Category: Blog
How to build hype around a new product category
In 2012, a new idea hit the streets—and permanently changed the transportation industry. Seven years later, the service spans 83 countries and serves 36% of Americans. Its market volume is expected to top $109,050 million in 2022.
So what is this relatively new idea that took (and continues to take) the world by storm?
Ridesharing.
Uber. Lyft. Didi. And their less-well-known predecessor, who kicked the whole thing off: Sidecar.
In less than 10 years, this new product category has quite literally changed the world.
And they’re not the only ones.
Fifteen years ago, nobody would rent a stranger’s room, sight-unseen, for a two-night stay in a foreign country. These days, Airbnb is one of the most recognizable brands around. Twenty years ago, sales teams tracked client information in spreadsheets and on sticky notes. These days, 91% of companies with 11+ employees use a CRM.
All because someone had a useful idea for a new product or service category—and, importantly, they knew how to build up hype around it.
So if you do have a bright idea for a brand new category, how exactly do you go about building that hype? Well, first you better make sure you have something people want…
Stop! Do people actually want what you’re selling?
Before you start marketing, you need to know who your target audience is, and even more importantly, whether they’re willing to buy what you’re selling. Otherwise, you’re just setting yourself up for failure (and a major loss of both time and money).
Google “worst app ideas” and you’ll find a long list of people who skipped this step in their strategic process. The app that billed itself as “Airbnb for parking spaces” before realizing nobody wanted to spend 20 minutes bidding on a parking space just to save a dollar. Or the app that notifies you when your friends take a pee break (taking the concept of girls going to the bathroom in packs a few steps too far). Or the app that was “Tinder for dogs.”
You may love your idea. And your team may love your idea. And your agency may love your idea. But that doesn’t mean your audience will pay for your idea. To figure that out, you need to find your target audience and get access to their opinions—through pre-launch sign-ups, surveys, focus groups, minimum viable product tests, etc.
Before you start throwing money at a new idea, make sure it’s not “Tinder for dogs.”
Quick…what can your new category do for me?
Let’s say I’m your target customer, but you don’t know me personally. Everybody else is constantly pitching me their products and services via ads and emails and damn jingles I can’t get out of my head. I’m busy. My attention span is short. And I’m ignoring—or rolling my eyes at—about 95% of the marketing messages I see.
If you want my attention, the only way to get it is to cut through all that ad clutter with a message that tells me quickly and clearly:
What’s in it for me?
That’s true for any marketing, but it’s especially true for a new category because I need to understand right away what you are offering and why it’ll change my life. I’ve been living life without it for years, so why do I need you now?
Which is why when you’re talking about something that didn’t exist a year ago (or 10 minutes ago, for that matter), you better have your elevator pitch down. And I don’t mean four to five paragraphs and a slide deck. I mean two to three sentences. I mean if you only have two floors to go on the elevator, you want the person riding it with you to get off excited about what you’re doing. I mean that when I come to your website, I should understand what’s in it for me just from reading your headline.
This is hard to do and it’s why the first person or agency on your consultation list should be a strategic messaging expert.
Get the word out
So you’ve got your messaging nailed. Now you have to get it in front of people.
Because you could have the greatest message—the greatest new product—in the world, and if nobody hears about it, it’s not going anywhere. It is the proverbial tree in the forest. And none of us heard it fall.
Which is why your strategy—and probably the bulk of your budget—should start here.
There are lots of tactics for getting the word out. Press coverage. SEO. Viral videos. eBooks. Interviews and guest posts on popular sites in your niche. Ads in magazines. Ads on streaming services. Infographics. TV appearances. Billboards. Social media influencers. Even comics or documentaries.
The approach you should take will depend on your target audience (and where they spend their time online and off), your message, your geographic reach, and your business goals. Which is why strategy and messaging come first, and getting the word out should flow naturally from those.
Beef up your customer experience
You know what kills hype before it gets off the ground? Bad customer experiences. After all, studies show that bad customer experiences spread twice as fast as good ones. And companies that prioritize customer service make 60% more than the competition.
It’s also important to know that customers are very unlikely to complain to you. 96% won’t tell a company when they’re less than thrilled (but they will tell their friends). This means that a single customer complaint actually represents about 24 unhappy people—and that’s not factoring in the 15 friends they each warned off your service.
So pay close attention to every single one and hire or outsource the right talent to identify customer experience faux pas before they eat your hype alive.
Lots of companies start with marketing and think customer experience can build with time. But these days, you better have good customer care right out of the gate or you’ll stop your marketing in its tracks.
Budget to beat out the competition
Remember at the beginning of this article when I mentioned the very first ridesharing company ever? They were called Sidecar, and they went under in 2015.
