A few weeks ago, I headed up on the train from Portsmouth to attend our first event of the year, B2B Marketing’s Ignite Conference. Spread over 2 days, this year’s event focussed on B2B buyer behaviours and aimed to provide senior marketers with a unique space to learn, network, and drink too much coffee.

I headed to the venue, the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge, from my hotel at around 7:30am and mingled with a few familiar faces over some pastries before the morning sessions began. During my time at conference, I got to hear some amazing insights, so here’s a few of the highlights…

 

Reimagining the relationship between marketing and our buyers

Antonia Wade, Global CMO, PwC

In Antonia’s session, she shared her observations and experiences from 20+ years of working in B2B Marketing. Some interesting pullouts I took included:

• Whilst time goes on, marketers face the same challenges; their organisation not realising the value of marketing, the disconnect between marketing and sales and budgets which often are used as a piggy bank to dip into when the organisation needs to claw money back.
• Between 12-15 people are involved in every buying decision, all of whom have different expectations of what they need from a product or service.
• B2B buyers only spend, on average, 6% of their time in the buying cycle speaking/dealing with sales representatives, so other marketing channels need to work harder and differently to combat this.
• 45% of B2B buyers today are millennials, which poses new challenges and expectations around how buyers prefer to be marketed to.
• 75% of B2B buyers expect messaging to not only be personalised, but highly relevant to the situation they’re in.

 

Can ChatGPT write your marketing copy?

David McGuire, Creative Director, Radix Communications Ltd

If you’re ever attending an event and David McGuire is speaking, I encourage you to join the session if you can. He brings a light-hearted and comical feel that few can get right.

David used his session to look at Large Language Models (LLM), like ChatGPT, Bard and Jasper, under the microscope to help determine if, and how, marketeers should be using them in their marketing copy.

He shared some useful copy resources including their B2B content quality checklist, set the bots a series of staged tasks to see how they would perform and came to a few conclusions. For the record, I am writing this blog with my own two hands…

• AI leaves no room for originality or differentiation in copywriting because it is can only build on what has already been written online.
• AI is not human and cannot draw on its own experiences. It cannot think, or apparently write jokes because it cannot understand context.
• LLM will often look like they know what they are doing because they are doing an impression of someone writing copy. This can create a culture of under proofing where mistakes slip through the net.
• AI has its limitations but it can be used in many effective ways alongside a human copywriter including writing summaries, transcripts and grammar checks.

Our resident Copywriter, Emily, recently published a blog on ChatGPT which you can read here.

While ChatGPT provides a useful tool for marketers, it helpfully lists what limitations it has on the platforms homepage.

 

Unlock the power of audience insights: How Arden University propelled themselves into the B2B world.

Russell Parsons, Editor-in-chief, Marketing Week and Festival of Marketing, Caroline Evans, Corporate Strategy Director, Arden University and Clare Rhodes, Account Director, ReallyB2B

My colleagues, Clare and Russell, were joined onstage by Caroline Evans, Corporate Strategy Director at Arden University to talk about the campaign we ran with them, which picked up ‘Best corporate decision-maker targeted campaign’ at the B2B Marketing Awards last year.

Arden University are a digital and blended learning provider, traditionally targeting the B2C market. They came to ReallyB2B wanting to better penetrate the B2B space and help businesses utilise the underspent Apprenticeship Levy we have in the UK. ReallyB2B conducted a full customer research campaign, including desk-based research, expert interviews with relevant stakeholders from brands including Mars and Autotrader. We also used personality profiling models like DiSC to get a handle on what to say to Arden University’s corporate market, and how to say it.

The research project was followed by an activation campaign focussed on engaging prospects, sharing relevant and timely content, and ultimately generating new opportunities for the Arden University team to follow up on. This activity delivered 272% to MQL target and £1.3Million+ of revenue for Arden University.

Caroline, Clare and Russell closed the session with some advice for marketeers struggling to get sign-off on budget for market research – remove your personal opinion, articulate in terms of business outcomes and use relevant case studies and proof points. Time and time again, businesses make assumptions about what their buyers want, but this is not true market orientation.

You can access the full session and presentation slides from our session here, or to learn more about how this type of campaign could work for your business, you can reach the team on marketing@reallyb2b.com.

This week’s blog has been written by Daisy Truman, Marketing Manager at ReallyB2B and Xeim Labs. Daisy supports our marketing team within the agency and works within Xeim Labs, our internal commercial team, which is dedicated to generating partnerships and advertising opportunities for our sister brands, Festival of Marketing, Marketing Week and Econsultancy.