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A 2019 study conducted by marketing and advertising effectiveness researchers Les Binet and Peter Field for LinkedIn’s B2B institute, titled 5 Principles of Growth in B2B Marketing, found that some of the most important rules for being effective in B2C Marketing also apply to B2B. It concluded that five practices in particular – routine for B2C marketers – are common even in the most effective B2B marketing case studies, while they are barely used by most B2B marketers.

In fact, a LinkedIn Marketing Solutions survey of marketers found that many B2B marketers are doing the opposite of following these rules – for example, focusing entirely on sales activation rather than balancing the focus on activation and branding; and more reliance on loyalty-based strategies than customer acquisition.

The five insights from Binet and Field for effective B2B marketing:

1. Invest in Share of Voice

There is a close correlation between growth in market share and investment in advertising, measured as share of voice. The relationship is very similar to that in B2C, which means that advertising works just as well in B2B as it does in B2C.

2. Balance mark and activation

The advertising investments should be weighed between long-term brand building and short-term sales activation (e.g. lead generation). Both must be invested in, but B2B seems to require more activation than B2C, with an optimum of around 45% brand, 55% activation.

3. Expand your customer base

In general, there are two ways a brand can grow – either by attracting more customers (increasing market penetration) or by selling more to existing customers (increasing loyalty). Some believe that loyalty is the more lucrative route because it is expensive to acquire new customers. In B2C, the overwhelming weight of empirical evidence tells us otherwise. Decades of research by the Ehrenberg Bass Institute show that brands grow primarily through the acquisition of new customers. That way, they always get that little bit more business with existing customers, and long-range advertising campaigns reassure existing customers that they made a smart, popular, and safe choice. Loyalty is never the most important growth engine and only increases with penetration. Even with our limited number of B2B cases, customer acquisition strategies are typically much more effective than loyalty strategies, and these reach strategies (which talk to customers and non-customers together) are usually the most effective of all.

4. Maximize mental availability

Campaigns that build more “mental availability” tend to be more effective. Mental availability is the extent to which the brand easily comes to mind in buying situations, triggered by a combination of high conspicuity and strong associations with the category.

5. Use emotions

Emotional campaigns (those that try to make prospects feel more positive about the brand) are more effective in the long run than rational campaigns (those that try to communicate information). According to the IPA database, B2B campaigns based on emotions are up to seven times more effective than those that don’t. The emotional approach required will be very different in B2B and B2C, but the principle applies to both.

Because emotional campaigns are better suited for brand building. However, rational campaigns are better for short-term sales activation, so a balanced campaign includes both.

B2B and B2C marketing: more similar than you thought?

Were Binet and Field surprised at how closely their results match the effectiveness in B2C? Binet shared his thoughts with me:

Well, there was a comparatively limited sample of data in relation to the number of papers we looked at, but yeah, we were surprised. One of the most surprising discoveries was the share of voice. In B2C, there has always been a stable relationship between share of voice and market share growth. We could see the exact same relationship in the B2B data, and it was highly statistically significant.

A few other things came out that we believe B2B marketers are looking for an advantage that they can capture and leverage: emotional versus rational, penetration versus loyalty, and so on. It was surprising that some of the really important relationships in marketing seem to be the same in B2B and B2C.

Binet and Field didn’t have much time to fully gauge the response from B2B marketers before closing the world of events to protect against the spread of Covid-19.

They did speak to some live audiences, however, and felt that their work had met with a warm, if somewhat mixed, response. As Binet comments:

The share of voice stuff isn’t something people talk about in B2B or a metric they use a lot. And I suspect that focusing on market penetration as opposed to striving for greater loyalty goes against the strategic thinking of B2B marketers. It is a belief for many in the B2B arena that growth comes from getting more business with existing customers.

Which leads us to a question for you: How is your B2B brand reacting to closing the gap?

Contribution to Branding Strategy Insider by: Mark Choueke, excerpt from his book Boring2Brave: The ‘courage as strategy’ that is changing B2B marketing.

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