The tension between creative thinking and the need to prove business impact isn’t most marketers’ favourite aspect of their job. If they work in B2B, it’s a pressure they probably feel more than they would like. But, Simeon Bird isn’t your typical B2B marketer. He learned his trade helping to build big consumer brands like Orange and EE. He’s fascinated by the emotional life of B2B customers. And for him, embracing the tension between emotion and the business bottom line is what marketing is all about.
“The role of a marketing director is evolving to combine two big, important things,” he says. “One is the psychology behind how people make buying decisions, the triggers that operate and how you can use emotion to influence that. The second is a clear understanding of the performance and outcome of marketing activity.”
That clear understanding of impact has been a priority for Bird over the past 18 months. Like many marketers, he’s faced budget cuts during the pandemic. His response was to double down on quantifying the impact of the spend he did have available.
When budget shrinks, prove the value of what you have
“We’ve used this time to find opportunities to get better at reporting, better at measuring – and better at sharing the value of marketing,” he says. “The achievement I’m most proud of is turning the conversation around and building an understanding of marketing investment as a driver of growth. It means that we were actually able to increase the budget this year.”
A crucial element in this success has been linking marketing investments to an agreed business plan. That throws up a familiar issue for B2B marketers: the question of how best to align with sales. “It’s really important that we’re aligned on objectives across the two teams,” says Bird. “The marketing budget can only really be justified if there’s a clear benefit to it in the business plan. If sales don’t sign up to increased targets, for example, there’s no point spending more money on marketing.”
The value of healthy tension between marketing and sales
Does this mean that marketing strategy gets defined by the sales agenda? Not at all. Bird doesn’t believe that the route to alignment involves agreeing on everything – or seeing things from the same perspective. “There’s value in a healthy tension,” he says. “You want to keep the functions separate yet working closely together. The common leadership comes from the CEO, which enables sales and marketing to focus on their respective tasks. They can then push the other to deliver better propositions, pricing or advertising in the case of marketing, and better channel experience or conversion rates in the case of sales.”
For Bird, the value of marketing comes in offering a distinct perspective on the buyer journey – one informed by insights from sales, but also by the science of psychology and a commitment to applying it creatively.
“Traditional B2B marketing feels like it’s created by people who’ve always worked on the B2B side – and maybe come up through sales,” he says. “It’s marketing that’s talking about products – but the fact is that human beings respond to benefits, not products. The value of coming over from the consumer side is that you know that you don’t need to overload on the product detail. The single most effective thing in B2B marketing is to focus on a simple, human benefit – to think about customers as human beings.”
Building diverse, reassuring brands
Committing to understanding the human decision-making behind business purchases leads Bird to a clear conviction: that B2B marketers have to make the case for the brand. “Deep down, buyers really don’t want to make the wrong decision – it’s their job on the line,” he says. “We need to get the point across internally that people need to feel reassured; they need to trust the brand; they need to instinctively feel comfortable choosing products and services from it. It’s the job of the marketing director to show the value of achieving this.”
The brand marketing that BT Enterprise uses to build reassurance has another responsibility as well. Bird believes that brands with significant media budgets have an inevitable cultural impact – and so a moral responsibility to reflect the diversity of society. “It’s a big part of how we think about marketing at the moment,” he says. “It goes into the briefs to agencies, the scenarios we want to see in scripts, and the casting decisions.”
Bird is clear though, that advertising alone doesn’t build a diverse brand. “Our Hope United campaign is based on giving people mechanisms and platforms for dealing with online hate – it’s not just us talking about the issue,” he says. “We’re making it a function of the brand to do something about this.”
Marketing ideas that resonate psychologically but also link to actual impact: it’s the key to tackling issues around diversity; it’s also the key to building a successful B2B strategy.
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