Why thought leadership is a missed opportunity for B2B brands

Oftentimes, B2B marketing—when compared to consumer marketing—is viewed as being less creative, less interesting, and less emotional. But times are changing according to Joe Kingsbury, global chair of Edelman, business marketing.

Today B2B marketing is being invigorated by technology and data, making the B2B category dynamic and even exciting.

Yet, while the category is transforming, amid lingering global economic uncertainty it's tough for B2B companies to win new business. At any moment, an astonishing 95% of customers from B2B companies are not actively looking for products or services. Ongoing economic uncertainty is lengthening the sales process, with almost 90% of global buyers reporting that their purchasing journey extended last year. Additionally, B2B buyers now favour self-guided digital exploration instead of traditional sales calls.

Campaign caught up with Kingsbury on his recent visit to Singapore to learn more about how thought leadership is unlocking new business growth for B2B marketers and how predictive data is having a transformative impact.

Campaign: What would you say is the biggest challenge impacting B2B marketers at the moment?

Kingsbury: The alignment of sales and marketing is a pretty big challenge that CMOs are grappling with here in APAC. Validating the impact of marketing on the bottom line is a top priority for CMOs. But it's harder to do in the B2B world than in the consumer world because if you are a consumer-facing company where you have digital transactions, it's easier to measure and attribute the impact of your marketing activity along the way. In B2B, it often tends to be non-ecommerce transactions, and very long sales cycles. So there's many different stages along the way in terms of capturing revenue. So it becomes overall just more complicated to measure. For that reason, sales and marketing really need to be aligned in order to understand what works with regard to marketing and communications efforts that can help support the commercial outcome along the whole customer journey.

How can B2B marketers break through in a tough economic climate in order to win new customers?

A lot of B2B companies are really focusing on how to build a powerful brand that will help things like demand generation be more effective down the line. To that extent, I would say thought leadership is probably the biggest area where we are seeing clients have needs and challenges. What we found in our global study of over 3,000 B2B buyers across many different industries, is that thought leadership is a significant driver of the way that buyers think about companies that want to sell to them. Thought leadership actually has influence, not just in terms of capturing their awareness at the top of the funnel, but it actually informs the way that they think and behave throughout the entire customer journey, even including post-purchase. 

What role does thought leadership play in B2B marketing to atrract new customers and retain existing ones? 

B2B buyers, especially the senior level ones, are ultimately seeking insight that's going to help them do their jobs better. But there needs to be something substantive in the thought leadership that helps to change their thinking on something. And that's where providing knowledge plays such an important role because if you don't have the knowledge piece of it, you may have captured somebody's attention, but after that, that's not going to be helpful. Let's say you are a C-level executive at one of the top 50 global airlines who's grappling with how to integrate sustainable aviation fuel into the strategy of your company. There really needs to be some kind of substance.

Are there any companies out there that are really mastering thought leadership—and if so, what sets them apart?

There needs to be a willingness and a desire by B2B companies to truly understand what the needs are of the target audience. And that can be challenging for B2B companies to do because historically many of them have been very used to talking about features and benefits and telling a very company-centric story. And so now we're shifting into a need for an audience-centric story. And how do you tell an audience-centric story unless you really know a lot about the target audience?

For example, a major financial services company with a very significant credit card product came to us several years ago and said they were having a challenge with the construction industry. This mostly revolved around the fact that corporate cards in the construction industry are not used as much compared to other industries. So we did audience research and it came out to a fairly basic conclusion—they were under-penetrated in the construction industry and their client was not thinking about corporate card programmes. 

The solution was for the company to start talking about the things that their client cared about and the challenges they're dealing with every day. And that required a shift by that company to go from talking about the features and the benefits of a corporate card programme to instead talk about the top challenges facing the leaders of construction businesses today. Such as finding labour, and getting jobs done on time while dealing with supply chain disruption. What the financial services company found is that is you can sufficiently educate the client on their challenges and give them some kind of value, then you earn the opportunity and the permission to sell to them. 

So is a large part of thought leadership about building trust?

A huge part of the work that we do with B2B clients is to earn the trust of the companies and the people that they're trying to sell to. A lot of companies are publishing content, and they might label it as thought leadership, but it's not actually providing true value to the customer. And that's what separates the content that everybody is doing from the content that will truly break through with a potential customer. Because buyers can recognise when it's not just a thinly veiled sales message. When you give them actual knowledge, they're much more interested in learning more about how that company could potentially help them. 

Is there an element of creativity involved as well? In terms of knowing what story to tell and how to tell it?

Creativity is becoming a much bigger need for B2B companies. They are competing with so many different things for people's time and attention. At the end of the day, we all still want to enjoy what we're consuming. It's difficult to get somebody who's on their mobile phone to consume a big, long whitepaper. They want interesting content just like everybody else. So, it's got to be a compelling story, and it also needs to be relevant to the reader.

Are your clients prioritising thought leadership over traditional marketing materials? 

I would say that thought leadership has really risen to the top of the agenda for CMOs because it also has impacts on many other things that CEOs need to accomplish. One example would be employee engagement. It turns out that if you're doing effective thought leadership and part of that involves publishing through the executive level, it has dual benefits in that way. If this can really help us engage with customers, it can also help us engage with potential talent. And it can also reinforce to our existing employees the kind of values that we hold high within the organisation. For that reason, I would say that thought leadership has multiple benefits, and so it has quickly risen to the top of the agenda.

Besides thought leadership, are your clients using any other marketing tools to win customers?

It's definitely not the only tool in the arsenal. Things like predictive data have become a much bigger piece of B2B marketing. By predictive data, I mean data that can provide a signal around potential buying behaviour. And that's either within a specific set of companies or within a specific industry. The other one that I'll call out, which is very much emerging still, is influencer marketing. The role of influencers within the B2B world is something CMOs are certainly beginning to wonder about. They are keen to figure out an approach to influencer marketing that can be relevant.

Do you anticipate that influencer marketing will become a bigger part of the marketing mix for B2B?

The way that we are looking at influencer is really across a couple of different dimensions. Are there influencers who can provide reach and credibility? And are there influencers who can help create content in a way that maybe a brand can't. Those are the main attributes that clients are thinking about. Businesses are increasingly asking: where could we benefit from the help of an influencer? And is it helping them gain access to a particular type of audience?

It's kind of tough out there right now, but would you say there are some industries that are doing better than others within B2B?

We're seeing a bit of an uptick in B2B in a couple areas like industrials and the food and beverage world. Some people may think that food and beverage companies primarily sell to consumers. Except there are a lot of B2B companies and a lot of B2B buyers that are the intermediaries. Foe example, food makers sell to grocery stores. Food companies don't sell directly to the consumer. And so there's been a real increase in food makers seeking to understand how they can do a better job of competing for shelf space at the grocery store. So that's one example of why we're seeing more B2B marketing in the food and beverage world. I would say in energy, especially around renewables and sustainable energy–that's another area where B2B marketing is thriving.

Are there innovations that are transforming B2B marketing?

We're probably used to this as consumers. You buy a toothbrush on Amazon and then all of a sudden you start getting related ads for some of those products. Well, there's a similar dynamic happening within the B2B world, which is based on predictive data. 

It's based on content consumption habits. Such as, what are people at certain companies consuming? What are they downloading? What kinds of events are they attending? What are they searching for? If you begin to piece that together, then you can start proactively putting certain types of content into the feeds of those B2B buyers, even if they have never explicitly reached out to somebody. And then proactively be in front of what they would call potential hand-raisers before they're raising their hand.