I vividly remember “Charlie Bit My Finger” as my foray into the internet, but I’ve been sitting at my desk for the past 10 minutes struggling to pinpoint one recent viral video in particular. However, a sample size of one is never accurate, so I posed the question to various colleagues to circumvent the obvious bias. With the exception of our Creative Director announcing she’s not on “TikTak,” everyone I asked couldn’t pinpoint a single asset either.

Even with all the options floating through our heads, not one came from a B2B brand, which brings us to the question at hand: Can B2B go viral, especially in the face of content overload? The answer is yes — but it’s difficult.

“B2B can go viral because we have the technology and the research that helps us understand our customers,” said Jen Spencer, President of inbound marketing agency SmartBug Media. “It's just a matter of the creativity and it’s on us as marketers to unleash that creativity.”

As someone who’s spent the past year trying to get her dog to go viral on Instagram and TikTok, I know it’s not easy — and it’s not something that can be forced, either, as it’s a matter of chance. When gymnast McKayla Maroney qualified for the 2012 Olympics in London, she never expected to become a meme — her “not impressed” face was the result of a perfectly timed picture that captured a brief emotion and sent Maroney into virality. She even snagged a picture with former President Barack Obama recreating the look.

While it's clear that you can’t manufacture virality, you can do what B2B does best: Take an analytical look at successful campaigns and create relevant assets that break the mold and resonate with customers. As 62% of marketers rely more on content to research and make B2B purchase decisions than they did last year and 80% of B2B buyers indicated that a vendor’s content had a positive, significant impact on their buying decisions, it’s time B2B modifies its content strategies to stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace — and potentially goes viral in the process.

Why B2B Struggles To Break Out Of The Box

Though B2B and B2C marketing has overlapping elements, the key difference is in budget and targeting. B2B marketers have sales teams that sell their products, whereas B2C operates without the middleman and, consequently, more budget for creative opportunities. Additionally, B2B tends to focus on selling their products and forget another human is consuming their content.

“When you think about the most viral piece of content you’ve seen, regardless of where it comes from, it makes you feel something,” explained Spencer. “People make emotional decisions on the B2C side down to where a product is placed on a shelf — there’s data informing why products are placed where they are. On the B2B side, there’s just more of a feeling about needing the company to see our product or have a demo and talk to someone to explain things, and we often forget there’s a human on the other side.”

B2B’s penchant for analytics, while helpful, also serves as a hinderance in many circumstances. Spencer continued that oftentimes brand marketing is confused with demand gen marketing, even though they have distinctly separate purposes. It’s not just analytics and targeting that’s holding marketers back, though — formality is also engrained in the B2B mindset.

“There’s a measurement problem where B2B is concerned with connecting initiatives to pipeline or determining how they’ll result in revenue,” said Taylor Harruff, Sr. Director of Brand Marketing at ABM platform Terminus. “Making the case for fun stuff is hard in a B2B setting because everything is so over-measured and over-indexed on pipeline and revenue. It’s hard to go up to a CMO and say, ‘I need to start a TV station, but I’m unsure if it’s going to contribute to revenue or pipeline; it will just help our brand.’”

Harruff pointed to Terminus’ “Break Sh!t” event and the launch of Terminus TV as two instances where her colleagues had to approach their C-suite and attempt to sell them on a campaign that they couldn’t guarantee would positively impact the company’s bottom line. However, Terminus’ executives had faith in its employees, the power of streaming services and "Break Sh!t's" saxaphone-playing Sasquatch and ultimately green-lit the initiatives to impressive success — “Break Sh!t” saw 2,525 sign ups, a live attendance rate of 1,003 and, as of May 2021, another 1,024 people access the event on-demand.

Or take Duolingo, for example. The internet of the early 2010’s took a seemingly innocent owl mascot that reminded users to take their language lesson into a mischievous, borderline sinister, figure. Though that image was definitely not what Duolingo intended, the company’s now leaning into the meme across its social media channels and racking up millions of views each time it does so.

