Live with Marketers: Brand Storytelling in a B2B World

[Music] cheesy intrusive pushy dishonest they're all slick is some guy in a suit all buttoned up somebody who's selling you something you don't need [Music] I'm hoping it's changing I'd say over the course of the last five years number of people in this profession are trying to elevate it because salespeople are professionals I think this kind of project can change the perception of sales it can really show that the best salespeople aren't people who are trying to put something down your throat should I be looking at the camera or should we go out of our way to make sure that we create these bonds with our customers just creating real relationships you can't make a sale without your team we're the front lines we're setting up the meetings but we rely on our team or Account Executives to go ahead and you know convert those meetings into sales everyone sells if you're a doctor if you're a lawyer every day you're selling what it is that you do and it's about relationships and it's about human connection I think sales at the end of the day is about solving problems it's about being compassionate it's about listening in and you know empathizing to sort of change the face of sales maybe stop looking for the same thing and so I think we all just need to have a little bit of a different lens when we look at salespeople [Music] hi everyone good afternoon and welcome to live what marketers live from a Dublin office here today the video you just saw was from our real faces of sales campaign that we ran last year and to hear at the conversation today we're going to have a couple of more words about that video and also the second iteration of it if you haven't seen it or if you missed the start of it you can grab it on YouTube by searching real faces of sales LinkedIn sales navigator so my name is grace McDonald I'm a Content marketer for LinkedIn sales and marketing solutions business based out of our Dublin office I'm really excited today to have two really interesting and strong brand marketers with me on my panel and we're going to talk about brand storytelling especially in a b2b world it's talked about a lot for b2c and not so much for b2b and these guys have real-life experience of how it works before I introduce you to our guests I want to go through some quick housekeeping a couple of different ways you can join the show today first is on on 24 so for anyone on on 24 there is a Q&A panel there where you can add questions to Rash my team are picking those up and feed them to me and I will put them to my guests later in the show if you're on youtube or on LinkedIn live via my own profiler my colleagues profile you can join the conversation still with the hashtag alive what marketers and we would love this to be an engaging conversation please get involved send us feedbacks and as questions thoughts everything we would really really enjoy that okay I'm gonna pass over now and introduce you to my lovely colleagues today so Kevin and Keith thank you so much for being here with me today you're very welcome and I'm glad that you accepted my invite so it's very good and I would love for you to introduce yourselves your role at LinkedIn and I also wanted our audience to get a little bit closer to you and understand a little bit more about what makes you think tick so I gave you some pre-work I asked you to think about a brand that really represents you and bring a prop to show us how why and what it means for you so Kevin if you would like to go first could you introduce yourself sure my name is Kevin Ryan I'm the director of global America for our sales solutions business and our marketing solutions business and I got a bit confused between the prop and the brand I definitely brought a prop and the prop I brought is some fresh money so some fresh honey from from our house we bought a new house and we inherited beehive so I and what I'm looking to do is get some ideas of a brand name for our new honey we want to get about 20 pots so this thing isn't gonna go commercial but I'd love to hear your ideas in the chat and we should call ish I'm gonna give that to you grace I'm on the brand part there's some very interesting brand stories there's Burt's Bees which is an amazing story there's a case study by the Harvard Business Review on when Clorox Bosch Burt's Bees so it's a very kind of fascinating story and then manuka honey and the growth of that from five dollars a table to $75 a table or whatever is now so an interesting industry and um one that represents me I'm a personally somehow I'm not sure but I was trying to see what you would bring in and I'm not surprised now so my name is daya Keith browning and I'm the brand marketing manager for Lincoln sale solutions and marketing solutions like heaven and the brand that I've chosen today I've gone Ferdie probably the opposite end of the spectrum I would say Kevin because I've gone for one of the most recognizable and iconic brands here's a reveal which is McDonald's and the reason I've chosen McDonald's is well a couple of things one I'm loving it so I am loving life but I think when it comes to these kind of conversations of like you know best brands and kind of most innovative brands and you know in any of these conversations I think McDonald's really gets a shout out and but when you see not only how long they've been around but even right now how much they're innovating with technology etc in terms of like the self-serve boots and mock delivery and all of those things also Kevin and there are two gifts in here for your two children Donny and Daisy so late so you can hold on to that so it looks like I'm the only one that didn't get a gift but the detergent final reason that I chose McDonald's is actually because McDonald's was my very first marketing job out of college so it's a it's a place that's still a little bit close to my heart with very first marketing campaign I ever worked on was McDonald's and it was a TV ad which I also have a cameo role in as well so we're so yeah I thought for me shouldn't that I'd like to you wouldn't believe the amount of times I get do you get free McDonald's cuz my name is grace McDonald's or old macdonald had a farm' so to ones that everyone thinks they're really clever and unique so Keith you were just back from can how was it oh yeah cam was amazing yeah and I learned a lot about brands and mainly rose' brands and your hands but no I mean it was it was absolutely fantastic there's a does you know the world's best speakers and brands are out there I got see Rory Sutherland which was a real highlight so Rory Sutherland is he has a really famous TED talk called life lessons from an adman which I'll encourage everybody to check out if you haven't already but yeah he's been on my bucket list for years kind of American speaker so I got the I got to see him for them yeah overall it's an amazing experience we had we had a Swede out there ourselves and yeah just quick great great great experience overall crazy shed look the coverage was amazing from us what was your biggest learning or key takeaway from the week I had a few it was one I think that that sticks out so there's a guy called Richard chaton who wrote a book called the choice factory which is a very kind of behavioral economics but I think one of the things that he talked about was a social psychology idea called the pratfall effect and I really resonated with me