Uber actually existed before Sidecar, but they were only a black car and limo service. Their marketing literally said they were the car service for the 1%.
Sidecar saw the larger opportunity first. Ride-sharing for the 99%.
Even though they were the first to the market, today, most of us don’t know Sidecar’s name. The reason? Their competitors had bigger budgets, better operations, and more marketing savvy.
It’s a cautionary tale for every marketer, but especially those pioneering new categories. If you don’t budget for marketing, your competitors will. And it won’t matter that they came to market two months or six months or a year after you. What will matter is what you put into your marketing.
The average tech company allocates a little under 15% of their budget to marketing (and says that marketing represents over 38% of their revenue growth). So if you want to keep up with the competition, you should plan to do the same (or better).
And if you need help with your messaging, marketing, and budgeting? Let’s talk.
10 blogs and publications every marketing leader should read
Data science. SEO. Content marketing. MarTech. Messaging. Websites. Lead generation. Social selling. If you’re a marketing leader responsible for the whole marketing ecosystem, chances are you have to keep up with a seemingly endless stream of topics, industry information, and new norms.
So, how do you do it?
Part of the answer is setting aside time to read the latest articles and studies by thought leaders in the space. Which is why if you don’t already have a weekly reading practice, we highly recommend one. Here are some of the most useful resources we at Catalyst keep in our own resource feeds:
Harvard Business Review
While HBR.org covers a variety of business-related topics, it’s their deep-dive research articles that really excite us.
Want to know how Americans’ bias change (or don’t change) over time? How about whether consumers actually buy sustainable products (and, if so, should you market your company’s sustainability)? HBR digs deep into everything from AI to customer retention to research on the psychology and habits of the people we marketers serve.
HBR gives readers three free articles per month—six if you subscribe and share your email address—or unlimited online access for $10 per month.
Forbes
Forbes CMO network publishes regular articles on topics that matter to CMOs—everything from loyalty programs to customer experience to case studies of companies getting it oh-so-right or oh-so-wrong.
One caveat on Forbes, though: Council members pay the publication to feature them and their articles. There’s some great advice out there from these successful business leaders, but it’s worth knowing that their inclusion is a paid PR opportunity for them—not necessarily always because they are the best people to quote and feature.
Entrepreneur.com
If you’re an entrepreneur, this one’s for you. The content is less about marketing and more about overall business and industry news and strategies—like how companies can make a positive social impact and where to find the latest cloud storage service.
HubSpot Blog
Whether you prefer the term content marketing or inbound marketing, this is your source for the latest on the topic. Learn how to write better blog posts, incorporate more video into your marketing, and wrap your head around new social networks as they continue to multiply like rabbits. And get real numbers on things like email opens across industries so that you can compare your marketing efforts to the rest of the market.
Advertising Age
Want to keep up with what other marketers are doing these days? Ad Age is the place to go for glimpses into who’s winning awards, losing their CMOs, and adjusting their policies—and why.
You can register for three free articles per month by sharing your email with Ad Age, or you can subscribe for an all-access pass to their online and print content for $129 per year in the US.
Your local business journal
It’s never a bad idea to know what’s going on in your local community—whether your business is hyper-local or decidedly global. Your local business journal can be a great prospecting tool and resource for finding relevant local events, as well as a way to assess the local business climate on a week-by-week basis.
MorningBrew
These quick daily emails will keep you informed and, as they say, make you smarter in five minutes. Newsletter sections include markets, trade, consumers, international, gaming, and more. Plus, the newsletter ends with a puzzle to get your brain going before the coffee kicks in.
Marketing Profs
From customer engagement strategy to content marketing, MarketingProfs publishes daily articles on the topics most relevant to marketers. They also publish plenty of infographics and stats that peek behind the curtain at real customer opinions and marketing trends.
Marketing Land
Another site with the marketer at its heart, Marketing Land covers a little of everything across the marketing landscape. Want to know if you should market on Reddit or Pinterest or what to do with your summer email marketing lull? Those are the kinds of topics you’ll see here.
The Catalyst Blog
We might be biased, but we think our own little slice of marketing insight is worth keeping up with. Here’s where we share whatever marketing insights are top-of-mind for us at the moment—from how to make your B2B marketing less damn boring to tips for elevating your influence.
The B2B Marketer’s Guide to Elevating Your Influence
It takes a lot to be a marketing leader these days.
Marketing is tied more directly than ever to sales and revenue goals. Skills expectations have ballooned, leaving marketing leaders responsible for everything from creative campaigns to data science to privacy law compliance. Marketing stress levels are on the rise. And 90% of CEOs and CMOs say the role of the marketer is going to change even more significantly in the next three years.
No wonder CMO turnover rates are increasing year-over-year.
