Working to create a marketing campaign that knocks the socks off your target audience, but unsure how to go about it? It’s okay to feel uninspired. We all have those days.
Thankfully, a little inspiration can go a long way, putting the creative gears in your brain to work. We reached out to experts and asked them to share the best B2B marketing campaigns they’ve seen, and exactly why their chosen campaigns are so effective.
The most important elements of B2B marketing campaigns
To begin with, we asked our survey participants to vote for the most important marketing elements.
Three elements turned out to be close winners: messaging, positioning, and voice/tone.
Let’s look at each campaign element individually.
Campaign messaging is the most important element
Based on the responses we got, messaging was mentioned as the most crucial to creating outstanding B2B marketing campaigns (rated 4.5 out of 5).
Messaging is pretty self-explanatory. It’s the message you want to share with the world. Want to tell your target customers it’s easy to start their own business? Tell them. Want to send a message that project management is a breeze with your software? Go ahead and convey it.
Business positioning is also essential
The second most important element for B2B marketing campaigns (rated 4.4 out of 5) is your business’s USP or unique selling proposition. In other words, it’s what differentiates you from the rest of your competitors.
For instance, Zappos has a reputation for great customer service. It’s what separates them from others in their industry.
What’s your unique positioning? Ease of use? Friendly staff? Whatever it is, write it down, then show it off in your B2B marketing campaign.
Consider your campaign’s voice/tone
Our respondents also think voice/tone is almost equally important (rated 4.3 out of 5) for the success of your marketing campaign.
Not only does it help show your business’s human side, a unique voice helps you stand out and leaves a memorable impression on your audience.
Once you have your voice nailed down, be sure to write your campaign’s script in that voice.
Your campaign needs to pull some emotional strings
We also inquired about the significance of leaving an emotional impact with your campaign. It turns out, leaving an emotional impact is important (rated 4.05 out of 5).
Why? Because we’re all emotional beings at heart and like it or not, emotions play a critical role in helping us make decisions.
The medium you select is equally important
Similarly, the marketing channels you use to distribute your campaign carry a lot of importance. The marketers in our survey give it equal importance to emotional impact (at 4.05 out of 5) when it comes to the success of a B2B marketing campaign.
Visuals communicate your message quickly
Not to forget, visual elements always play an important role in marketing (rated 3.9 out of 5). Strong visuals communicate your message quickly, so it’s a good idea to pay close attention to how your campaign looks.
And don’t forget a solid campaign slogan
Lastly, your marketing campaign’s slogan stands somewhere between “least crucial” and “most crucial” according to our marketing experts (rated 3.45 out of 5). While it plays an average to important role, it’s also something to keep in mind when creating your B2B campaign.
The 12 best B2B marketing campaigns
Now that you know what elements make a stellar marketing campaign, it’s time to see some of the best campaigns in the B2B sphere that check off these elements.
1. IBM’s “Every Second Counts”
The first on this list of best marketing campaigns is IBM’s campaign.
Crediful’s Lucas Robinson talks about it: “The mixed media approach [this campaign takes] helps to direct users to their landing page, and also gives the customer someone more interesting to look and interact with. The films were really poignant to the campaign, and something different than the usual image format.”
The take-home message? Robinson points that out for you: “Using more than just images helps for the audience to have a very engaging experience with a campaign, and social media is a great way to push content forward.”
2. Drift’s employee advocacy campaign
“Spotlighting individual people makes the roles at the company more human, and makes sure customers see every individual role at the company as a person who works there with a face and life, rather than just seeing the company as one,” notes Ethan Taub from Debtry.
The lesson learned from this employee advocacy program is simple: “If you want to make people the center of your company, make sure they are in every part of your content, too,” outlines Taub. “If they are the forefront of all campaigns, customers know they will always be in mind.”
3. WeWork’s video campaign
Thomas Glare from Smallbizdaily applauds WeWork’s video campaigns. Glare writes: “This is a creative company whose most recent campaign shows to be a good example of how to crush every bit of usefulness from your video investment.
“For small businesses to drive forward their office space, this company has created a series of 30-second videos. The videos can be cut to 15 or even six seconds and still gets the message across, proving to be a good utility of this marketing campaign.”
