Spam has always been a volume game: if you send out enough emails, the reasoning goes, enough people will make a purchase for it to be an economical form of marketing. That might make sense for people selling diet pills or soliciting personal injury claims, but it’s a very different question when it comes to B2B marketing.
Most serious marketers would claim that they don’t engage in spamming potential customers, yet many continue to send vast volumes of unsolicited email – for example, after someone downloads a piece of content such as a whitepaper.
Targeting the right people
Not only is this bad for the business’s reputation (and also their email deliverability) – but it’s also pretty pointless. First, there’s the fact that individuals very rarely make purchasing decisions on their own, with the average buying team can be made up from anywhere between three to ten people. Secondly, who’s ever overhead a conversation that started: “Hey Bob, I had a really interesting bit of spam in my inbox this morning…”?
Quite.
To market effectively, you need to reach multiple people with engaging content. It’s easy to see how emails to individuals aren’t going to lead to meaningful sales, or long-term trust and collaboration between vendor and customer. What’s needed is an understanding of what engages people, and how they make purchasing decisions.
If buying teams are bigger, then the answer is to try to reach multiple people within a company, and target them with relevant, engaging content that’s easy to share across devices.
Content choices
We shouldn’t be prescriptive about what form that content should take – each business and every audience is different, after all – but most businesses recognise that video is a vital part of the B2B marketing mix. A short, punchy, thought-provoking piece of video content is much more likely to be remembered, shared, and discussed than any other type of marketing collateral.
It’s a great way to introduce a brand and its messaging – far better, in most cases, than a speculative email that starts: “We notice that you downloaded our whitepaper….”
It’s not enough, however, simply to “do” a video and hope for the best. The point here is to understand the buyer journey, using that venerable but still-relevant AIDA methodology: attention, interest, desire, action. Except in this case, you’re not influencing thousands of individuals, but rather a handful of highly-targeted decision makers.
So marketers need to think about questions of messaging, video production, context, targeting, and how easy it is to share content across a variety of screens and devices. After all, video isn’t the cheapest option, but it has the potential to be the most engaging asset you have. It makes sense to get it right.
Telling a story
One final thing: Don’t fall into the trap of thinking “We’ve got to do video because that’s what our competitors are doing.” Think instead of how you can use video to tell a story – one that engages an audience and which begs to be shared and discussed.
Very likely, it’ll be one of the best decisions you’ve made, and your message will glitter like a diamond in the slough of spam.
By James Foulkes, director & co-founder of Kingpin
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