So how can marketing leaders stand out in today’s fast-changing landscape? How can we make a real impact on our businesses? And how can we stop marketing leader turnover—which costs businesses an average of 213% of that person’s salary—in its tracks?
How, in other words, can B2B marketing leaders elevate their influence and drive real-world business results?
Here’s what the latest data has to say.
Tactical thinking is out. Strategy is in.
We need a blog! Why aren’t we on Snapchat yet? Facebook ads are what we’ve been missing! A website redesign will fix our problems!
People have been throwing out enthusiastic suggestions like these in marketing meetings since marketing meetings became a thing. But here’s the rub: tactics-driven marketing doesn’t have the long-term payoff that strategic marketing does.
Don’t take our word for it. A study of 500 marketing case studies bore this out, showing that tactical activities brought in predictable sales spikes and declines. Strategic, results-driven activities like branding, on the other hand, kept on growing with no decline in sight.
The quickest route to elevating influence and saving the proverbial day? It’s replacing the well-intentioned, tactical-first thinking of “we need a blog!” with the business-focused, strategic thinking of “How is this going to drive business?”
Embrace emotional connection and creativity—even (especially) if you’re B2B.
Think of a brand whose ads delight you. Who comes to mind? Dove, with their real beauty campaign? Nike, pushing us to just do it? Always, with their “like a girl” ad?
What makes those campaigns stand out? What draws us to them?
The answer, at least in part, is emotional connection.
One study of over 100,000 customers found that positive emotional connection drives 306% more lifetime value for a business than customer satisfaction alone. These emotionally connected customers stick with brands almost two years longer than their satisfied counterparts (an average of 5.1 years vs. 3.4 years) and are significantly more likely to recommend those brands (71%, as opposed to 45%).
Another study found that customers with emotional connections were seven times more likely to buy and 15 times more likely to recommend a brand.
And a third study used neuroscience to prove that emotionally compelling ads resulted in a 23% increase in sales.
The examples given in the research are B2C, but the truth is that B2B isn’t different. We’re still humans connecting with humans. We still want to work with brands that we feel an emotional connection to.
In fact, according to a Google study, B2B buyers are more emotionally connected to the brands they purchase from than B2C buyers.
So what’s the path to emotionally compelling ads? It’s empathy and creativity. The kind of creativity that turns cultural ideas on their heads. The kind of creativity that asks big questions. The kind of creativity that surprises and delights. The kind of creativity that breaks through the noise to let buyers know who we are and what we stand for.
The kind of creativity that asks people, through our campaigns, to re-think something they just assumed was true.
Know when to take risks—and when not to.
Of course, creativity and emotional connection require risks. Dove didn’t know for sure that their real beauty campaign would become one of the most talked about campaigns in advertising history. Nike didn’t have a 100% guarantee that “just do it” would forge such strong bonds.
The risks they took were thoughtful ones. But any new campaign—anytime we turn traditional thinking on its head—is a risk. And to win big, we have to be willing to take them and budget for them.
Now, that doesn’t mean every marketing action should be risky. There are things we know move the needle for marketers. There are strategies that actually are tried and true. And there’s a balance to be struck between those tried-and-true strategies and risk-taking.
There’s no exact formula here (if there was, we’d all be rich). But there are a few things that consistently pay off with more revenue, customer loyalty, and other metrics that truly move the needle for a business.
So where should you spend some non-risky budget? Getting your website to load faster is one smart tactic, as slow-loading websites cost $2 billion in lost sales annually.
Customer experience is another surefire way to move the needle in your favor, with 74% of customers saying they’ll take their business elsewhere after a bad experience, thank you very much.
Then there’s content. Site growth for content marketing leaders is nearly 8 times as high as it is for their competition, and only 42% of B2B marketers believe they’re doing it well.
And speaking of content, creating content that’s focused on each phase of your customer journeys is another proven way to drive results. In fact, high-performing marketing teams are 8.8x more likely to have adopted a customer journey strategy.
The key here is balance. Make sure to prioritize strategies that clearly work. But leave room (and budget) for creative risks that can pay off big time.
Evolve your marketing team.
If you’re nodding along but also thinking this is a lot—you’re right. Which is why you need the right support, both internally and externally.
This means understanding what skills you do—and don’t—have on your team, training the team where it makes sense, and outsourcing to fill the gaps and bring fresh perspective.
Why should outsourcing be part of your strategy?
Because most companies underestimate the cost of recruitment by 90 – 95% (expert recruiters say the cost of onboarding an employee is somewhere around $240,000).
Not to mention that you get access to a wide range of talent for much less than it’d cost to hire for that whole range. (The average cost of a marketing agency runs between $2,500 and $12,000 per month. The average salary of a marketing manager will cost your company upwards of $11,000 per month—and that’s just one person.)
