Let’s be honest, sometimes the typical formula for B2B marketing materials can be dry. You can make a checklist of what the typical ad entails: product shot, list of features and benefits, a few specifications, maybe a price, a logo with contact information, and a call to action. It’s easy to forget that there is another person on the other end, a person who will make a connection to your product by experiencing an emotional response to your brand. Of course, in the end the consumer will likely compare apples to apples in regards to specs to price, but the emotional marketing techniques for B2C can still be invaluable for B2B.
In an ad, you have a split second to make an impression. Whether you’re using a bold color, a short but impactful headline, or an interesting shot or visual metaphor, that impression needs to be concise and powerful in order to engage the viewer into reading the rest of your ad. But what if you want to include multiple paragraphs of ‘necessary’ information? Forget it, you can almost guarantee that your audience will be overwhelmed and move on. The key is to hit that sweet spot of piquing your reader’s interest, creating that connection that will bring your brand first in their minds.
We recently put these techniques into practice with our client, Hamilton Storage. Marketing an extremely specialized and technical line of products that are used to store samples of biological material can be a challenge—and this ad needed to be versatile enough to be implemented across a range of media over a long period of time. We could have used a picture or illustration of their product—as many of their competitors do—but we wanted something that would stand out and communicate the idea of their product swiftly, amongst the sea of dry product photography. After a round table creative session, V2Works came to the idea of using the preserved woolly mammoth on ice. Tying together a few key concepts: current events (a preserved woolly mammoth was recently discovered, an especially huge event in the science world); the immediate association of preserving fragile, delicate, and important biological material; and the glimmer of an idea that if Hamilton’s Storage Sample was around in the time of the woolly mammoth, perhaps this creature would not have gone extinct.
In the end, the client was extremely happy with the creative concept, as it certainly stands out on the pages of the laboratory-focused magazines in which they are advertising. By moving away from a traditional B2B ad format, they have positioned themselves to be the brand that will drive consumer connection in their field.
