Get Creative to Drive Better Marketing Results
June 9, 2014
Seven years ago, most marketing for B2B technology was dull, disengaging, and in significant need of a Don Draper type ad-mind to give it a make-over. Fast forward to today and B2B marketers are designing some of the most creative marketing tactics and campaigns across all businesses.
Why? Because just as the challenge of reaching buyers and getting them to pay attention has increased, so has the incentive to find a way to stand out. That often means trying new things, venturing off the beaten path, and getting creative.
3 Qualities of Great Marketing
Of course, creativity is great, but only if it helps you engage your target audience. Too often marketing teams in B2B businesses lose sight of the “who” they are trying to engage with. Instead, they end up trying to engage the masses and waste a lot of time and effort in the process.
Reaching the wrong person or reaching the right person with the wrong message — either way, you end up with the same result: no response. This makes understanding your buyer needs and pain points more important than ever before. Because today, great marketing is three things: 1) creative, 2) targeted, and 3) on-message.
B2B marketers need to use creativity to:
- Improve metrics
- Stand-out amongst other vendors
- Get visual and make information easy to consume
B2B Marketers must re-think the way they evaluate marketing tactics and channels to ensure they are focusing their creativity on getting target buyer attention. They also need to think about the purpose of each marketing campaign, and make sure every tactic is designed with a target action in mind.
4 Factors to Evaluate Your Marketing Focus
Maintaining the right focus is key to achieving marketing results and amplifying them through creativity. To effectively evaluate marketing channels, you need to understand the following four aspects of the opportunity:
- Relevance: the fit of a given marketing channel in terms of audience and timing as to when they utilize a specific channel
- Reach (Influence): the number of potential buyers your company could influence, educate, or interact with via a given marketing channel
- Cost (Resources, Time): the human and capital resource requirements necessary to effectively utilize a given marketing channel
- Effectiveness: the marginal return that can be expected from utilizing this channel
Only by qualifying your marketing opportunities via these four criteria will you truly be able to know they are worth the time or investment. For more on evaluating marketing channels, refer to my previous post on developing a prioritizations scheme for evaluating and prioritizing marketing channels.
Because creativity is often timely, you should get a sense as to what types of channels make sense for your target buyers so you can identify the best delivery mediums for timely content ahead of time. This should help get your team’s creative mojo focused in the right direction without delaying it!
Looking for Inspiration?
Download our eBook, It Takes a Content Factory! for a list of 61 types of content to consider and more. Download.
Photo by: JD Hancock