The takeaway? “For B2B and B2C marketing campaigns videos are must for every brand,” in Glare’s words. And, of course, it’s important that you deliver your message in as short a time as possible just as WeWork’s videos get the message across even when cut to six seconds.
4. Shopify’s “Let’s Make You A Business” Campaign
This campaign “helps anyone to believe they can have their own business. And with the help of the company, you can grow your business and be a success,” observes Daniel Foley. The campaign “helps those who have a business show they can do better without much effort – it is just about using the right platform,” adds Foley.
Brand24’s Mike Sadowski also notes: “Aimed at new potential business owners, Shopify decided to get their message through various channels. They used internet ads, TV ads, billboards, and other mediums.”
“What they wanted to achieve,” continues Sadowski, “is to keep their advertising visible at any part of daily life. Be it on a walk, driving your car to walk, watching TV with your family, or scrolling the internet by yourself; they aimed for their message to stay in your mind.”
Summing up, Aaron McWilliams from 1Dental calls Shopify’s campaign “one of the most creative B2B marketing campaigns I have seen before.”
By using various marketing channels to get their message to new and small business owners, McWilliams highlights “it established the idea that Shopify is a place for entrepreneurs to make their business ideas come to life.”
For marketers, the “Let’s Make You A Business” campaign leaves us with a few knowledge bites including:
- “Positioning is the most important aspect of a campaign. Differentiating yourself from the competition and demonstrating the value you provide over other companies will make for an effective campaign.” – Aaron McWilliams.
- “Relate to your customers and make them believe that with your business they can be a better success. Put your customer at the front of the campaign and help them to be motivated.” – Daniel Foley.
- “By advertising through many channels, chances are, when someone eventually decides to launch a business, they’ll choose Shopify. Because of their presence, people would latch onto what they already knew. So the takeaway is you should use plenty of channels for your marketing efforts.” – Mike Sadowski
5. Cisco’s “SuperSmart Security Graphic Novel”
“In terms of the most creative B2B campaign, for me the hands-down winner is Cisco,” comments Jack Zmudzinski of Future Processing.
“I’m a senior associate at Future Processing and am constantly conducting A/B testing with our marketing campaigns to see what works best. Through trial and error, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all about strong messaging which resonates with potential clients, followed closely by positioning and reputation.”
And when it comes to all these pointers in Zmudzinski’s list, Cisco’s campaign meets them all, leaving us with an interesting takeaway of how boring information can be presented in a creative way.
In Zmudzinski’s words: “Wanting to teach people about cybersecurity, Cisco did away with the idea of a dry but informative campaign and, instead, produced a graphic novel – complete with a superhero. Honestly, it really doesn’t get much better than that!”
6. Google’s comic for the launch of Google Chrome
Anu Ramani from Isoline Communications thinks, “This comic was a great piece of content that elaborated on highly complex concepts in simple, accessible terms. Beautifully detailed, perfectly pitched, and addresses all the key questions developers might have about the browser.”
“Tech B2B does not have to be all about words on a page!” as Ramani puts it. “Don’t be afraid of exploring different and creative mediums in your work.”
7. Xerox’s “Get Optimistic” campaign
Linkody’s Francois-Louis Mommens shares this old campaign as one of the best marketing campaigns.
Mommens observes, “Xerox went for very targeted advertising. It started with emails sent twice a week that were divided industry-wise. These emails would then send the prospects to websites that were associated with their industry.”
“Then, Xerox partnered with Forbes to create their own publication platform called Chief Optimist. They wanted to reach not only the executives, but all employees involved with decision-making. I believe it was so successful because of their unique approach to marketing. Moreover, personal touch in advertising is a great practice.
“The primary takeaway to learn from this is to keep things personal in your campaigns,” concludes Mommens. “People value that because it shows you care about them and want to help them develop by providing useful content about their industry.
Xerox didn’t only keep things personal in the emails, but also launched a whole magazine where they focused on particular needs. Furthermore, Xerox decided to conduct seminars all over the US to further promote themselves.”