Changing The B2B Mindset

It’s clear that B2B needs to shift its thinking and embrace the more emotional side of marketing. B2B’s hesitancy to experiment with different campaign formats and strategies likely stems from the seriousness that’s typically associated with the industry.

“A lot of people think they have to put so much pressure into, ‘Oh, it’s B2B, we have to be super traditional,’ or, ‘We need to be more enterprise-focused; they don’t want to hear from us in a fun way,’” said Harruff. “That’s not true, because B2B buyers are still consumers at the end of the day. We’re seeing an interesting shift where more brands have a fun tone and voice, because generally, B2B buying committees are attracted to a brand they can relate to.”

In fact, 55% of buyers want content that tells a strong story that resonates with buying committees. However, when venturing outside the B2B norms, brands should proceed carefully as there are two types of virality: Good and bad — and it’s easy to fall into the latter category.

“Companies have this mindset that they have to get attention, but it’s not worth the efforts and can harm your brand if it’s the wrong type of attention,” said Harruff. “Sending out a silly tweet jumping on a trend is fine, but people will see right through you if you try to make a full-blown campaign that has nothing to do with your business just to play into something. I remember earlier in the year, the Las Vegas Raiders posted ‘I can breathe’ after Derek Chauvin was found guilty, but it was in such poor taste and received a ton of backlash.”

Going, Going, Viral!

While there’s no recipe for virality and it’s a matter of luck more than anything, there is a cheat code of sorts — research. Organizations need to understand what buying committees are looking for and identify prospects’ and buyers’ content preferences when putting campaigns together. According to DGR’s “2021 Content Preferences Survey,” buyers look for:

• Short-form, easy-to-consume content;
• Content that’s light on sales messaging and heavy on product value;
• A balance of imagery and copy; and
• Relevant/shareable links that allow for immediate sharing across social channels.

Sharing across social channels is key in both virality and content marketing in general, as it guarantees you’ll receive the most eyes on your content and generate interest. However, multichannel campaigns should tread carefully as it’s easy to drop content in an inappropriate channel.

“You have to know your customer and consider the channel,” Spencer said. “Let’s say you want to promote a video — you have to identify where your buyers are and where you want to be seen. If you know a target spends a lot of time on Instagram, then you should make sure your content is consumable on Instagram. A big piece of going viral means understand the kind of content that performs best on particular platforms.”

Going viral is never planned, and it’s not something marketers can force. Rather, it’s the result of compelling, relevant content that strikes a chord with humans.

“When something goes viral, it means someone just had the right message reach the right group of people at the right time, which is what marketers should always strive for,” said Spencer. “Best case scenario? You go viral. Worst case scenario? You’re still driving brand visibility and reaching targets with relevant information.”

Brightcove CorpTV, which will be housed in the PLAY TV app, seeks to forge stronger connections between organizations and their customers, partners and employees over any device — including connected TVs — by streaming a variety of branded stories, shows, case studies, demos, training content and more. Companies can also sell ad time, sponsorships and premium content on their CorpTV channels and consolidate their video repositories, measure viewership watch time and continuously engage their audiences.

The release of Brightcove CorpTV falls in line with the emerging B2B streaming trend, with companies providing hyper-personalized, on-demand video experiences to their buyers in a comfortable and familiar way.

“Companies for the first time have an opportunity to cut through the noise, transcend static websites and enthrall the people they want to connect with,” said Jennifer Griffin Smith, CMO of Brightcove, in a statement. “The secret is thinking like a media company and engaging audiences, driving greater brand awareness and creating new revenue streams and brand loyalty. To see Brightcove CorpTV in action, check out the Brightcove PLAY TV app, Brightcove’s very own Brightcove CorpTV channel.”

This is where personalization comes in, but I don’t mean merging text fields or including the name of a buyer’s company in the email you send them; I mean real personalization, which boils down to relevance. To reach your target audience with tailored content, you need a program that prioritizes relevance, creates an exceptional experience and boosts sales and marketing alignment. There are a few strategies that help check all these boxes, but instead of taking my word for it, I want to share the story of a real marketer who crushed it in these areas.