Need some help?
Elevating our clients’ influence is what we’re best at. We’re data nerds, creative thinkers, and results-obsessed marketing experts with decades of experience. If your marketing team could use some help to fill the gaps in your team, we’d love to talk.
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7 tips for marketing leaders that’ll take you from risk to reward
It’s no secret that change is challenging.
People resist it. Organizations resist it.
In fact, according to one study, 62% of organizational change initiatives fail and an additional 8% said they succeeded but found their results weren’t sustainable.
Change, as we said, is damn hard.
And here’s the kicker: It’s also necessary. In marketing, it’s change or die. It’s shift with the customers or lose them. It’s harness the latest technologies or go the way of the dodo.
But you already knew that.
The problem isn’t that we’re unclear about the stakes. The problem is that change is risky.
But, hey, no risk, no reward, right? You can’t be on the cutting edge without risking getting cut.
So, how can marketing leaders embrace change and take the kinds of risks that pay off big time? In our experience, these seven things play a key role in big successes:
- Be like Netflix, not Blockbuster.
Here’s a fun fact for you: Netflix wasn’t the first company to bring streaming services to the table. Blockbuster was.
The service was called Total Access and Blockbuster killed it because they didn’t want to lose out on late-fee revenue. I mean, fair enough, right? Blockbuster was making $800 million in late fees. What company in their right mind would give that up?
The answer: Netflix.
The brand name we all now know when there’s nary a Blockbuster to be found.
Netflix didn’t care about late fees. They didn’t care about maintaining the status quo. They saw an opportunity and they pounced on it. And Blockbuster, unwilling to change, went from owning the industry to being something only those of us over 30 remember (alongside such gems as floppy discs, the 10-minute wait for dial-up internet, and that tootsie pop commercial with the naked kid and the asshole owl).
The point here is this: There are always reasons to stick with the old way of doing things. But if you don’t embrace change, your competitors will. Being a risk-taker, rolling with the proverbial customer service punches, staying ahead of the competition—it all takes big-picture thinking.
It’s never just a question of “if we do this, will we lose our late-fee revenue?” It’s also a question of what customers want and what the market will happily give them if you don’t.
- Always be learning.
Every year, the list of skills CMOs and marketing leaders need to master grows by leaps and bounds. You’re marketers, sure. But now you’re also data scientists, marketing technologists, privacy law experts.
It’s enough to drive 1 in 4 marketers to therapy.
But instead of panicking over all these new skillsets, what if we embraced them? Why not spend a day or two with your data scientists understanding exactly what they do? Why not take a course in privacy law? Why not embrace the way marketing is becoming more multi-faceted every single day?
After all, 90% of CMOs are responsible for marketing strategy. And how can you put together a truly great strategy—how can you know which risks will pay off—if you don’t understand all the skills and tools available to your team at the execution stage?
- Don’t do everything yourself.
Speaking of growing responsibilities, no matter how many skillsets you pick up, you probably can’t take on everything yourself. Don’t be afraid to delegate. Hire smart people. Bring on a strategic agency with a killer track record.
The more you understand, the better marketing leader you’ll be. But if you try to execute on everything yourself, you’ll just be an overwhelmed one. Know when to dive into learning and when to partner with other marketing pros.
- Befriend the sales team.
Did you know that over half of sales and marketing pros aren’t happy with the support they get from the other team? And 90% of the content marketing slaves over for the sales team is never used by said sales team?
For teams whose goals are so closely aligned—acquire new leads! Convert more customers! Up-sell and cross-sell!—that’s a pretty damn depressing and deeply foolish stat.
So let’s knock it off, shall we?
Make friends with the sales team. Find out what customer needs they’re hearing about that marketing isn’t meeting. Learn what tactics they’re using to convert, and ask how you can incorporate something similar into marketing campaigns.
Companies where marketing and sales do work together have 36% higher customer retention rates. Ignoring that reality is just leaving money on the table.
- Embrace the flywheel.
Increase customer retention by 5% and research says you’ll drive profits up anywhere from 25% to 95%. Crazy, right?
This why the flywheel approach to marketing—where instead of focusing all our energy on getting new customers, we give upsell, cross-sell, customer retention, and customer satisfaction equal priority—makes so much more sense than a relentless, single-minded focus on new leads.
- Understand customer journeys.
44% of customers say a personalized shopping experience equals repeat business.
95% say they’ll get the hell of your website if the digital experience sucks.
And existing customers are 60% – 70% more likely to make a purchase than those new to your brand.