because in actual fact if you look across some of the most famous marketing campaigns ever created you see the pratfall effect at play in all of these campaigns or in a lot of the campaigns but a lot of marketers have never heard about this this idea so it's almost hiding a plain sight who to a certain degree and the idea behind a pratfall effect is essentially that we like people a little bit more when they make a mistake or we check we tend to gravitate towards people when they exhibit flaw in some way and brands have just taken this and used it in really interesting ways over the course of the last two decades so you have like Guinness a really iconic Irish brand for a long time their slogan has been good things come to those who wait so the idiotic Guinness takes longer to poured and every other beer again you would think that's a mistake and they might try to hide that but they were upfront about it and in the alcohol industry as well you've got stella artois and similar ting so reassuring the expensive again highlighted the fact that more expensive than most beers and you've got Avis the car rental company one of the most iconic campaigns of all time with the we try harder so we're number two so we try harder literally highlighting the fact that they're not the not the number one but I think that the best example is probably the airline industry and in particular the low-cost carriers in the airline industry so brands like Ryan air and I don't know if you've ever noticed this but they go after way all the time to let you know about the fact that our no-frills to let you know that you don't get a newspaper and you gotta pay extra if you want them to science seed and all of these things and the reason they do that is if they just come out and said you know we're one third of the price of British Airways and you get everything exactly the same and we would have start to to you know consider will where are they saving money then you know where are they maybe they don't train their pilots as well as your airlines or maybe they don't check their engines as regularly or whatever so they come out and they constantly reminders of this idea that actually you don't get a newspaper and you don't get an assigned seat and all of these other things so so you had a platform fact I think is something that if you if you really examine some of them also kind of campaigns of all time you'll see it up play and I think it's one for marketers to look into and think about how they can elevate their campaigns by by using this it's interesting how it's showing up in like the core messages of some of those companies so like the no-frills tagline for Ryan Ayers is like it's gonna square around with that as well and I think we'll be talking about emotion and brand storytelling later and like vulnerability as well as something that's kind of key to that and kind of opens up your brand to engage with people a bit easier as well yeah yeah and they know people people and think if we know that brands are not flawless they know you know we're not perfect and there are some kinks in our armor so one of the other great benefits I suppose off the pratfall effect is that you're actually you're coming out and saying well here's where we're not absolutely perfect and instead of having people wonder and kind of going search for it yeah I think it's interesting all the examples you use there would be to see and it's something I noticed in the coverage I don't know if you notice as well from Karen when I was looking back on the different articles and the analysts that came out there seem to be very little of b2b presence did you notice that when you were on the ground 100% yeah so it's something that I mean I I knew this was coming up today so I actually even made an attempt to go on and hear from as many b2b brands as I could but it's it's a really difficult task they're genuine he just wasn't that much stuff out there and if you look at the awards that the cons lines were to this year it's very slim pickins when it comes to b2b and I saw one of the judges actually come out here today kind of said they think there's a real opportunity next year to try to get more b2b brands kind of taking part and submitting their campaigns for awards but I mean it's something that you and I have experienced over the past couple years a lot yeah definitely so and I speak at b2b nice every year and you know you want to show the best examples for b2b and it's difficult to get to get examples you know I think some stuck up for me in can previous years with the Volvo Trucks work is really interesting I think Adobe always do interesting stuff around b2b and their positioning around you know I'm the marketing hub and stuff with that is always really valuable but it's difficult to find them you know they're not from the center yeah I'm do I hear you did some pretty work anyway for today you didn't just rock up and get mic so that's great so Kevin you have been open meeting a lot of our top marketing solutions or my advertising clients recently do you think that brand is something that they're thinking about now and how important is it for them um so it's definitely top of mind for you when I got speaking at events or if I'm meeting with clients brand is like this kind of a bit of a constant conversation how much should we lean and into it and how do we need to differentiate it from our other b2b tactics so it's top of mind if the question is whether people are heavily investing in brand from a b2b perspective I think we're we're it's improving you know we're on a bit of a kind of a continuum there yeah but I don't think it's reach you know I'm a huge tipping point and there's a piece of research that was fielded a few weeks back by M Binet in fields where the the researchers and Addington were involved as well and talk about lots of different things but stiffly around recommendations on budget and how much budget you should put into your your brands vent and they recommended about 40% compared to your other activities and you know just gonna pulse on that with customers I don't think we're at that point from pure b2b spend add just yet but people are thinking about it strategically as well and I think the pendulum is moving over to more brand brand related stuff at it b2b level it's very difficult like I mean you know marketers do have a have a very challenging job we both come from the demand gen world so we know you know you're you sign up for a number with the sales team you're you know - so much literature out there about sales and marketing alignment making sure you're speaking to sales teams language making sure you're not only signing up for a number but hitting that every quarter so it's you know the short-term thinking is is part of our marketers job and I think that's what the the great thing is about what what you're recommending about what the study shows is that we're not saying you go all to long term it's it's about finding the right balance and you know you can still hit the ground running to a certain degree like I read a start a couple of weeks ago that the average tenure of a CMO is 18 months so you see the need there for marketers to immediately make an impact that you know there isn't time to wait two or three years to show the impact but I think between finding the balance between short and long term is key but also even in the long term the great thing about doing long term work