Kristin Kolb is the Senior Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Manager at Matillion, which offers a cloud-based extract, transform and load (ETL) tool to enterprise customers. Kolb and her team wanted a better way to target accounts and support sales, so they launched an ABM pilot with personalized content marketing as the centerpiece. Here are a few of the strategies they used (to great effect) and how you can do the same to strengthen your own buyer reach.

Provide Pressure-Free Content That Spans Departments

Marketers know the benefit of using gated content to capture leads and ultimately convert customers, but there can be a bit of fatigue on the buyer’s end about this, stemming from having to fill out multiple webforms to view the content they want. Some will even abandon ship and give up on the product or company they were researching because they don’t want to hand over their details just yet. So, Matillion wanted to do things differently — and it worked like a charm.

To start, the company knew it wanted to use its content holistically across all departments, not just sales and marketing. Kolb spearheaded a multichannel campaign that included input from the company’s different departments and focused on delivering a top-notch experience to buyers. The program began with a hands-on event in a small, intimate setting, where invitees could demo the product, start a free trial and play with sample data. Then, the organization launched ads, emails and personalized outreach, and concluded the campaign with a customer webinar.

All the content was ungated, and Matillion tracked unique visitors, return visitors and who was viewing and consuming what. That information was then passed over to the sales team so they could have conversations with their prospects and know who to pursue. Leaving the content accessible was an intentional choice, a way for potential buyers to sit back, relax and enjoy the personalized content whether they took the next step or not. No pressure or pain, all gain. And it worked.

Internally, Matillion’s sales development reps (SDR) and account executives (AE) met weekly to make sure that they were tracking the right accounts and capitalizing on intent signals. Marketing put together nurture emails and outreach templates the sales team could use to piggyback off the value of the campaign and leverage to book with target accounts.

The two teams also shared their efforts with the rest of the company, ensuring all departments understood what content was being created, the goals of the campaign and the role they could play in achieving them.

Make Your Content Valuable & Relevant

To help build relevant content, Matillion relied on Snowflake, a complementary system that enables companies to build data-intensive applications without operational burden. One of the reasons for this initiative’s success was Kolb and her Matillion team’s understanding the importance of relevance in personalization.

Kolb’s team identified target accounts that already used Snowflake, and then shaped every piece of content to demonstrate how Matillion and Snowflake work together. The content experience was highly personalized, and only delivered to folks who would actually find it relevant.

The main takeaway you can embrace in your own content is to focus on using it to deliver value. If the reader/viewer doesn’t buy from you after consuming your content, will they have learned something? Will they have enjoyed reading your content? If not, something is off. Make sure your content itself is valuable and, most importantly of all, make sure it’s relevant. Speak to the target’s pain points and goals at their specific stage of the buyer journey. You can’t go wrong with personalizing in this way, but everything can go wrong if you don’t.

Personalize At Scale

Finally, what made Matillion’s effort such a smash hit was the team’s ability to deliver the personalized content at scale. They didn’t have to spend all this time and money creating content for just one account or one buyer; they could make it just as personalized for an entire group of target accounts.

“For the first time, Uberflip enabled us to personalize our ABM efforts at scale,” said Kolb. “Our ABM Uberflip experience for this campaign gave our sales team a high-value asset to support their outbound prospecting efforts to accounts showing the right signals of intent, and in return they received some of the best response rates resulting in a higher number of meetings booked.”

Case in point: Matillion saw 98% of accounts touched and 33 opportunities influenced by this campaign (which shakes out to over $1.1 million in pipeline). The sales team had a higher open rate and response rate from their outreach and a higher number of meetings booked than with previous campaigns, and their content destination (created using Uberflip) saw 7,928 page visits from target accounts (3,598 new visitors and 284 return visitors).

If you’re looking to improve your buyer reach and see similar results, these three strategies are key. Consider how you can provide relevant, valuable content to your target buyers in a pressure-free way. Make sure your marketing team is collaborating with your sales team, and that the rest of the organization can use and learn from the assets you create. Finally, plan to deliver such a personalized content experience at scale. Do these three things, and you will be well on your way to the kind of impact that Matillion achieved — it’s all but guaranteed. 

