The IPA has teamed up with the B2B Institute at LinkedIn to produce a guide to help agency planners and brand owners looking to prove the business impact of their work. This is the foreword by Jann Schwarz, Global Senior Director, The B2B Institute at LinkedIn to the "Guide to Writing a B2B Effectiveness Award Entry".
Being a B2B marketer often feels like being a left-handed person living in a right-handed world. Everything you touch is hard to use because it has not been designed with you in mind.
And what’s worse, people tell you not to make such a fuss because it’s practically the same anyway. B2B marketing is different from B2C. There are important and nuanced differences between buying a coffee and buying a cloud computing system. We don’t buy coffee as a group or in a complex decision-making process that takes months. We don’t fret about what our boss might think about the coffee we’re about to buy or wonder if choosing the wrong coffee will get us fired because it doesn’t taste the way people expected it to. But the purchase path is fraught when it comes to cloud-computing. Emotions matter in both categories. But they are different emotions.
B2B businesses represent around half the global economy. Behind every CPG product in a supermarket is a long supply chain of dozens and dozens of B2B businesses that helped land that product on the shelf. And yet B2B receives far less attention or support. And when B2B gets attention, nearly all the focus is on shortterm conversions and sales activation, not on brand building. At the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, we believe the opposite should be true.
Long-term brand building is the single greatest opportunity for B2B businesses to secure sustainable growth and create future demand. In any commercial enterprise, the job of marketing is to create future customers and guarantee future cash flows. That’s why it is important to celebrate and be inspired by B2B businesses that are getting it right.
We are thrilled to work closely with the IPA to catalyse B2B entries that persuasively establish a link between marketing and business value.
Winning an IPA Effectiveness Award is often a career-defining event. I want to take this opportunity to wish you the best of luck.
Download the "Guide to Writing a B2B Effectiveness Award Entry" free of charge