Which is why you need to know your customers and understand their customer journeys. You need to know where they’re at, what they’re after, and how you can best meet their needs at every touch point along the route to their purchase—and every touch point along the route to becoming a high-lifetime-value customer, loyalty program member, or brand advocate.
And remember Blockbuster? They’re a good reminder that customer journeys aren’t static. They change with new technology. They change with cultural shifts. And you damn well better change with them.
- Talk like a human.
Whether you’re B2B or B2C, nobody wants to read boring marketing and sales materials. And the truth is that a lot of marketing—especially in the B2B space—is boring. Don’t take my word for it, though: 42% of B2B buyers agree.
Part of the answer to being less damned boring? Talking to people like they’re people—not robots.
Let’s get risky.
Taking risks that pay off big isn’t a one-person job. You need smart people on your team and smart partners by your side. If you’ve been nodding along, we’d love to chat.
How to find a marketing agency that’ll make you look damn good
Well, hello there, marketer. Here’s your cheerful news of the week: If you’re reading this, there’s a 50-50 chance you hate your ad agency.
That’s right.
In 2016, just under half (48%) of marketers said they were unhappy with their agency partners, and only 8% gave their agency relationships top marks for satisfaction. Then, in 2017, CMO turnover reached its highest level ever. And those stats have only gotten worse since then.
So, what’s going on here? Why can’t CMOs keep their jobs? Why aren’t agencies helping those same CMOs win big and look like heroes? And, more importantly, how can you find an agency partner that will actually knock your marketing out of the park?
The answers start with knowing what a great agency looks like. Here are nine characteristics we’d look for if we were hiring an agency ourselves:
- Relax, Janet. They’ve got your back.
It should go without saying, but apparently it doesn’t:
Your agency shouldn’t be a source of a stress.
A good agency should pluck that stress right off your shoulders and toss it over their own backs. They should be the calm in the storm. They shouldn’t require babysitting or miss deadlines.
And if they aren’t a source of calm? If they don’t have your back?
Fire. Their. Asses. Yesterday.
Marketing is stressful enough without your agency partner falling down on the job.
- They bring you new ideas.
You’ve got enough to do without having to come up with every marketing idea yourself. A good agency partner should be constantly bringing you creative new ideas and helping you solve new problems and understand new marketing trends.
- They’re risk-takers.
Change is hard. Seizing new opportunities is hard. Getting out of your marketing comfort zone is hard.
But the companies that do change—the companies whose products, marketing efforts, and sales roll with the ever-changing customer desire punches—they win big.
Which is why a good agency partner should push you to take risks and make changes. Not just for the sake of risk itself or to be edgy, but because change is what customers demand. Because taking the right risks can come with big rewards.
- They care about your business.
If your agency doesn’t care your business—its growth, its goals, its bottom line—then why are they even in this business?
Getting apathy from your agency? Confront them or let them go. The stakes are too high to hire partners who aren’t excited about and invested in your business success.
- They know you as a person too.
Fun fact: Business is just people working with people. (Well, and robots, but they’re not really decision-makers…yet.) And any agency worth their salt should care not only about your business and your customers, but about you.
After all, research shows that social connections at work (and this should include agency partners) increase happiness, lower stress, boost engagement, and improve health—all of which contribute to increased productivity.
- They’ve got grit.
According to researcher Angela Duckworth, grit is about sticking with long-term goals. Gritty people keep going through setbacks, they push through distraction, and they finish what they start—even if it takes years.
Grit is a predictor of achievement. People who don’t give up are more likely to get things done.
And that’s what you want from an agency partner. A team that gets things done.
- They’re customer-first. Every damn day.
Nearly 50% of brands aren’t meeting customer expectations, survey says.
Your agency should be committed to making sure you aren’t one of them.
Which means they should be committed—passionately, relentlessly—to understanding and representing your customers. If they’re not asking for, developing, or talking about buyer personas, journeys, customer data, and customer advocacy, part ways. You don’t need yet another opinion about marketing that isn’t informed by customer needs.
- They’re creative, boundary-pushing badasses.
Brands that take customer-centric, well-thought-out marketing risks reap pretty massive rewards. And those risks only come from creative thinking and a willingness to push boundaries.
- They skip the ego and focus on making you the hero.
Those 8% of brands who love their marketing agencies? We’re pretty sure it’s because those agencies are focused on their clients. Helping them win big. Helping them be marketing heroes. Helping them better serve customers and, in turn, reap the brand loyalty, high-customer-lifetime-value rewards.
You know what we think those agencies are less focused on? Making themselves look good. Winning awards. Taking the hero’s mantel on their own shoulders.
Not that winning awards is bad. (Our people have definitely won their fair share.) But awards and accolades and ego should never be the point. Big wins for the client should be.
