Keep Them Coming Back With Creative B2B Lead Gen Strategies

The B2B Marketing Benchmark shows how B2B leaders are prioritizing lead generation, with this strategy securing 36% of allocated budgets. What’s even more revealing is that investment in brand building and awareness isn’t far behind at 30%. 

This near dual prioritization of lead generation and brand development shows how thoroughly B2B marketing leaders have internalized the 95/5 rule. This rule holds that 95% of your target audience is out-of-market at any given time, with only 5% prepared to buy right now. 

Given that drastic disparity, marketers have to answer a crucial question: how do you get the 95% to come back when it’s time to buy? 

The answer is as simple as it is challenging: you have to stick in their mind. And the best way to do that is with highly creative campaigns. 

Creativity On the Rise in B2B

The demand for creativity is growing in B2B. According to the B2B Marketing Benchmark, creative strategy and execution remains within the top three most important skills CMOs will need to master in the next few years. In addition, nearly two thirds (65%) of marketers further down the org chart say this is currently the most important skill for their own job.

Highly creative B2B marketing campaigns are not a novel approach, but they are only recently starting to gain traction. 

Let’s explore how marketers can apply these creative skills to developing winning lead generation strategies.

Creative Approaches To Lead Generation 

Powerful creative marketing materials are able to generate 10x-20x more sales than ho-hum marketing campaigns. They do this by winning over the customer with a resonant experience and then making it as easy as possible for them to share their contact information. After all, positive brand sentiment alone does not translate into sales. 

So, what does creative brand building look like when the goal is lead generation? It looks less like B2B and more like B2C. When your audience expands from a single decision maker to entire teams or even cross-functional collectives of potential stakeholders, highly logical, dry, and data-driven campaigns are simply less effective. 

To help inspire you when developing your own B2B lead gen strategies, take a look at some of the recent B2B campaigns that won high honors at the Cannes B2B Lions awards. These winning campaigns took one of three approaches to sticking in their customer’s mind: give them a useful tool, be funny, or tug at their heartstrings. 

Give them a useful tool that makes them happy to share their info 

Offering up a useful tool is a tried-and-true approach to getting potential customers interested in your product, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon. Some of the most inspiring and interesting winners at Cannes B2B Lions developed simple but effective tools to capture and maintain customers’ attention. 

The winner of the inaugural Creative B2B Grand Prix at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2022 was a paint company. Sherwin-Williams created an app that allows the user to verbally describe a color and then have that color produced through AI. Instead of searching for the perfect color, interior designers can tell the app what they want using natural language and, pop! There it is. 

By giving the user a tool that eliminates a pain point creates a natural path for soliciting contact information. Putting the tool behind a simple lead form will help ensure the leads you get from the tool are all serious about your offering. 

Be funny to create long-lasting brand affinity

Maybe the most fun you can have with creativity in marketing is making something funny. And just in case you think your B2B brand can’t embrace humor for your campaign, think again. 

When you think of humor, Finance and HR probably aren’t the first things that come to mind. But finance and HR platform Workday was selected as a Gold winner at the 2023 Cannes Lions awards in Creative B2B. Their campaign features rockstars – actual rockstars – trying to reclaim that name from the business world. Putting some of music’s most iconic rockstars in an office setting is as funny as it is effective. 

When the time comes to approach a vendor, B2B buyers will look to the brands they remember first. Using comedy to develop brand affinity will ensure they remember you fondly.

Tug at their heartstrings to motivate action

A more direct approach to establishing long-lasting emotional resonance is to tug at your audience’s heartstrings. Make them feel something deep and they won’t soon forget you. 

That was the creative strategy for the Brazilian stock exchange B3. The campaign is called EART4, and was developed in partnership with the United Nations to highlight the importance of preserving the value of the planet we all live on. This extremely creative approach to conveying a challenging message won the campaign top honors, netting it the 2023 Creative B2B Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. 

An emotionally powerful campaign can do more than just stick in viewers’ minds. It has the power to motivate action, which is how viewers turn into leads. Just make sure your campaign has an easy next step to bring opportunities into your pipeline.

Make It All About Them 

One thing that all of these winning campaigns have in common is that their creativity touched on the personal. 

A tool that validates an important segment of the customer base. A campaign that places beloved celebrities behind the same desk as the audience. A story about home that reflects the faces watching from around the globe.

One of the best ways to get through to your audience is with personalization. According to Forbes, 74% of customers are frustrated with content that isn’t personalized and 72% simply won’t engage with content that isn’t personalized. 

Relevant and customized content resonates more with audiences, and when combined with creativity’s ability to introduce more interesting angles, deeper storytelling, and more engaging visuals. You have a lead generation strategy that’s not just resonant, but highly memorable. 

But it’s not just about winning over one customer at a time. In today’s B2B buying climate, nearly everyone is a potential stakeholder. Personalizing content by role with a different creative approach for each persona will ultimately give each stakeholder the message they need to keep your offering top of mind when it comes time to buy. 

Let Creativity Drive Your Lead Gen 

Your customers probably don’t self identify by where they are in the buying process. What’s more, they may not even know when they plan to buy.

When the stakes are so high and timing so uncertain, it’s even more important to lean into creativity to capture customer attention. With a creative, unified brand development and lead generation strategy, you can ensure anyone who is out-market today will be in-market for your brand tomorrow. 

For more tips and inspiration for creative marketing strategies, generating leads, and building your brand, follow the LinkedIn Ads Blog.