Emotional Creative Can Create Breakthrough in B2B Marketing

This post is part of the LinkedIn Collective, which is designed to inspire excellence and success for all B2B marketers. The Collective offers groundbreaking thought leadership and content resources informed by LinkedIn data and insights, our team of experts and leaders across the B2B marketing industry.

One of my favorite podcasts, The CMO Podcast with Jim Stengel, asks one of my favorite questions as a recurring bit to each of the CMO guests he invites on his show: “What was the one brand you remember making an impact on you as a kid growing up?” I’m obsessed with their answers to this question, because they are always tied to a deeply personal story that makes these very successful CMOs feel immediately relatable – regardless of that particular CMO’s upbringing and background.

It’s not a surprise that all of the brands that get named are B2C brands. Of course they are. Kids aren’t business decision makers (although my own kids might beg to differ). But, those same kids who were impacted by Nike and Barbie and Wheaties and McDonald’s have grown up to become the CMOs and business decision makers that we, as B2B marketers, are selling to today. 

What does that tell us about our B2B buyers? Well, for starters, it tells us that the people buying tech stacks and software and CRM platforms are, well, people! Ones with emotions and bias and a need to feel seen, just like everyone else. They’re much more complex than their demographic and behavioral data would suggest. 

The other thing it tells us is that one of the commonalities of enduring, iconic brands is that they give you all the feels. So then why is B2B marketing still so often associated with speeds, feeds, and lists of all the things your product does or features it has…without telling you why you should care?

I think part of the reason for this is an (incorrect) perception that because B2B buyers are smart, savvy, accomplished, experienced business leaders, that means they are hyper-focused on the rational – the data, the numbers, and the margins. B2B buyers may even tell you this when you talk to them, which can make our jobs extra tricky! So we need to dig deeper.

The fact is that a B2B purchasing decision is a massively emotional one. The stakes are high and so are the investments; the buyer’s reputation, trustworthiness, and potentially future success are all on the line. A recent Gartner study showed that 77% of buyers say their last purchase was very complex or difficult. Why? So many solutions, so many features, so many stakeholders in the process – all with their own experiences and biases. And often, all the options start to look the same.

When all the options look the same, the emotional connection that your brand elicits can be a differentiator. I’d say that if you don’t have emotion built into your marketing and into your creative, it’s going to be hard to stand out from that pack and win over a new customer.

If you’re still with me, and if you’re ready to get more emotion into your creative to and win the hearts and minds of B2B buyers, start here:

Obsess over the emotional motivators of your target. 

If you have the time and budget to do a study with a research firm, that’s great. And you should! But if you don’t, go talk to your sales and customer success teams to find some current customers and some prospective customers to interview. Find out the deeper emotional drivers that inspire and move them to action – and build that into the way you market to them.

Focus on the emotion you’re trying to elicit. 

We know that buyers take action based on emotion. So pick 1 or 2 emotions that are authentic to your brand and build your creative and content around them. I love this chart from Shaan Puri:

Stay consistent with your creative bets over time to stay top-of-mind. 

Brands grow by maximizing their mental availability and their physical availability – they are “easy to mind,” and “easy to find,” according to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Emotionally resonant creative will work hard to make your brand more mentally available, so that it comes to mind quickly when decisions are being made.

And to be enduring and memorable? You have to stay consistent. This doesn’t mean ignoring the data (on the contrary!), but it does mean giving your creative some time to wear in with your audience before iterating or going in a different direction. And exercising patience with seeing results. Because brand KPIs like awareness and consideration can lag by a quarter or two, give your brand campaigns at least six months in market. This is especially important in B2B where purchasing cycles are longer. In fact, LinkedIn’s B2B Institute did some research on this, and discovered that only 5% of prospective buyers are in-market at any given time. 

LinkedIn, in particular, is doing some great research on this topic. Another recent study showed that delivering creative that resonates emotionally with your targets boosts the results of your campaign on the platform. And brands that developed creative that sought to build emotional connection with their ads acquired almost 200X more followers and had a 44% higher average CTR than other advertisers on LinkedIn in 2022.

Finally, I love the below that my friend Tusar Barik recently shared with me, because I think it says a lot about where B2B marketing is headed:

The majority of senior B2B marketers (89%) now recognize that brand building is just as important to driving long-term revenue growth in B2B as it is in consumer marketing; while 69% of senior marketing leaders agree that B2B purchasing decisions are just as emotionally-driven as B2C. 

I’m hopeful and excited for the in-market B2B creative work to catch up with these beliefs in 2023. Certainly watch this space for more to come from us at HubSpot.

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