is that it does start to pay off immediately as well maybe not as much as the short-term stuff but it's not something that you have to wait two or three years for if you're doing it right it'll start to pay off immediately as well yeah I think the other thing that came through in that research as well and just as part of the recommendations is if you focus on the long term that would fuel your short term but if you disregard the long term and just focus on the short term that will never build your brand equity or any kind of meaningful connection with your customers so there's a duality to it you need to build up your brand in the long term but you can't lose sight of the important metrics that we know particularly if you're going to be out of a job in you know 18 months or whatever it is you need to be doing both you know it's not a choice between one of the other yeah we are going to talk about how you measure brand a little bit later but I think as well just building on what you guys have said it's about communicating what your sales need your sales teams what you're doing in the brown space in these small wins as well so we're gonna show some campaigns later that Eric smaller wins true I thought Browns story and probably telling people about that and making sure you have the right narrative around it is a big help as well to get them bought in and not just waiting for the bottom line figure which is harder to prove and I guess as well a big question that our audience would have you were coming here today is around b2b brand storytelling b2c brand story talents probably a little bit easier to talk about it's something that we see the whole time where it's everything we ever where we go it's for sauce and advertising everything the whole time how is it different it b2b just standard advertising and what role does brand storytelling type play so I think you know the goal is to build long-term brand equity and get this kind of long-term strategy my team at LinkedIn we have three principles on how we build that equity through use and stories and the three principles for storytelling the first one is people love stories you know that that's the essence of what you need to kind of realize that there's frameworks and strategies for building a really compelling story had the people will engage with the most famous one is the hero's journey kind of popularized by Joseph Campbell at Christopher Vogler wrote kind of a script version of that and that fed into like Star Wars Mad Max is the same framework and the babe series like the baby pig in the city and that actually the same person Roche babe and baby pig in the city has wrote Mad Max a guy called George Miller so the same brain came up with these two completely different words worlds but use the same structure to tell a story that resonates with with people and so bring your customer into that hero's journey bring your product and that hero's journey and people will and recognize the flow of it and engage with it the the second principle is people of true stories is the second principle and I think that's really kind of important nowadays like we're kind of in an era of fake news and you know misinformation that kind of thing also and something I've been following is this rise in documentaries like people are consuming documentaries you know try thing about the last time you sat down to watch just a movie and like you didn't consider some feature-length or 10 episode our Netflix or whatever so I think people are kind of clamoring for a kind of authenticity and truths in what they consume from a marketing perspective movies etc etc so I think you need to be real with your stories I think the third principle then we rely on is if you get the first two right then your community would share those stories for you and do a lot of the advocating and community marketing for you and I think you know brands like dove have done this really well Airbnb more recently a focused on community as well so by focusing on those principles and you create kind of great brand stories as well I think what's what's great about stories as well as opposed to kind of standard advertising as your first question is stories just have this universal appeal like we we as humans we get stories the world over it does a great there's a great book called the seven basic plots by Charlie Brooker and he essentially talks about the fact that you know no matter what our backgrounds our cultures you know age is geography all that kind of stuff and what we're actually seeing is the same seven basic stories being told again and again so whether that's a movie or a child's you know play or it's a TV show or whatever it is that's the same basic story similar to the hero's journey that you were just talking about um and just completely coincidentally last night I saw that somebody had just written an article about this and here's me in the context of marketing so there's a guy called Rob Schwartzman see in New York and he literally just put up a post last night about the seven basic plots and and he talked about you know generally the seven basic plots but also the campaign's that Warnock online last year or last week and which of which is the Plus that they they kind of fall into so just as an example I won't go into all seven but there is if you take rags to riches for example and that's kind of you know those with assessment in you know a story of gone from having nothing to having it all or such which we know in children's stories we know when Disney movies like Cinderella and you see brands like Dre Beats will use this a lot and in a lot of it with the celebrities that they use so our own Conor McGregor was was the feature one and featured celebrity last year and again they told that story of star from these really humble beginnings in South Dublin to becoming kind of what our yesterday and also you see you see you see order plus being being used like together sometimes as well so sometimes you see one plot being used by itself but sometimes there's there's overlap as well and I think the the real face of sales video that you showed at the beginning and I think we've another one lined up and it's a story of rebirth and we yeah we've talked about that a little bit later on I think there's the element of the hero's journey and putting the you know the customer at the center of that as well which works really well with that and the things we're talking about are very kind of you know they seem very lofty and do seem b2c orientated and but the examples we're gonna show today are you know how we're using them to build apart our two brands or brand for sales people and our brand for our marketing people that landed as well so it works for both and Keith I guess to talk a little bit more on that point you were telling me recently about as an experiment that New York Times did to prove the value of storytelling oh yeah yeah don't can you walk us through that because I don't have the details I won't do it justice yeah so it's I only came across this recently but essentially it's a New York Times journalist one he did a study I think is from 2006 from what I remember um but essentially he wanted to prove the value of storytelling so he came up with a really interesting experiment he basically bought two hundred really low value items so low intrinsic value and now these items were like I'm talking about like a motel keycard like a plastic banana like