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Randy Frisch is the CMO and Co-Founder at Uberflip, a content experience platform that empowers marketers to create content experiences at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Randy is also the host of “The Marketer's Journey” podcast, was named one of the Top 50 Fearless Marketers in the world by Marketo and is the best-selling author of “F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience” (yeah, he swears sometimes).

Sales Assist aims to help business development reps and account executives pull in relevant content by topic, buying stage, use case and more, allowing them to share content directly from their platforms for increased engagement. The solution also sends reps notifications when the prospect engages with content, enabling them to follow up and personalize the buying experience in real-time.

Additional capabilities include:

• The ability to create content from Google Docs, PowerPoint and PDFs and share them with prospects from within the platform;
• Locking the content for both the rep and the prospect via password authentication for secure buying experiences; and
• Brand-approved templates to engage prospects within a persona, industry, etc.

“Sales teams move a mile a minute and oftentimes don’t have the ability to know which content is approved, let alone which content would provide the most personalized experience,” said Yoav Schwartz, Co-founder and CEO of Uberflip, in a statement. “Uberflip’s Sales Assist makes it seamless for sales reps to send prospects collateral that’s digitally packaged, engaging and — most importantly — delivers exactly what the buyer needs.”

The Seismic Storytelling Platform is designed for personalized content creation, allowing go-to-market teams to create the most effective content. Sales teams will also be able to deliver content to targeted businesses more easily throughout the sales cycle.

The updated features will include:

• On-the-fly presentation assembly that is designed for enhanced content personalization, helping sales teams assemble multiple content pieces under a unified message;
• A data-driven approach that aims to improve a sales team’s ability to discover impactful content, foster new content and simplify content for individual understanding; and
• A Seismic Pages feature that will allow marketers to create and activate playbooks and content for sales engagement and consumption faster.

“Sales and marketing teams have recently shifted to working almost exclusively from home,” said Doug Winter, CEO and Co-founder of Seismic, in a statement. “It’s also become more important than ever for marketers and enablers to quickly develop and deploy updated content to field teams. Seismic excels at enabling go-to-market teams to move rapidly and effectively in changing environments. Given this strength, we’re seeing accelerating usage of the Seismic Storytelling Platform by organizations of all sizes.”

Seismic will soft launch these enhanced capabilities for its platform in late Spring 2020.  

FEATURES/FUNCTIONALITY

The hyper-customization service aims to provide:

• Personalized, wax-sealed messages with every order;
• Hyper-customization at scale: send one to 500+ personalized gifts/mailers at a time;
• The ability to ship gifts right to your location or recipients’ doorsteps;
• Hosting for internal products on Craftom platform and warehouses;
• 24 to 48-hour turnaround on all single-unit orders (1-2 weeks for bulk orders);
• Monthly reports and monitoring, with management safeguards available; and
• CRM tracking and recording with Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics plugins.

TARGETED USERS

Account-based marketers, demand generation marketers, business development and sales executives at startup and mid-market companies who see the value in integrated, multichannel outbound and are seeking a tactile sending platform.

COMPATIBILITY

The Craftom.io platform offers plugins to Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics.

The platform can create new contacts and update existing contacts in the CRM. This also includes CRM Integration and custom platform build-out capabilities

DELIVERY/PRICING MODELS

A $20,000 minimum gift/mailer purchase with 10- & 25-unit minimums on most products. The pricing on most products is determined via volume-based pricing.

This comes with 365 days for fulfillment, the right to refill products at any time and a minimum $15,000 annual re-up.

COMPETITIVE POSITIONING

Craftom.io specializes in the hyper-customization gifts, mailings and packaging can be customized with different logos, texts and photographs – whether sending one or 1,000 units at a time.

This provides startup and mid-market brands with a “big brand feel,” making it easy to send hyper-customized, highly unique, high-quality gifts and mailers on-demand.