(I mean, I’m biased here, since Catalyst’s brand purpose is to help marketers be heroic, but why wouldn’t you want your agency to help you be a hero?)
If your agency is all ego, find a new one. Find one that cares about you and your business and your job and your big wins.
Agency partnerships that don’t suck
So, about half of the businesses out there aren’t so happy with their agencies.
And here’s the fix: Fire them.
Seriously.
You deserve an agency that’s passionate about building your business—and your career.
If you’re looking for an agency partner, we’d love to talk. No bullshit. No ego. Just real people who care a whole lot about our clients’ successes. Say hi here.
B2B marketing is boring. Here’s how to fix it.
Here’s a fun fact to kick off your summer: Your customers think your marketing is boring.
That’s right.
42% of B2B buyers say most marketing is boring and 83% wish it was more creative. Another 81% said better marketing would help them make better buying decisions.
Let’s pause there. Better marketing would help them make better buying decisions.
That means 81% of buyers are feeling a bit uncertain about their decisions, right? They’re asking us to help them get certain—help them throw more money in our respective directions. And all we have to do is be less boring.
Of course, that’s easier said than done, right? Because if we knew we were boring, we’d try to fix it.
Right?
Right? Bueller? Bueller?
Ha. Just kidding. We do know we’re boring. We’re even boring ourselves. A 2017 survey found that 60% of marketers were bored at work—making marketing one of the top 10 most boring jobs in the US.
So, what are we doing wrong that’s boring us and our customers out of our skulls—and how do we fix it?
Here are five suggestions:
Knock it off with the jargon already.
Jargon doesn’t make anybody sound smarter. Full stop. We all know it, but we just can’t seem to knock it the hell off.
The more jargon that makes it into our marketing, the less buyers are actually understanding us. And that’s not just an educated guess. In one recent survey, 88% of office workers said they pretend to understand office jargon even when they have no idea what it means.
And if office workers who are around your jargon 24-7 don’t know what the hell it means? Your customers are even less likely to.
So let’s all just knock it off.
Speak in plain English, thank you very much.
Speaking of bad communication, here’s another truth:
Big words don’t make us sound smarter.
Yep. That’s right. Using a $20 word isn’t earning you any brownie points.
Studies show that simple language makes us sound smart. The reason behind this, according to experts, is that the easier someone can understand us, the smarter they assume we are. And the simpler language we use, the easier someone can understand us.
As Einstein said: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Be human.
It’s easy for B2B marketing to feel robotic. We’re trying so hard to sound professional, follow all the grammar rules our 5th-grade English teacher taught us, and put our best foot forward that we often end up sounding stilted. Like a robot with three pre-recorded messages.
And hey, maybe we are using robots for some of our marketing these days. But that doesn’t mean our marketing has to sound like one.
Because B2B marketing isn’t actually that different from B2C. You’re still talking to a human. You’re still allowed to be a human.
In other words, shoving a stick up your butt never makes you look taller.
So talk to your customers like they’re people. Feel free to crack a joke. Start a sentence with the word “and.” Be vulnerable. Tell the truth. Use the word damn if that’s on brand.
Just because I’m at work researching CRM systems doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a good joke. And it definitely doesn’t mean I want to spend my afternoon reading through sales materials that feel like formal college essays.
And we’re not saying every brand should be sweary or bursting with jokes. But we are saying that brands that sound human—that talk to people like people—perform better.
Can B2B marketing be interesting? Hell yes, it can.
We know because we’ve worked on a lot of B2B campaigns that blew customers away and knocked business goals out of the park. If you’re done with boring and need some help grabbing the attention of those 81% of buyers who are begging for more creativity, we’d love to chat.
B2B marketing is stressful. Here’s how to turn down the pressure.
If you’re a marketing leader, congratulations! You have one of the highest stress office jobs in the world.
In fact, a 2015 report revealed that 80% of marketers say they’re overloaded and 25% have reached a stress-related breaking point that’s driven them to therapy.
And the higher up the leadership ladder you are? The more stressed you’re likely to be.
Since then, things have only gotten more complicated.
Responsibilities have doubled, then tripled. New technologies are appearing every few minutes. Marketers have become responsible not just for marketing leads but for sales and revenue goals.
Not to mention that the role of the marketer has ballooned. You’re expected to master not only both digital and traditional marketing but also data science, an ever-expanding suite of marketing technology tools (91 in the average company, according to Mary Meeker), and the ins and outs of privacy regulation.
In other words, welcome to Hell. No wonder the pressure is sending 1 in 4 of us to therapy.
But hey, we’re marketers. Creative problem solving is what we do.
So let’s solve this thing.
It’s pretty clear that a big part of the problem boils down to setting boundaries and prioritizing your health. Medical studies tie high stress closely to lack of sleep, poor diet, and less physical activity. If you can fix those things, your high stress levels aren’t long for this world.