the things that were like basically under $2 I think what was his rule I think the average price turned out to be something like $1 sturdy whatever but basically what he did is he contacted 200 of his colleagues or 200 journalists and he sent them an item each and he asked him to write a story about the item right and send a bathroom and when they sent him back the story he uploaded the he applauded he did this on to ebay so in the description on eBay he put the story along with the item for sale and he made 8 hell's in dollars so we went from something which which cost less than $200 to $1,000 just by attaching a story I locked along with the items so I thought that was a really interesting way of kind of showing the value of stories and the value they can add here but I don't think 200 my colleagues would respond to my request crazy what would you pay for a fast about a given so we've talked a little bit about storytelling and emotion and story talent and how that really is more obvious I guess in a b2c world and I think for me as a Content writer for our LinkedIn marketing and sales solution side of the business it's easy to fall into the trap of writing a brochure you want to talk about features you want to talk about all the good things that you can get from our products unhandy who runs MarketingProfs and she's a brilliant marketer in the States she has this newsletter that comes out every second week called anarchy and if you're not subscribed I would recommend it's very good read it's like a long form but she talks quite often about this guy called Warren Buffett who every year sends a letter to his shareholders he's a financial guy so the letter should be quite technical it's about stop figures and important stuff and but he writes it in the tone that he writes to his sister so it's letters to Doris it's something we're trying to adopt as a Content team now how can we really make sure that when someone receives piece of content from us it's on this personal and emotional level and they know I'm writing to them and I'm not just trying to sell in an old-school way I guess and we're marketing an old-school way I guess what how does emotion play into a b2b brand marketing yeah well first off you put up some great counter as well on their LinkedIn marketing solutions blogs I think everybody should check that out if they get a chance as well no but Rudy there's some great stuff there and a really good balance between you know using b2c practicalities b2b audience and I think there's a few things going on with emotion the reality is with emotion the figures are in that if you've got emotion in your campaign of perform better than a rational campaign so the industry practitioners advertising I've advertised in the IPA will stick on your alcohol team right yeah the IPA they publish this report they do this awards program and they get in loads of vanes in when you look them all by performance and revenue and the campaign's with emotional content perform twice as good as the campaign with purely rational content so that was interested I think people all feel that and know if you kind of get something kind of gets you the gosh that yeah react you know more to us so I could kind of a bit of research into that and there's a famous book by a guy called Daniel Kahneman and he wanna he won a Nobel Prize for his work in heuristics which are kind of like the shortcuts you use when you're making decisions and he talks about two systems of the brain and one is the more rational thinking part and one's the more emotive and the reality is we make the majority of our decisions with this emotional part of our brain you know these kind of we get these cues we make decisions very quickly it's not all the rational stuff and you know I mean at ubirr irrational cxos and VPS of sales and all different types of roles who say you know I make rational decisions data basis your decisions etc etc that's just not accurate you know there's a so much that goes into the decision making process and if you can come up with a campaign that really hits people and emotionally it'll bypass the rational elements and hidden to the emotional part of your decision-making and you know it's frustrating sometimes to see a lot of b2b stuff going out there that's purely rational it's all about the numbers you know it's very um one plus one equals two or a you know compared to B etc etc and features whereas there should be there's room for that depending on the funnel but there should be a more emotional leaning angle to your communications as well from my perspective yeah I think like we know emotions are our play like the b2b b2c whatever you want to call it it's you know we're also people as you hear a lot like human to human people people whatever whatever you want to call it and but I think there is a difference between b2b and b2c in the sense that at other time there are different emotions I played there are still emotions I play but there's just different emotions so if you like I just to give you a really personal example my sister started college a couple years ago and remember she came home with a Mac so like a brand-new Mac kind of thing which he obviously paid it quite a bit you know a price premium for um and she also got a pair of dre beats as well so she's paying a premium for both these products no there's no chance in hell that she taught the best sound quality is gonna come from these rabies or she sat down and meticulous he went through the features of the mat versus your you know laptops and that's why she decided to go with a Mac and we all notice especially as marketers we know the role emotions played indeed PTC she wanted to feel and look cool that was that was more than anything I hope she's not watching this but yeah in in in b2b it might not be so much about looking cool so it's not necessarily those kind of same emotions that are at play but we do we want security we want trust we weren't confidence that we've made the right decision like one of the best b2b campaigns I think I've ever seen is the IBM one from a few years ago nobody ever got fired for buying IBM and I think what's amazing about that is you know you you you imagine you're in that you know but you're in either the buying committee or you are the the head buyer and you're making this decision you go when you buy this on branded product or this little known brand and something goes wrong with it and your boss is like why'd it why the hell did you did you buy that and you're like oh like you know I wanted to save some some car sees like well you know you your cost isn't more in the long term and I think that's the that's the value of a brand and the value of emotions are play in b2b there it's not exactly the same as B to C so there is a difference but it's just different emotions that around play I think in b2b as well you're challenged to be very creative as because you can't just go ahead an or moliro because it does become just a pitch or like this what the benefits are and someone who did this really good recently is HPE with the IT monster I don't know if you've seen that one but basically they created this monster who is going to IT the whole time and he's there beside you every time something goes wrong and it's it's so relatable because all these things do go wrong and work the whole time the printer doesn't work or whatever it is we've all experienced it's all of a sudden I'm in that