CONTACT

Craftom.io
635 Atando Ave.
Charlotte, NC 28206
(704) 324-9046

FEATURES/FUNCTIONALITY:

ON24 Target’s media library, page builder and content intelligence tools make up a back-end that is designed to enable marketers to create an outbound content experience from their existing webinars and content. The interface is designed for any user to drag and drop content and embed CTAs in a pre-set or customizable layout.

On the front-end, ON24 Target’s registration capability aims to give audiences an ungated environment to consume content. On the back-end, all audience behavior is captured, helping marketers identify the most-engaged accounts and contacts so that their sales team can prioritize leads in real-time. This helps users gain a holistic understanding of their content performance so they can optimize their best-performing campaigns.

TARGETED USERS:

ON24 Target is designed to be used by any marketer looking to customize engagement with prospects or customers. This includes ABM teams, field marketers, regional marketers and customer engagement teams.

COMPATIBILITY:

ON24 Target integrates with marketing automation platforms and CRM systems, including Marketo, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and more. By integrating insights from ON24 Target with their tech stack, marketers are positioned to engage leads with content then leverage interest data to trigger actions across teams.

DELIVERY/PRICING MODELS:

ON24 Target is available through the ON24 Platform that enables live, always-on and personalized digital experiences. It may also be purchased as a stand-alone solution. Licenses include access to ON24’s media manager, enabling storage and organization of content.

CURRENT CLIENTS/USERS:

Customers like Zendesk, NVIDIA, ServiceNow, Qlik, Erie Insurance, Aurea and more are using ON24 Target to increase lead generation and customer engagement for their businesses.

COMPETITIVE POSITIONING:

Marketers are in need of a tool that allows them to create personalized content experiences for their target audiences that will drive engagement, speed up buyer journeys and impact program and campaign results. ON24 Target is designed to enable marketers to build and publish personalized, engaging content experiences from a single system.

CONTACT INFO:

ON24

1-415-369-8000

While I could go on and on about the benefits of personalized marketing, what’s more important is emphasizing the “how.” We all know personalization is important and that’s precisely the problem. Everyone — including your competitors — is going to be personalizing their marketing in 2018 and beyond. So, here are two ways to stand out and make your personalization strategies different.

Get Personal With Video

New developments in video are allowing B2B marketers to take their content to new heights. With ABM on the rise, marketers are challenged with figuring out what will grab their target accounts’ attention. Personalizing videos with a target’s name and interests is possible, and in turn, can generate more engagement from the recipient.

“We find time and time again that people are more likely to respond to video content because it’s more engaging, it’s more personal, it’s more interactive and it puts a human face on your brand,” said Tyler Lessard, VP of Marketing at Vidyard.

Lessard presented an awesome session during Demand Gen Report’s Buyer Insights & Intelligence Webinar Series (#bii18), titled: “Using Personalized Video To Get More Attention And Gain More Insights On Key Audiences,” where he shared the best ways to incorporate video into your ABM strategy and across marketing programs.

Get Smarter With Interactive Content

While static content — such as PDF-based white papers and E-books — still has a place in the content marketing mix, interactive content (a.k.a smart content) enables organizations to not only create unique experiences for buyers, but also gain new insights into their needs. Static content is a one-sided conversation, while interactive content encourages engagement. This two-sided conversation positions marketers to learn from the buyer and then create even more relevant and personalized experiences for them.

“When we leverage content to solicit feedback, we, in turn, gain insights into our buyers,” said Jessica Baum, VP of Marketing at Content4Demand. “With these insights, we can adjust our messaging, topics and draw strong alignment between our products and our buyers. Smart content can utilize interactive questions and assessments to segment our target audience, enabling us to provide relevant follow-up content based on industry, job function and more. It also can enable us to embed content rabbit holes that enable our audience to go down a defined path to continue across multiple content pieces without ever leaving the first page.”

Smart content was a key theme during Content4Demand’s webcast at #bii18, titled: “Developing Smart Content: How Interactive Content Helps Identify Buyer Pain Points & Paths For Continuing The Conversation.” Baum and her colleague Dana Harder discussed tips and best practices for developing smart content that encourages interactivity and user engagement, ways to best leverage personalization in the overall content equation and much more.

