Between lead generation, engagement data, and conversion rates, a lot of number crunching goes into advertising. In B2B marketing, it seems like we somehow lost touch with the human side of it all. We’re talking to brands and forget our audience is still made of people. From that vantage point, do we really need a different approach between B2B and B2C? Maybe we could make it H2H –human to human?
With those questions in mind, we crafted the launch campaign for our new webinar solution, Kaltura Webinars. So, we looked at B2C campaigns and refashioned our strategy into a more humanized B2B approach that is not just about the rationale behind our solution and its features but makes room for value, connection, and emotion.
In this blog post, we discuss our latest B2B campaign, along with 7 simple ways you can humanize your B2B marketing strategy today.
Jump to:
- Why we’ve humanized our B2B marketing approach (and you should, too)?
- Know your audience
- Create a message that connects emotionally with your audience
- Showcase your people
- Share customer success stories
- Create personalized experiences for your potential customers
- Harness the superpowers of social media and employee advocacy
- Take advantage of marketing technology
- Final thoughts
Why we’ve humanized our B2B marketing approach (and you should, too)?
As B2B marketers, we’re often fooled into thinking that our customers are brands. They’re not. Our customers are the people working for that brand. That’s why we wanted to give our B2B campaign a B2C flavor. It’s important to build a relationship with our audience and, to do so, we first needed to create a connection, a rapport, a mutual interest.
It took us a few creative meetings and brainstorming sessions to shed our B2B skin. But the result speaks for itself. We let features and selling points play second fiddle to rousing tension and a unique, memorable delivery that speaks directly to the people behind the customer brand and addresses their personal pain points.
And we made a lot of it “show-don’t-tell.” Notice how the audience is not actually sitting in the room. The individual participants are in a park, at home, or at work. That explains why one attendee gets a ball thrown at him, while another one signals his child to be quiet. But we took some artistic liberty and brought all these remote attendees together in the same room to underline the convenient but engaging and immersive experience that is a Kaltura webinar.
People don’t remember ads with long lists of features –however compelling and important they are—until way down the marketing funnel, around the Consideration and Evaluation stages. But, in earlier stages, they might remember the original “slam poetry” delivery and other fun details of the main campaign. Along with, hopefully, a product feature or two.
Watch our main WebinarSlam video ad:
As you see, between the artist on stage, the graphic animations, and the short stories of the individual attendees, a lot is going on in these 99 seconds. People get bored easily, so that was our way of holding the viewer’s attention.
We also released several shorter versions that each highlight a different value proposition of the product, making it easier for the viewer to remember. Additionally, the shorter format increases our chances of the fickle viewer watching the video until the CTA appears on the screen.
Of course, the ad campaign and CTAs point to the Kaltura Webinars landing page on our website, so it was important to keep a campaign language and use the same dark mode, actors, and design assets from the video on the landing page. This way, we can deliver a unified and consistent campaign experience to the audience.
Watch our WebinarSlam BTS reel:
As a marketer, you know that a successful campaign resonates with your audience and reaches them through multiple channels that elicit human connection, personal approach, social proof, and transparency. To achieve success, we recommend assessing your next marketing campaign against these 7 best practices:
1. Know your audience
Obviously. To connect with your audience, address their pain points, and touch them emotionally, you first need to know who they are and what makes them tick. Run customer surveys, talk to your Sales and SDR teams, and use data from analytics and earlier campaigns to create customer personas. In the end, you want to show your audience you understand their problems and that you have just the right solution for them.
2. Create a message that connects emotionally with your audience
Based on your audience personas, you should be able to create a message that appeals to your target audience. Your message should convey the unique selling points of your product and the problems it solves in a personal and engaging way that speaks your audience’s language, without indulging too much in industry-specific jargon. The most successful marketing departments develop a unique voice that speaks throughout their campaigns, publications, and messaging and makes their brand instantly recognizable.
3. Showcase your people
The first B in B2B is made of people, too. And customers need to see that there are real faces behind the brand, to trust and with whom to connect. Let relevant employees take the stage in ads, videos, blog posts, events, and images. Sign emails with your real name. Show names and faces on your About page. Feature employee stories and quotes of the engineers that worked on a particular solution on your product pages. Why use stock images of fake office people, when you have the real deal on the work floor? Invest in a repository of ‘insider’ images.
4. Share customer success stories
Few things in marketing are more powerful than other customers endorsing your solution through a success story. This is the age of peer reviews and star ratings. It’s the first thing most people will look for before purchasing a product or service. Kaltura has its own reviews page and has a growing section on the website dedicated to case studies and customer success stories. We also show social proof with customer logos and performance data on our home page and product pages. Let the world know your customers like your brand and solutions!
5. Create personalized experiences for your potential customers
As we mentioned in our first point, the customer will only react to campaigns that address their personal interests and pain points. You can segment your audience based on information they share with you, data you are able to gather from their interactions with your website (downloads, pages visited), and their position in the customer journey. Based on all this information, you should be able to create highly personalized content that will help you push them further down the marketing funnel.
6. Harness the superpowers of social media and employee advocacy
Social media and employee advocacy are the internal cousins of social proof and customer success stories. They grant the audience an “unfiltered” peek behind the scenes and stand proof of a healthy and unified company culture. Cherry on top of the cake, brand messages posted by a brand’s employees are 24 times more likely to be shared than when posted by the brand itself. Even stronger, leads generated from employee advocacy convert 7 times more frequently than other leads. So, make social post kits an integral part of your social media strategy by sharing ready-made posts with design assets and suggested captions (their own personal caption is always better, but a suggested caption will lower the barrier to posting). Make it part of the company culture to follow, comment, and like brand-related posts on the corporate channels and co-workers’ channels.
7. Take advantage of marketing technology
Take advantage of all the marketing technology available to you. A campaign doesn’t always have to be written. You can create all kinds of video assets and even add interactive elements to them. You can leverage ad banners with or without animation, live and on-demand video events and webinars, blog posts, etc. to shape your next humanized B2B campaign.
Use analytics platforms to understand your audience. The demographics, their technology, how they interact with your website, and what interests them, … these are all metrics you can gather from Google Analytics or any other data collection platform you use. Look at your marketing automation tools, social media, and video experience platforms like Kaltura Webinars or Kaltura Events. They all collect user behavior and campaign performance data in the background that can prove invaluable for your audience segmentation efforts and your marketing campaign strategy!
Final Thoughts
A great tool to make your B2B marketing efforts a little more H2H is webinars.
Webinars check all the boxes we mentioned in this article. You get one of your expert employees to connect directly with your audience to solve their pain points in a personalized session. During such a session, the expert employee can share customer success stories, showcase your solution in a real-life setting, and interact with attendees through polls and moderated Q&A to get to know and understand them better. Kaltura Webinars also comes with a robust analytics dashboard to produce additional insights about your attendees. Webinars always offer great opportunities for social posts, ads, authority building, and general brand awareness as you promote your upcoming webinar and when you offer your recorded content on-demand, after the live event.
The best news? You can try Kaltura Webinars for free with our 14-day trial, no strings attached, and take your first step towards more humanized b2b marketing content.
Create webinars that move… with Kaltura Webinars!