real-life scenario so yeah you're push to be creative I believe anyway and okay so everyone on the call is one gonna want to know more about behind the scenes of LinkedIn how do we look at brand wash how did we define a brand story and vision for a b2b brand in LinkedIn so the first thing we did two years ago was am we really kind of have made ourselves central to the vision and the vision to values of our business units so I explain what that is it's kind of like if you put everything down in one piece of paper what does your and this is if you're an SMB or your business or an tries for us it's a business unit and you put it all down on one piece of paper what do you stand for and that starts off with a vision which is you know where you want to get to a kind of aspirational view where you want to get to a mission which is how do you get there day to day what do you focus on on how to get there and then usually it's a series of value props around what your product does which kind of uniquely solves and challenges in the world so that's your vision to values and for with brand being the owner of that and the owner of a story that comes out of that which we call the core narrative internally which is like a two pager document that we have for both business units on while we stand for an articulating the whole thing you use that as the jumping-off point for all your brand strategy basically so you get opportunities to create stuff that just isn't about your product only or just the rational elements it's stuff that's more aspirational around your vision or your mission and a practical example of how we did that with a LinkedIn is our our vision for LinkedIn sales solutions is to make salespeople essential partners to buyers so we're able to use that jumping-off point and for a lot of our brand perception campaigns and our brand awareness campaigns and then we're going to show some of them today but it's it's really old and that kind of central purpose for the company and contributing to that and then you've kind of earned you've earned or you've built a strategy that everyone's aligned with so you need everybody to sign off the list in the company product sales marketing etc this is what we're about and then as brand marketers you can say we're gonna create this based off of our mission or vision or whatever it is and that's that's the strategy of a built on strategy versus and I was something really emotional but there's nothing to do with what your brand is about you know what I mean yeah yeah and as far as I can I can give you a really specific example of that so to Kevin's point we have this vision of making sales professionals essential partners to buyers so when the in the LinkedIn sale solutions business line sales professionals are our primary target audience and one of the things I I think that was really getting under our skin in LinkedIn was how sales professionals were represented in in culture so whatever was movies or weather was you know he went onto Google and you typed in sales person he looked at the images or as marketers were on image banks a lot and typing in sales person again somebody images that come back and it's these kind of cheesy buttoned up kind of you know used-car salesman type sales professionals and that was really getting on the rescue him because we knew the reality and so what we decided to do was to tackle that to tackle somebody's misconceptions so the first campaign and that we created to tackle these misconceptions was called the real phases of sales and essentially what we did is we followed some of these amazing sales professionals as they went about their daily lives so whether they were you know working from the office or in a cafe having a meeting or working from home or whatever what they were doing we followed them as they went about their daily lives and we captured some amazing video we captured some amazing images we created a whole film to show the process but we took those images and we just uploaded them to all of these major image banks with the idea being that now when you type in salesperson or now even when you're on Google hopefully eventually and you type in salesperson you're going to start to see our images come up rather than these kind of new sales car salesman type images and we would actually very little budget and just very organically we had over a hundred companies join us in our campaign so companies from like hope spa to fortune to you know Fast Company box come all began to just very organically pick up our images from from the library and when they were talking about sales people they were using our images of real salespeople rather than some of the ones that that were out there before and so that I remember like refreshing Google search on the images hey you know a Fast Company of shared it like yeah I'm sure that like yeah literally change in the face is certainly the most potent container I've ever been appearing off because was really do it there was very little budget put behind a media spend we like we had an idea we knew what we wanted to do and then just kind of overnight out of these companies began to pick it up and yeah and that's a good point around the b2c b2b difference you know we we don't have the b2c budgets but we're trying to achieve b2c goals and ambitions and stuff and that was you know less than you know was a twenty five grand or something that so it can be achieved with you know not so necessarily on a shoestring but you know not massive massive spend as well like the millions you might spend on an ad campaign or whatever yeah examined so so that was like I said that was about probably a year to a year and a half ago at this stage but we're still we're still running with that campaign in a real face of sales and the latest phase and that campaign just dropped a couple of weeks back so the idea of this year's campaign is we want to show sales we want to show the world some of the great some of the some of the great sales professionals out there that are doing really good work and especially how buyers and sellers about in it together yeah great you're gonna owe my dad an apology easy used-car salesman I'm gonna have a text when I go back but we do have the video actually lined up now so I want to show that to everyone and so I'm going to show you now the video real faces of sales phase two at the top of the arrow we showed you phase one and if you want to see that if you would miss the very start just type it into Google geo good sales navigator and able to find it but never play the video I was complaining about my back hurting then orthopedic surgeon told us I would need to get a back brace and just a lot so I deal with compared to like my regular life before [Music] my name's Rob Thompson I'm the Sales Director that unique uniques a company that innovates medical wearables with 3d printing technology we work with key opinion leaders in spinal scoliosis Rob it came to me and said we've got this brace that's going to be thinner lighter more breathable I was very excited and I wanted to hear more [Music] what's important is building trust and collaboration that is absolutely a number one driver a client is coming off the operating table the brace has to be there waiting for him that's called trust that's what you got in a good salesperson is someone that is going to help you solve your problem arrival understands that he knows that what he's doing affects