Marketing Applied Part One: Why We’re Obsessed with Brand Awareness

Working in insights, we all love to preach consumer marketing mantras. We go gooey over behavioral sciences and weak for awareness. But we seldom apply our enthusiasms to ourselves – to our own company marketing.

So, what are the B2B marketing principles you can’t afford to ignore right now? What’s the latest thinking? And how can you apply it to your own marketing, to win in the insights space?

This is the first of a short blog series on the most important conversations going on in marketing right now; and how we can apply these principles to insights for our benefit.

Let’s start with Brand Awareness

You work in insights, so I know you love numbers. Here are some: 95:5. This is from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science ¹ who showed that only 5% of B2B buyers are in the market to buy at any one point in time. Which means of course that 95% of your prospects are out-of-market and won’t be interested in what you offer until some point in the future.

Here's another number: 75. You have probably noticed, B2B sales cycles are getting longer so that point in the future we need to market for, could be quite far off. The insights sector has a busy constellation of small businesses and start-ups; across industries, the average start-up saw a 24% increase in the sales cycle from 2022 to 2023, going from a 60 to a 75 day cycle². It’s not quicker for bigger companies, where the sales cycle can vary from six to 12 months, and when a purchase is particularly large, it could take even longer.³

Another number to bear in mind, especially in a competitive space like insights, is 90%. Research published in the HBR by Bain and Google showed that 80% to 90% of B2B buyers compile a list of vendors for consideration before they start the search process. Then 90% of them will choose a vendor from that very first list, that they wrote on day one.⁴

So, if 95% of buyers aren’t looking to buy right now, and if 90% of them already have a shortlist of vendors, how do you get cut through? “To win the market you need to win the minds” said Peter Weinberg Global Head of Development at the B2B Institute, at the recent UK Festival of Marketing. “Prime the market with what we called pre-suasion rather than persuasion” he continued. This is why brand awareness is so important: you can’t influence a buyer you’ve never reached.

Although this seems obvious, we still see a predominantly lead-generation-only approach in insights. But your buyers don’t want to receive another sales email. “Emails are a big issue, don’t assume that everyone wants to hear what you have to say and don’t send emails asking for an appointment next week… I get forty of those a day” said Marion Hoek-Koudenburg, Director of Consumer Insights and Capability at Under Armour, during one of our panels at IIEX Europe.

This obsession with lead generation, leaves a space to feed the top of the funnel for those who are willing to put some eggs in the long-term brand awareness basket. Work on “memory-generation” to win minds, rather than lead-generation.

Here are five practical tips to help build awareness:

• Feed the top of the funnel; most of your competitors aren’t. Create good thought-leadership content (think about self-funded research) and share it as much as you can, through as many channels as you can.
• Talk to the media: buyers turn to industry publications, and industry influencers – make sure you have a strong presence on their go-to sources.
• Don’t be metrics obsessed. It’s about the long-term, just because you can measure something it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to measure. It’s good to have KPIs, but don’t sweat it. Focus on getting your message out there.
• First impressions are important! Websites strongly influence the research stage, buyers want to see easy to navigate, informative, memorable sites that resonate with their challenges.
• Find a healthy balance; you still have 5% of prospects who are looking to buy. Just don’t forget to nurture that 95% with long-term brand building.

Up next on Marketing Applied: Mental Availability. Stay tuned if you want to learn why this is important, and how you can leverage it.

References

1. https://marketingscience.info/the-955-rule-is-the-new-6040-rule/

2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mastering-new-b2b-sales-cycle-cience/

3. https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/2021/03/sales-cycle-length--how-it-s-calculated-and-why-it-s-important.html

4. https://hbr.org/2022/09/what-b2bs-need-to-know-about-their-buyers