The Problem With B2B Marketing

Emma Clarke, founder of community-building consultancy CUSP, explores the challenges of building effective B2B communities. Drawing on her experience working with brands like Soho House, Soho Works and 180 Studios, Emma explains why community building is essential for fostering authentic customer connections, but also outlines why many B2B brands struggle to implement it. She discusses the shift from top-down marketing to customer-led engagement, and offers strategies for overcoming internal resistance, maintaining engagement, and measuring success.

Key talking points:

The Shift to Authenticity: People crave genuine connections, especially post-COVID, and B2B communities can meet this need.

Top-Down vs. Community-Led: The outdated model of brand-controlled messaging versus the benefits of empowering customers to connect with each other.

Why community strategy often isn’t prioritised in B2B marketing and how to make the business case for it.

The difficulty of sustaining customer participation, and how to build communities that offer real value without feeling like an obligation.

The importance of internal champions and a dedicated community lead to drive engagement and sustain momentum.

How to assess the success of a community, and why “fuzzy” metrics like testimonials matter.

Links and references:

Emma Clarke

Soho Works: Community-driven workspaces 

Crafty Counsel: An example of a successful UK-based B2B community

Oliver Wyman Forum: Another firm that excels in community-building for business leaders

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Nick Andrews, Partner and Head of Commercial Marketing at Knight Frank, delves into what he calls the "B2B Blandemic"—a term borrowed from designer Thomas Heatherwick to describe the wave of uninspired, forgettable content in B2B marketing. 

Drawing from his experience, Nick breaks down why so much B2B messaging fails to resonate and outlines actionable strategies to stand out without resorting to gimmicks. He also explores the implications of over-investing in performance marketing at the expense of brand building, and the importance of balancing short-term gains with long-term value creation.

Key talking points:

• The B2B Blandemic: The overwhelming prevalence of generic, forgettable content in B2B spaces and the need to move beyond this trend.
• Standing Out Without the 'Jazz Hands': Why B2B brands struggle to differentiate and how to create authentic, memorable messaging.
• The Real Cost of Blandness: How dull content results in significantly higher media spend to achieve the same level of cut-through as more creative, engaging campaigns.
• The 80% Engagement Problem: A staggering 80% of B2B content fails to engage, with ads seeing a similarly high rate of neutral responses.
• Performance Marketing vs. Brand Building: The risk of over-investing in performance marketing and neglecting brand-building efforts, and why this imbalance can lead to long-term consequences.
• The 95/5 Rule: Why 95% of your target audience isn’t ready to buy and the dangers of focusing exclusively on the small percentage that is.
• Customer Orientation: The importance of shifting from a product- or sales-oriented mindset to one that prioritises customer needs and market insights

Knight Frank

Peter Weinber and John Lombardo - The Principles of B2B Marketing 

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Lucy Ferguson, Content and AI Marketer, and former Head of B2B Content at Google, discusses the problem with Thought Leadership. Focusing on the common mistakes she has seen over the course of her career across media owner, agency and platform roles, we discuss how and why B2B brands are turning clients and potential customers off with content that's more 'inside-out' than outside in. Lucy shares insights on how to develop the content your customer needs and the huge ROI potential from taking distribution seriously, including a practical view on how AI can make this better (or worse) depending on the approach you choose. 

Key talking points:

• How Google’s lens of ‘Helpfulness’ shapes the content the business creates and “helps the user to do their job better”
• How to plan thought leadership content effectively when 95% of your audience isn’t ready to buy
• The importance of moving on from a campaign / “one and done’ mindset to creatie once, using everywhere.
• The case for long term investment in brand platforms and owned IP to grow ‘mental availability’

Internal vs. External Influencers: Deciding who to partner with externally and how to “help the voices inside the organisation become more vocal."

Authenticity Matters: The importance of asking "Is this the best use of your brilliance?" and finding ways to channel what individuals are genuinely passionate and knowledgeable about for creating effective expert content

Generative AI in Content Marketing: Avoiding the risk of anodyne content: "The problem... is using AI in a way that just churns anodyne content... it wasn't written with love… and anything that moves us away from really understanding our audience, really helping people, and sharing new knowledge is going to be a problem." But harnessing the possibilities; "use it as a hypothesis as a test, alongside existing content and compare how it works”

Links and references:

• Google Firestarters
• Gartner on the Rise of Buying Committees
• 2024 Edelman-Linkedin Thought Leadership Impact Report

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Welcome to the very first episode of The Problem with B2B Marketing! We talked to Matthew Gale, Director of Brand & Creative Content at Deloitte and architect of The Green Room, one of the most successful podcasts from a brand, about the problem with B2B podcasts...

From getting started and working out exactly who you are for, to working hard to earn your audiences’ time and attention, what makes for effective distribution and how you define the ROI for the business, Matt shares his experience, the good and the bad, common pitfalls, and how to deal with them.

Key talking points:

• Matt didn’t set out to make a podcast, but having discovered that Deloitte’s insight reports were amongst the lowest performing content, they looked for other formats as a way to share expertise and cut through.
• The podcast format has inspired a new approach; they don’t simply talk about Deloitte’s new automation report but instead explore topics like “What will be the last job on Earth?”
• Unexpected benefits: The Green Room format, topics and talent have all helped build a greater understanding of the business and culture at Deloitte, benefitting the employer brand. 
• Hear about Deloitte’s ‘7 Principles’ for creating great content, and how they act as ‘guidelines, not rules; help experts across the business to create content for niche audiences that ‘respects busy with excellence,’ and the benefits of ‘debunking best practice.’ 

Links and references:

• The Green Room podcast from Deloitte
• The Green Room special series / Olympic tie-in - The Power of First
• Every Other Friday newsletter from Deloitte

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