lives not just makes money [Music] for me the compelling piece of this is ensuring that the physicians really get the desired clinical outcomes and that feeling of satisfaction from that I kind of forget about it now it just looks very nice then breathable not a burden to wear and also my soleus has improved a lot that's good I see us as allies and teammates in the care of the patient if we can continue to look toward the future we're going to have better and better outcomes and we're in this together [Music] great so I hope you enjoyed that video we would love to know your feedback on it um I know the first time I saw it was at an all-hands and it was quite emotional actually so a hashtag live at markers if you want to get involved and tell us what he thought of either the videos or the conversation so far so neither of you guys started your LinkedIn journey or your marketing journey as brand marketers can you tell me Keith where did you start and what has your journey looked like yeah I started in Andaman Jen at least from from a LinkedIn perspective and that's what I did for the first couple of years before moving into brand and really what let's word is I guess we were at a stage in the business where we had pretty much only been focusing on demand Jen so we hadn't really we had never run a brand campaign we had never really thought beyond this quarter as such and we knew from our very first brand Frakker that we had an issue or a challenge with unaided brand awareness so essentially what we and what we realized is that actually we need to start focusing a little bit longer term now and that turned into at first for me was a brand project so I was like okay we got to set up this longer term brand campaign and then it turned into a full-time role and now it's turned into kind of a full-time team but it was really just I guess and moving from dg2 to brand was just it was it was the right time for the business for us to start kind of looking at this stuff and yeah I guess it was certainly wheels under right place at the right time yeah I think so so I was in demand gen as well prior to that for about 10 years and the opportunity came up came up to build out a mera kaam function for the sale solutions and marketing solutions business which was kind of an amazing opportunity and the most amazing thing about it was I was kind of given a blank canvas to work out how how brand should work with various other elements of the business and it became very clear earlier on and that we really wanted our you know brand at the center of what that team would look like so Brad been responsible for you know what we say the stories we tell et cetera how we say it somewhat the brand tone voices and getting consistency around that and then to make a success of that you need some way to amplify that so the team that is a also component my team is content and social rounded as well so we use kind of our internal channels our own content to amplify those brand stories and then the final product we brought into it and build out and which wasn't a team that we had at all at the time was community so thinking back to our principles around you know how do you engage your community or people love to share stories we really focused in on who the organization's people customers that we want to partner with to help tell a bigger story and share what LinkedIn can offer to sales people and marketing people so we partnered with lots of our analysts also with our customers and and influencers well influencers as well how do we bring influencers into and that kind of a structure of brand at the center and expanding out so that's kind of the makeup of my team I think the important part there was just really emphasizing how structural brand was - and I sent the foundation for the team yeah I don't know if you guys agree with me but I think that every brand content marketer community anyone should do it to reduce your ugly shadow someone in demand gen and their SD team as well the closer you can get to that bottom line figure I'm like what sales really really care about it's easier to have conversations and speak the same language is good so you have the right structure in place the right strategy and then - kind of accumulated in your first sales navigator brand campaign which is get closer I think we have actually the first print media and campaign we were on under - there yeah so so this is this is get closer - right people which is our very first ever brand awareness campaign within the b2b portion at least of LinkedIn and it was for for LinkedIn sales navigator our sales product and I guess you know did I mentioned earlier on the challenge that we had that we were trying to overcome was ornated brand awareness so we knew that donated brand awareness was at a really low level and that was what the campaign set out to to overcome I guess um would you quickly just explain unaided and aided awareness just to make sure everyone on the call is yeah the same same sheesh I guess absolutely yeah so I guess the difference is it's really if you take the soft drink industry for example and I say to you right now grace have you heard of coca-cola yeah have you heard of Fanta have you heard of 7up yes so what that is is a DAT brand awareness good good yeah we would have been having some quiet time there but yeah so that's a different awareness so I've literally given you the prompts or the brands and you said yes I've heard of those the difference with an Oneida brand awareness is that I don't give you those prompts essentially so I say what are the top you know three or four soft drinks that come to mind I knew then would say something like I'm sure I think it's an obscure but so it's more that like top of mind awareness so you're not getting any prompts yeah mmm so that's essentially did the difference between the two so yeah they get closer campaign and the the objective was to try to overcome that kind of low on it awareness challenge that we had and yeah it was I mean if you look at the creative we've actually moved on the campaign is like probably about 18 months old at this stage and so if you look at where we were before and where we've kind of gone to and I think that the first change that we made is we actually introduced people so as simple as it might seem if you look at our marketing before this campaign it was basically kind of technology shots it was very very rarely people in them so really trying to humanize the brand by bringing real LinkedIn members so so these guys this is Peter in this example is a real LinkedIn member and he's a buyer so we captured some amazing photography and the tagline is get closer to right people because we feel that does a good job at summing up the value proposition of our sales navigator so it's about getting closer to buyers and getting closer to your customers and getting closer to your own sales team so we think get closer to the right people some set up quite well um and I mean so many other things that work that were called out about the campaign and this was actually quite unintentional but sales people really liked the black and white coloring actually because they talked about sales being a black and white business so sales is kind of a business where you either hit your code or you don't at the end of every quarter so yeah that was the that was the very first campaign yeah just to add I think am from a brand strategy perspective we're