challenges, let’s focus on what makes a B2B marketing campaign a success.
1. Determine your campaign goal(s)
Before you create or launch a marketing campaign, you need to determine what your goals for this campaign are. AND how you’ll measure those goals.
Goals for a B2B marketing campaign can include:
Nurturing leads
Generating demand for a new or existing service or product
Raising or increasing awareness for your brand, services, or products
Building your brand’s positioning
2. Identify your marketing channels
Are you going to use LinkedIn only? Or will you use Facebook and Twitter? Or maybe you’d rather create one or more email marketing campaigns?
You need to know where you’ll launch your campaign. Which of your marketing channels will you be using? You can launch your campaign on a single channel or several.
Contrary to common belief, you don’t have to be on all platforms at the same time. And even if you choose to be everywhere, which we don’t recommend, you definitely don’t have to create posts or ads for all platforms simultaneously.
The result usually means thinning out your budget, increasing the cost of your campaign, and not generating the results you’re hoping for.
How do you identify which marketing channels to use? Focus on the top platform where your customers are. In B2B, LinkedIn remains the number 1 platform for B2B audiences.