Of course, your reaction to that might be No shit, Sherlock. That shit is easier said than done.
Because how can you create better eating habits when you’re working through lunch every day and too tired to cook at night? How can you increase physical activity when you’re so burned out by the weekend that all you can do is lay on the couch and binge-watch Game of Thrones?
So yeah. Part of the answer is biting the bullet and prioritizing your health even though it’s going to suck at first. Even though it seems like it’ll cause more stress, not less.
And the other part of the answer? We think it’s about changing your mindset at work.
Now, I don’t mean yoga or Zen wisdom or manifestation a la The Secret. I mean something more tactical. More tangible.
I mean shifting away from thinking of marketing as a funnel—an endless parade of Must Get More Customers!—and toward thinking of marketing as a loop or a flywheel. An opportunity to get new customers, yes, but, just as importantly, keep customers, connect with customers, and increase the lifetime value of customers.
How the hell does that relate to stress, you ask?
Well, marketers have known for approximately forever that acquiring a new customer costs five times as much as retaining an existing one, right? And part of the reason it costs more? It’s not just because you’re spending actual dollars on ads. It’s also because it takes more effort from the team. It is, simply put, more work for less payoff.
So the concept of a flywheel—where customer acquisition, engagement, and delight are given equal priority—means you can reel in your workload (and take that time for a healthy lunch and a jog at the end of the day) while reaping greater results.
And that’s not just a marketing platitude. It’s backed up by research. Increasing customer retention by just 5% drives profits up by anywhere from 25% to 95%.
Of course, there are other ways to offload some of your stress. Like hiring Catalyst to help you meet those marketing and business goals and take some of the pressure off your team.
If that sounds like a relief, let’s talk.
3 Smart Ways to Build Brand Awareness
You’re a marketer working hard on your lead generation. You’re driving great leads. But not at the scale you need, or with the results you want. Why? It could be the lack of brand awareness. Brand awareness is defined as the extent to which consumers are familiar with the distinctive qualities or image of a particular brand of goods or series. Aka, brand awareness is defined as how well known your brand is.
Many people, especially marketers, hear “brand awareness” and immediately think of advertising: using a paid medium like television or digital banner ads to advertise a message. Is there a way to increase your brand’s awareness with your target audience, but without a costly media buy? Here are three things to try.
Referral/Brand Advocacy Programs: We’ve all heard stories about the power of word of mouth. But did you know that 83% of Americans say they seek recommendations from friends and family when considering a purchase? According to Nielsen, referrals from people we know and trust are the most credible form of advertising. How do you take happy customers and make them into brand advocates? Referral programs. While referral programs are all a bit different, the common denominator is that most of them offer a financial reward to both the person trying a product or service for the first time, and to the happy customer referring them.
Look at Uber’s rapid growth. How did they do it? Referral programs. They knew that once people tried Uber, it would become their preferred method of transportation over taxis. People who had great experiences would tell other people. So they offered their riders a credit for every friend who tried Uber for the first time – and they also gave a credit to first-time riders. Offering the program in-app made it feel seamless to the referrer. By giving free trials and rewarding customer referrals, companies like Uber remove barriers to trial and make it easy for happy customers to become brand advocates.
Guest Content/Influencer Marketing: When you hear Influencer Marketing, you might think of people selling products on Instagram. That can definitely be an effective form of Influencer Marketing. But at Catalyst, we think of a wider definition. We see Influencer Marketing as any form of bringing worthwhile information to an established audience. Our B2B clients sometimes think Influencer Marketing isn’t for them. But we remind them that a lot of the established best practices in B2B marketing are actually Influencer Marketing. For example, guest blogging is a great form of Influencer Marketing. Speaking at conferences or events is another. In both cases, you (or your company) as the authority are bringing excellent, practical content to a new audience (that of the conference or event).
Partnerships: This might be the sneakiest way to build brand awareness. Why? Because it just doesn’t make it to the list when people think about brand awareness. That’s a shame, because it can be really effective.
Here’s how it works: Find a partner who offers a complementary product to yours, or who sells to the same audience you do. Create a partnership agreement that has a mutually beneficial per-referral fee or revenue share, and create a joint go-to-market plan. This solution often creates a win-win-win between you, your partner and the customer, because it results in a better overall solution for the client. Many of our clients, including Microsoft and Adobe, go to market with other complementary products, and in these cases, are able to create a better end result for their customers.
It’s not easy to build brand awareness. It takes a clear strategic vision, plus time and dedication. These are just three of the many tools in the brand building toolbox. Identifying the need to increase your brand awareness is a great place to start. Want to keep building? Start with one of the above methods and test and measure from there.