talking with the vision and mission and how the video was tied into that like you said get close to the right people is just purely around your value props and if you want to build awareness for your product you lean into what your value props but getting that clarity around the vision to values was kind of just hugely important and for making that campaign come to life the other thing just to hit on something else we talked about is using real buyers and real customers in the shots and everything so yeah using stock for this just wouldn't have worked you know it's back to like people want that authenticity shining truth through they want you know the people to reflect what they look like for a symptom just too glamorous etc etc and so that was really steeped in that kind of principle we had around there yeah ten real stories ok let's talk a little bit of media planning so we have a sea of print here we've shown a couple of videos what does a standard media boy look for you guys so the the basis of our of all our brand efforts is LinkedIn first you know using our own our own platform we're building a b2b brand you know we're building b2b brands so you know of course you go to the the platform that's for b2b professionals with the most b2b professionals and on LinkedIn so we start there we had a vent in London about three weeks ago and Mark Ritson and you know huge e knowledgeable marketing contributor and thought leader was asked the same question and he led with LinkedIn as well you know it's a great place to start building that brand equity and you could do tons on there and to build up your brand versus you know the you know high profile billboard ads and stuff you can engage with your community start talking about what your key messages are what your company aspirations are and all that good stuff as well but we do extend outside of LinkedIn as well Keith's body knows yeah well we're getting too into the weeds I guess of a media planner I'll talk about some general principles so I guess the first one is when you're thinking about longer term campaigns and you're thinking about brand you really got a tink broad in terms of your targeting so I think people get especially in b2b they go into this really like I retired in kind of mine frame and that's that's okay to a certain degree especially when it comes to demand gen but you're never gonna grow your brand if you don't go beyond that base and I think that's one of the things that we learn done Kevin you talked about LinkedIn LinkedIn is an amazing place for that obviously it might feel slightly self-serving but it really is when you talk about b2b because you want to go if our in this instance primary audience are sales professionals you also want to think about the other people into buying committee that are influencing that decision and you even want to think of people who maybe are not sales decision-makers now but they might be in a year's time so you got to go abroad what your targeting I think is a really important element another principle that we had picky when it came to buying media was and picked the right moments so again when you're doing digital and it's maybe a little bit easier to to to target or to get caught up in that game and it's it's very difficult to imagine how you might kind of start to broaden that out we're now having a lot of wastage and I think that the way that we overcame that was to pick the right moments so the article that I held up there and a moment ago is from The Times UK so every year they put out a supplement for salespeople so that's an example of those picking the right moments we're not we're not doing a mass of print media by were picking a moment when we feel our audience and somebody other people in the buying committee would be reading something like that and another example is we did some out of home so we did billboards but again we're not doing a massive billboard buy in dozens of cities where there would be a huge amount of wastage there has to be a certain other way such you know the cent degree but what we did in in in in terms of out of home was and we picked events where there was gonna be a lot of sales professionals gathering or gathering around a particular City at a particular time and undocked when we chose to do out of home so picking the right moments I think is a key media principle particular when it comes to b2b yeah and we've we've kind of experimented with and you know picking the right moments location as well you know we have focused in on certain core markets and I think it's important to get tight on you know where you want you know to increase awareness instead of trying to do is everywhere is important and then there's certain locations like airports where you know is going to be done throughput for a certain level of traveler and that kind of thing as well so there's there's a lot more ways now to get a more targeted with your even you're out at home and billboards and stuff as well and even over the past two or three years since we've been thinking about this and stuff yeah great and I guess the big question a lot of people on the call are gonna have is how do you measure how do you bring this all together you're talking about smaller budgets than b2c choosing the right moments how do you report back to the business what what do you polish yeah so I think yeah so we've we've developed a method I guess which is pretty comprehensive for measuring brand stuff over the past 18 months or so I think just probably fit in nicely to tree buckets I would say so the first is probably the stuff that you'll be most familiar with so it's like you know how many leads are we bringing in are those leads converting into qualified leads or you know eventually kind of booking stones down the road and and even things like click-through rate and open rate and all of those so just monitoring is - is the creative working our leads coming in even though lead generation is not the primary objective of the campaign you still want to monitor the stuff because as I said it's it's gonna have an impact there as well on the short-term and so that's number one number two then is we started a brand tracker so we do this bran tracker and two times a year which measures everything from kind of you know familiarity to awareness to sentiment all these kind of things but it's essentially a long-term it's it's it's a measure of the long-term health of your brand so it's not something that it's gonna be campaign specific necessarily but if you're focused in on something like or nighted awareness you hope to see that over time you'll start to see the needle move on that in your your brand tracker so yeah that goes into field regardless of whether we're running a campaign an app that goes in the field twice a year and then deterred and kind of final when I guess is we run ad effectiveness studies as well so there's companies like Nielsen like interpret who will run effectiveness studies where they'll kind of find a group that they know we've been exposed to the campaign and compared them with a control group essentially and you get to see the differences between the two so unlike the brand track which isn't specifically tied to a campaign a defective the studies are so even if you haven't moved the needle in the whole world as such you might kind of say okay but among the people I was able to reach did a campaign have an impact and there's a lot of channels as