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Deep Dive

Deep Dive 11 Nov 2024 - 8 min read
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Some B2B firms are realising Byron Sharp was right on distinctive assets versus differentiation all along. A slew of recent research underlines that buying committees are increasingly buying on brand, not product features – and they've usually made up their minds before the first marketing qualified lead (MQL) lands with sales, rendering MQLs increasingly redundant. IT firm Logicalis ran the numbers on its own campaigns and found only 21 per cent of its potential customers were even aware of it – and that a single percentage point awareness gain would drive massive revenue growth. Moreover, six in ten of its potential customers couldn't recall a single ad from any of its competitors in the last 12 months – presenting a major opportunity to start optimising to awareness and driving conversion via bolder comms. "Funnily enough, I didn't find much resistance," says head of marketing, Lara Barnett. ABB global digital marketing and content chief Sophie Neate says the engineering giant has dropped MQLs as a KPI altogether and is now getting more joy out of other metrics while creating and personalising content across a much broader range of buying committee stakeholders. Stuart Jaffray, MD of B2B specialist agency Green Hat, urges brands to go all out on distinctive brand assets, brand awareness, mental availability and recall. Plus, forget the answers you wrote in your last ten RFPs and instead look at the questions – and develop content around them. Then the buyers will come to you.

Deep Dive 22 Oct 2024 - 8 min read
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Deep Dive 15 Oct 2024 - 12 min read
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Deep Dive 9 Oct 2024 - 10 min read
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Deep Dive 23 Sep 2024 - 8 min read
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Deep Dive 16 Sep 2024 - 5 min read
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Deep Dive 10 Sep 2024 - 8 min read
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Deep Dive 27 Aug 2024 - 10 min read
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The effectiveness “revolution” is colliding with the AI-spawned efficiency uprising and it’s leapfrogging the early consensus on AI use cases in marketing around automating personalised content and communications. So much so Mark Ritson choked on his Wellfleet oysters when Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg told him they were leaving top jobs at LinkedIn-backed thinktank, the B2B Institute. Then they told him why. Ritson promptly joined their venture, along with what Weinberg calls “the advisory board to end all advisory boards”.  Thus the synthetically-enhanced AI marketing outfit Evidenza was born. The founders claim their new piece of “synthetic customer” tech – which starts with creating AI copies of target customers – creates 95 per cent accurate customer responses. I.e. it mimics company CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs, CROs and the rest with strong correlation to the real thing. Those customers are really hard to find within B2B markets, which is why research is so expensive and takes so long. EY’s CMO – and a long list of others – verify that claim, because they’ve tested it head-to-head. “It can imitate essentially anyone by gathering and synthesising massive amounts of data,” per Weinberg. Evidenza claims it can also synthesise marketing strategy, science and the “pantheon” of effectiveness gurus, like Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Karen Nelson-Field, Les Binet and Peter Field. Which means marketers can ask them what they ‘think’ of their plans. Evidenza has already cloned Ritson to deliver “a finance friendly marketing plan that used to take months in minutes”, per Lombardo. “Well, maybe a day.” Weinberg acknowledges cussing is a challenge. But they are actively debugging.

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