Three Great Examples of Brand Purpose
In the marketing world, “Brand Purpose” is a term that started popping up after Simon Sinek did his famous Ted Talk about his book, Start with Why. His point, in a nutshell, is that brands and companies with a Brand Purpose know WHY they do what they do or make what they make. Brand Purpose galvanizes employees behind a deeper meaning to their work, and consumers are drawn to the brand because of the company’s cause, or the reason WHY they exist. If you haven’t seen Sinek’s Ted Talk, watch it here.
In the Ted Talk, he refers to Apple, a brand that so many admire and almost worship, so it’s easy to see why their Brand Purpose elevates the brand. At Catalyst, Brand Purpose often comes up in conversations with our clients. They often ask – “What are some great examples of brands with purpose–that aren’t Apple?”
We’ll share three, one of which is a business-to-business (B2B) company.
- Expensify: to enable professionals to focus on what they were born to do. Their brand story, which can be found on their site, is a great one. Expensify’s founder, David Barrett, started the company because he hated doing expense reports. He saw an opportunity to give people their time back so they could focus on higher order pursuits. Had he tried to sell his product as software that scans receipts and sends them to accounting, it would have fallen flat. But he positioned his product as a solution that enables employees to do what they love by eliminating the manual tasks they don’t. This WHY it resonated with companies big and small, and helped propel Expensify to be the expense solution for more than 60,000 companies worldwide.
- Crayola: to unleash the originality in every child. As they say, “What if?” is the greatest question in the world. A question that makes the impossible permissible. What we love about this Brand Purpose is that it is so inspiring both to consumers and to employees. A great Brand Purpose drives future innovation in the company, and in Crayola’s case, employees have a clear goal of driving creativity in children.
- Dove: to help women everywhere develop a positive relationship with the way they look, helping them realize their full potential. In 2004, Dove launched their Campaign for Real Beauty, and it was revolutionary. For the first time, the world saw women of all shapes, colors, and sizes being held up as real standards of beauty. Dove’s inclusive Brand Purpose elevates Dove to be more than just a brand of soap. It’s a brand of empowerment.
Back to Simon Sinek, who says, “Working hard for something you don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something you love is called passion.”
What’s your company’s WHY?
Marketing is a Lot Like Finding the Perfect Gray Paint
Why Sampling Marketing Tactics Is a Lot Like Sampling Paint Colors
I recently moved to a new home that was full of brown. Brown floors, brown granite, brown tile, brown cabinets, brown walls. My new sea of brown. And it tormented me. Every corner I turned, the shock of the brown would slap me in the face.
But I acted quickly and set out to find the perfect gray paint. One that wasn’t too green, too yellow, too blue, or too purple. One that was just the right shade of gray that evoked a sense of calm and sophistication. It sounds fairly easy, right? Visit the paint store, gather a few paint strips, and narrow it down.
And I was so careful about choosing the right gray. After 15 small samples, 15 test patches on a wall in every room, and 100 heated debates with my fiance and children, I found it. The perfect gray paint that would turn my brown hell into a glorious gray sanctuary. I felt so sure of myself! I was so excited because I finally selected the perfect choice! This perfect gray seemed light enough, cool enough, warm enough, neutral enough, classy enough. No undertones whatsoever. Just perfect.
Unfortunately, my process took a wild turn once the painter finished the first room. WTF color is this? BABY BLUE? This was no nursery. It was supposed to be an elegant, clean-looking entryway. A color that made you feel like you were stepping inside a coastal retreat. Instead, it was a color that made you question where the crib and glider were.
The horror. The anxiety. The damn money I spent.
To make a long story even longer (sorry), after 25 more pots of sample paint, and 400 more test patches on the wall, I found the right gray. The perfect gray. The one that soothes you when you walk in the door. The gray that makes you feel like you’ve stepped into a friendly Carolina home, but has a hint of Four Seasons Hotel class to it.
But marketing is a lot like finding the perfect gray paint. In order to build the perfect campaign, you have to keep trying different strategies, channels, and tactics to see what works. Because odds are, you’re not going to nail it on the first try.
We do a lot of campaigns for our clients and we target a lot of different types of people. Everyone from CFOs, to CMOs, to healthcare providers, to home buyers, and even marathon runners. But every campaign we construct is different from the next. And almost every campaign gets modified in some way at some point. So we keep sampling. We keep testing. We keep looking at it with a keen eye to see if it seems slightly off. And then we’ll switch it again until it’s almost perfect.
So build your campaigns and don’t be afraid to say, “This doesn’t look quite right. Let’s make it better.” And like paint, a campaign that seems off can be changed quickly with just a little bit of work. Tweak the shade of your campaign until it’s perfect.