Brand – so hot right now
Everyone’s talking about the ever growing importance of brand. But why?
Once again, brand is the order of the day in B2B media land. Everyone’s talking about the growing importance of brand. It was even identified as one of the top trends in the industry by Joel Harrison of B2B Marketing at our recent Fox Agency Festival of Creating Opportunity. But why? Our Head of Media & Performance, Conor Bant, is here to answer that question.
It’s hardly the case that brand is new, or there’s been a miraculous discovery of its value. All the impact of brand on demand performance are well versed and featured in many a strategy doc (including my own) for some time. So… why?
Because, (in B2B) we can
With the increasing volume and quality of data sets driven via the growth of programmatic media buying, we have greater precision than ever in B2B media. Whilst the value of brand advertising to your TAM (total addressable market) has its value, it’s spreading yourself thin and not likely to yield results. Now that you can actually guarantee awareness spend is hitting the accounts you want, it becomes a much more attractive and valuable play.
And that’s all of us
Advertisers are now equipped to deliver brand campaigns both technically and commercially. Gone are the days of multi-million budgets required for high impact, ATL media buys, or even brand being isolated to ad platforms such as LinkedIn and Meta. The increased sophistication of programmatic buying has reduced the barrier to entry for audio and Connected TV advertising. Such platforms are increasingly going no-license fee and charging for media only too, which further encourages testing. And with the targeting available, these memorable, engaging formats are being delivered to the right people only. Less wastage, more adoption.
And its measurable
So, you financially can afford to deliver B2B brand media – great! But what value does it add if you don’t know the impact? View through conversions, a variety of attribution analytics models and account measurement platforms such as 6Sense and Demandbase are all able to show the impact of brand on your KPIs, and ultimately demand performance.
Lead gen fatigue
Whilst it feels like a lifetime ago, we’re still only a few years out of the pandemic. The big shift towards digital demand gen and huge syndication budgets lasted some time, and it feels as if brand is now fighting back. I’m increasingly hearing of MQL rates dropping, which in part could be due to decision makers becoming frustrated by single touch, linear lead gen campaigns. We’re having to do more to progress leads and achieve those uplifts from brand to demand we all talk about. The onset of content syndication specialists expanding their offering to connected display programs is testament to that.
Which leads us on to modern tech buying trends
Again, many a strategy deck talk to this point. Increase in self-service. Clients going right down the decision-making process until direct engagement. Three vendor short list. Lower funnel progression engines are still vital, but there’s so much whitespace of opportunity to influence buyers before they become a ‘lead’. If you’re only investing once they raise their hand, you’re probably already out of the race.
We’ve got to mention AI, right?
500+ words and no AI reference?! But this is perhaps the most fundamental. The way people are gathering information is changing, and this has a big impact on marketing engines. Previously people may search for a given topic and a tech vendor can gain prominence by targeting upper funnel, research related keywords, both through paid and organic.
Now however, Gemini overviews are taking over and as a result, we’re seeing a surge in no-click behavior. This means no traffic, but also no data capture, cutting retargeting programs at the knee. Not only is it depowering the retargeting engine, it’s causing a visibility shift. We’ve moved from a click through to a website that displays all of your core value propositions, to a tiny reference in the sources, so your brand may struggle to get prominence and limited credit for the benefit delivered to the user in the LLM.
The point around all of this being, increasingly advertisers will have to activate a go-to motion. It’s becoming harder to be found, so you need to be present, visible and drive that inbound engagement.