“To stand out, B2B marketers need to create excitement—anticipation of both professional and personal rewards. How? By building emotional connections with their customers, which can drive important purchase outcomes like purchase intent and pricing power.”
- From Promotion to Emotion: Connecting B2B Customers to Brands, Google Consumer Insights
Emotive marketing is most often associated with B2C brands. However, if you thought emotional messaging was irrelevant in the B2B sphere, you’d be wrong.
Vendor switching and major purchases come with anxieties about failure and reputational risk. So for the humans inside organisations, emotional ROI matters just as much as financial returns, and emotions play a more significant role in B2B purchasing than many ‘rational’ business leaders would admit.
Research from Google looking at more than 3,000 B2B buyers found that purchasers are almost 50% more likely to buy a product or service when they see highly emotive rewards like the opportunity to climb the career ladder or gain kudos for their decision.1
Further studies show that while logical marketing works best for sales activation, emotive messaging is more effective at creating the long-term associations required for building mental availability and making buyers more receptive at the purchase point.
Logical, conversion-focused campaigns will always play a valuable role in converting new business. While you don’t need puppies to sell highly technical products and services, using emotive messaging to build your brand, excite, and create a lasting impression is essential to keeping new sales pipelines active, full and flowing.
There will be no ‘new normal’. The socio-economical landscape is changing so rapidly that the world could have lived through more ‘new normals’ and ‘unprecedented’ events in the time it has taken to write and produce this content.
However, the basic principles of emotive long-term and rational short-term sales and marketing working in synergy to engage the whole market will hold true.
While working with owner-managed and private equity-backed SMEs over the past two decades, we’ve lived with CEOs and sales teams through the challenges affecting every industry.
The Forge® team is uniquely positioned to understand how the right sales and marketing formula can help survive and thrive through the next five years, especially if you’re heading towards an exit.
Moving forward into the next five years and beyond, CEOs need support from a team that knows that the best marketing is really all about sales and is ready to campaign by your side until your marketing strategy is your business’s most significant single sales contributor.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/promotion-emotion-b2b/