The Buyer Insights & Intelligence Series is now available on demand. See the full agenda here.

The Challenge

Rollworks’ marketing and sales teams frequently produced varying numbers. Cross recalled one conversation in 2016, where the VP of Marketing said the marketing team had driven nearly 20,000 leads, while the VP of Sales said his team had not seen a single lead.

The company needed to define a common path to acquisition and was able to align the numbers. Conversion rates for outbound opportunities with a marketing touch (7%) more than doubled the conversion rate for outbound opportunities with no marketing touch (3%). RollWorks therefore needed to develop new campaign strategies to boost the newly-discovered numbers.

The Solution

To address the issue, RollWorks developed an “outbound for all” campaign in early 2017, which included delivering personalized advertisements and direct mail to all outbound opportunities.

The company provided different advertisements for different stages of the buyer journey. It also developed direct mail kits to correspond with the four main stages of the buyer journey: door-opener kit, post-meeting kit, over-the-line kit and a welcome kit.

The Result

The personalized advertisements and direct mail packages resulted in higher conversions and lower costs. For example, the cost per acquisition for personalized ads was 42% less than that of generic advertisements.

To get the complete details on RollWorks’ campaign, check out the webcast live on May 24 at 2PM ET. Cross will share the success story of how RollWorks synced messaging with where prospects were in the sales funnel, the four components of the campaign, how to market to customers beyond the onboarding process and much more.

Following suit in the “Web 2.0 craze,” video is proving successful in supplementing a direct marketing campaign by offering prospects the opportunity to engage at their leisure, providing sensitivity to busy prospects.

“With the use of video, a solid connection can be made between the presenter and end-user and personalizes the communication while creating interaction,” says Ben Chodor, President of media software provider Stream57. “With video exposure, you are giving clients the opportunity to associate a name and a face with your company and creating a personal relationship.”

Stream57 incorporates the use of video into email through its VideoMail application. The company reports that through the viral spread of video invitations, event reminders and company updates,” the company’s messages reaches more end-users. The Stream57 VideoMails are configured to generate reports based on user clicks and interaction, include time spent viewing the message as well as tracking any clicks made to other links from the message landing page.

Metrics to Move With
“Video analytics are some of the most powerful on the Internet today, exposing metrics previously unavailable to marketers in the past,” says Kristopher Drey, Founder of online video platform comparison engine VidCompare. “Not only do markers know how many times a video has been viewed or how many times it’s been shared, but also by whom it’s been viewed and where it was shared,” he says. “We also know how long a video has been viewed by a particular viewer, where they stopped or paused, and which part of the video was viewed over and over again… telling marketers not only how long their videos should be or where they should place the most engaging content, but also when to expose the viewer to an ad.”

Drey says geotargeting is becoming more powerful within video, which can help expose where videos are being viewed and shared, and how successful or popular they are in certain countries, states or cities. “This also allows marketers to drive specific content to meaningful places, as well as target unique users with relevant content and ads,” he says.

Key Components of Effective Video
Education is an integral element of video. Giving prospects the information they need to make decisions is a critical operation, and can make or break the deal.

VidCompare’s Drey says shorter video content is far more effective. “Getting your message across in a clear and concise manner, then driving viewers to a call to action such as a special offer link on the end screen.”

Determining an area of interest can help marketers design relevant content likely to evoke a positive prospect response, based on their characteristics and business objectives.

“You need to know the person, their company, the location, their products, their competitors, their hopes, their fears, their aspirations, their dreads,” says Ian Cameron, CTO, Real Time Content (see sidebar case study). “Each sales video reflects the best practice across every one of their sales team, and works 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” says Cameron. “It's really a condensed version of the expertise of all of the telephone sales people turned into an online interaction.”

Cameron says one of video’s greatest benefits is the opportunity for prospects to virtually connect with a sales presenter, offering real demonstrations and product video clips. “Because the Web site knows the profile of the visitor, the content is always relevant. Visitors are greeted personally, at a time that suits them. They can set their own pace, pause and review at any time.”