8. Monday.com’s quick explainer video
This ad is a suggestion by David Cusick of House Method. The reason it works is simple: “Monday.com’s ad is visually attractive and demonstrates clearly what it can do to help businesses manage their workflow and project management more efficiently.”
Put simply, “a business owner looking at it can easily imagine their business using the app.”
This leaves us with an important message: “Effective use of visuals can make a campaign simple yet punchy and effective in capturing a target audience’s attention,” Cusick summarizes.
9. Slack’s mockumentary video with Sandwich, Inc.
“The most creative B2B marketing campaign I’ve seen is the Slack mockumentary video with Sandwich, Inc.,” opines Naveed Ahmer of Keka HR.
“Sandwich, Inc. is a video creating agency that are customers of Slack. The video showcased the journey of Sandwich from not using Slack to using Slack.” The best part? “It explained how they bundled multiple communication channels in the organization under one platform. The video was funny and sarcastic, and didn’t bore the viewers.”
So what’s the message here? Try a video case study that’s engaging.
As Ahmer says: “The video was a real case study and also from a client’s perspective, which added legitimacy and made the application seem more genuine and useful. They strategically highlighted the challenges that organizations generally don’t even realize and how to resolve them.”
10. Hey’s launch campaign (a new email product created by founders of Basecamp)
Better Proposals’ Petra Odak says, “it’s really hard to be provocative nowadays, but [Hey] managed to pull it off and get the attention of the entire SaaS community around the world. Their promise of finally ‘solving’ email and getting rid of spam once and for all.”
In short, Odak shares, “they just created a landing page with some really good copy and a signup form – and that’s all it took. News outlets picked up the story and it spread like wildfire in just a few days.” And that’s exactly what you should aim for if you’re looking to replicate the success of Hey’s campaign.
11. Sweet Fish Media’s podcasts
“The most creative B2B marketing campaign I’ve seen is the way Sweet Fish Media, a podcasting company, structures its podcasts to market to other companies in its target market,” comments Stacy Caprio from Growth Marketing.
“One way they structure their podcast campaign to get more B2B clients is to invite their ideal clients on their podcast,” Caprio explains.
“This allows them to be a client attraction vehicle. Even if they don’t get tons of listeners, they are still getting to talk directly to their ideal clients by inviting them to talk on the podcast, which makes the campaign incredibly effective.”
Want to try out this marketing approach?
Caprio ties it altogether in one solid lesson: “Learn to target exactly who you want to buy from you in your campaigns. When your targeting is super specific and precise, you won’t need to have hundreds of thousands of site visits or campaign views to start getting sales and revenue.”
12. Oracle’s “Digital Bank of the Future” research campaign
The campaign “resulted in over 350k new leads for Oracle and a projected $28 million revenue pipeline,” recalls Jim Pendergast from altLINE Sobanco.
Pendergast elaborates on what made it so effective. “Oracle worked with B2B marketing giant MOI Global to put together a multi-channel lead-gen campaign that worked well on two fronts:
“First, it offered not one but two gated, incredibly in-depth reports on the disconnect between banks and the modern-day customer. Even better, the reports came with a benchmarking survey for audiences to temperature-check their own banking processes and see how well they were meeting today’s digital-first consumer needs.
“From that benchmarking survey, participants could go on to enroll in Oracle-sponsored tutorials and bootcamps. This made the reports all the more engaging and useful, as you could bring findings into the real world to make actual improvements back at your bank or financial institution.”
The moral of this marketing campaign story? “The biggest message is that yes, audiences still respond to in-depth gated content,” writes Pendergast. “But you get real lead-gen traction when you give prospects something tangible they can do once it’s in their hands or on their screens. Few organizations go beyond just publishing those static reports and whitepapers.”
Get inspired!
From using different marketing channels to creating a message that’s visually stunning and resonates with your audience, there’s a lot that you can do to make your campaign a hit. Use these examples of the best B2B marketing campaigns to get the creative wheels turning.
Start with understanding your audience and their pain points, then go on to find a creative campaign format that’ll get their attention. Remember: Your messaging, positioning, and voice/tone are the important elements. So, don’t forget to make them a priority.
