Do You Get Emotional About B-to-B Marketing?
Conventional marketing wisdom has always said that to be effective business-to-business marketing should stick to cold, hard facts. Present a logical rationale for choosing your widget and the cash register will ring.
Of course, this approach assumes there is not a human being making decisions, just a corporate drone. Numbers in, numbers out. But recent research is turning this approach on its head.
The B2B Institute at LinkedIn research found that adding an emotional tone to B-to-B marketing delivers a 7x higher return.
The bottom line is even in business-to-business marketing human emotion, and not just the bottom line, is still a key driver of decisions. The benefit of adding an emotional sell to your B-to-B lies more in long-term brand recall and loyalty because emotions create longer-lasting memories. Simply put, people like to deal with people they like and trust.
The emotional appeal in B-to-B marketing can be virtually any emotion, from humor or happiness to love or sadness. The key is to choose the emotional message that best correlates to your brand and your target audiences’ wants.
While the research has shown that emotion has its place in B-to-B marketing, logic and rational reasoning are still important to drive conversions. This is because business decisions need to be justified and built on rational reasoning more than personal purchasing decisions. Telling your shareholders you bought five million widgets because the kittens the vendor used in their marketing made you feel happy probably won’t fly.
If you’d like to learn more about effective business-to-business marketing for your brand, give the marketing strategists at Insight Marketing Design a call at 605-275-0011 or send us an email. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll help you sell the heck out of your widgets.