In a world where big budgets often steal the spotlight, we embarked on a daring adventure – launching a B2B brand campaign with absolutely no budget.
It might not have been the ideal scenario, but let me take you on a captivating journey through our experience and reveal how it all unfolded.
This is the inspiring story of how we accomplished the impossible – launching a brand campaign with zero budget. Join us as we recount the entire journey.
The Dynamic Duo of Branding and Activation
We’ve been working on a branding campaign for quite some time.
You might know that marketing works in two different ways.
→ Branding is when you create memories that influence behavior over the long term.
→ Activation, on the other hand, seeks an immediate response from marketing efforts, without Whatsapp Data necessarily forming long-term memories.
This latter approach is often referred to as classic leadgen in the world of B2B marketing. It encompasses paid search or display advertising. Think about Amazon’s daily deals or our own WriterAccess’ 14-day free trial, it’s those limited-time promotions. It’s performance marketing.
As is often the case in B2B (too often), we have always given priority to activation/leadgen – and this in a way makes sense for a start-up like Rock Content in its first years of operations.
Activation delivers immediate results, supporting our monthly pipeline. You can measure the return on investment of it, in (nearly) real-time. On the other hand, branding takes time, its results are long-term and not so easy to measure.
But it’s through branding that you will generate demand. Both are important disciplines and should go hand in hand. The first supports the second, and the second complements and completes the first.
It’s like having a marketing model operating at two different speeds; you must balance the two speeds and adapt them to your specific situation. Too much activation results in insufficient demand and strong conversion, but limited growth; excessive brand-building risks create a robust demand but weak conversions.
To achieve sustainable long-term growth, you need to have a good level of demand and a good level of conversions.
Both brand building and activation are important and should go hand in hand: the first supports the second; the second complements and completes the first.
In fact, the campaign’s goal is to increase mental availability. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute defines mental availability as “the propensity of the brand to be thought of, or noticed, in buying situations.”
In simpler terms, in relevant buying situations, customers easily recall brands with high mental availability.
Embracing Customer-Centricity
While this seems simple, this school of thought requires a radical shift in the way B2B marketers approach marketing. To be precise, mental availability requires marketers to become less brand-centric, and more customer-centric.
Putting ourselves in the CZ Lists minds of our customers isn’t easy. Here are some primary questions we should be addressin.