well like just you know Facebook and Google and a lot of companies will give these brand lift studies as well which are quite channel specific so we will use those as well okay great so I'm gonna wrap up there and switch over to live Q&A from our audience in one word or a very quick sentence because we actually have gone a little bit over the time I want to leave a little bit more time for Q&A what's the key takeaway you would like the audience to walk away with today I have two quick ones really quick so the first one M is about this realness in your campaigns like the authenticity and as I said you know with fake news and and you know the Roy's dog there's so many signals the people are craving truth and reality in their campaigns so I think if you stick to that you can't go wrong and get your customers in there you know in your campaigns is a huge step towards that the second one is I think the pendulum is shifting Pam I think we you know it's maybe not the last three or four years but maybe the ten years before that we went completely over to a data-driven and metrics orientated view of the world and I think marketing technology drove that but I think we need to kind of let the pendulum swing back a bit and make sure we've got the right mix of kind of creativity marketing principles along with all the great kind of data analytics and chops as well and four people are hiring out there I think if you can you know look for people from the creative arts or I've worked in agency or whatever even if it's an intern for six months I think your mind will be blown by what they'll bring to your campaigns and your creativity so that would be my my two three years I had a time to think of my own psyche I would say getting the right systems and structures into place is probably the key lesson I've had over the past kind of 18 months or so so and getting very clear about what your challenges so do you have a perception issue do you have a where an associate whatever it is but just getting very clear and which usually comes by putting the right measures into place and yeah and getting very clear in your objective den so if you've got a challenge with or neither awareness or whatever it is and being very clear that that's the objective of your campaign putting the right KPIs in place and just having the right measures then to be able to measure that it's a little bit more complicated as we mentioned when it comes to brand because it's a little bit longer term so I think even more so than demand generation you need to make sure that you have a way to be able to measure the impact in the short medium and long term great thank you so much I hope they're helpful for the audience and are you guys okay for us to switch over to a quick live Q&A yeah okay as a reminder everyone if you would like to get involved in the QA on on 24 you can do that in the Q&A box which my team is monitoring and you can also get involved if you're on YouTube or LinkedIn live with a hashtag live at marketers we do just have a quick ten minutes so I'm going to fly to some will keep our answers short and sweet okay I don't yeah I don't think they know okay one thing we didn't hit on was brown purpose and it's something that's shown around a lot some people think it's a buzz word some people think it's really really important at the moment what does that mean in b2b if I was good to you Keith and I think what purpose is kind of a hot topic actually so it's for me we probably need a whole hour I think to dissect that one but I think if I if I had to be quite concise I think just making sure you're being authentic um it's a really big one there's a lot of brands that were founded based on a purpose sort of hole positioning a space around the purpose so whether it's like toms or Ben and Jerry's or those kind of brands but I think without calling out any specific brands I think what's happened a lot very recently is you get a lot of these brands who never had any sense of this kind of altruistic like purpose who are kind of tacking on a purpose almost and I think it's coming across quite inauthentic and yeah we've seen we've seen examples of this I think in in in the past couple years brands who try to do brand purpose and just didn't get it right so some of the classic failings would be like Pepsi Starbucks to a certain degree and I don't think that you know they've both come out and admitted up and themselves but yeah I think being authentic and understanding your brand is important yeah I think the flipside of having you know a really involved community is there can be a backlash yeah if something doesn't feel right to them as well so mission and vision and having that clarity from everyone in the business that's the starting point for purpose instead of coming up with a purpose you know because that's easy too and that's what it's not I'm gonna be long-term or meaningful yeah and I'm delighted to see we actually hit a couple of people's questions here so Adam was asked about how do we measure brand strategy success so it's great we already hit that one names from my honey no I haven't been sent on your names with honey we'll do that as a follow-up a fast follow after how much how much are you gonna pay not gonna come for free and another one here is around the biggest learning or challenge in the last two years because this is obviously something you did net new there was no standard to go against in LinkedIn I think the biggest learning would be I think the tracking like you have to earn you have to earn credibility and the ability to invest in brand efforts and until you get like the tracking and so tight that you build up you know these bulletproof business cases they can go up against Adam and Jen a score a partner marketing ask for whatever it is it's very difficult to kind of get that momentum and I'm glad to say we've kind of crossed that hump now and we got to realize that we needed to bulk out the tracking and the metrics and after a couple of months so I think that was the biggest learning I'd have versus kind of a challenge yeah okay I think from for me just add a quick one on it's the challenge between needing to think broad in terms of your targeting but also making sure that you don't spread yourself to 10 as well so when we set out to lunch get closer to the right people we were calling it a global brand campaign and we had these ideas that it was going to go into every country in the world so if I'd add and then then you get your media budget and you realize actually we're not gonna be able to have an impact if we just spread ourselves to two Tinley so it's about kind of focusing in that's Kevin's editor on on a number of key markets but once you focus in in those markets well then you can go more broadly and think outside your primary audience so just getting that right I think it has been probably the biggest challenge and learning great and there's a great question here from Laura around examples of great b2b storytelling by SMEs so one for me would be drift Wistia they're two tech of video brands that are doing really really good bad storytelling in the b2b space but I would say I'm gonna guess on quite minimal budgets they're doing it in a very scrappy way has anyone spring to mind if you were to name one SME brand there is a company that we're working with called Schuster and they do live video and they try and come in and train you up no I use live video and the the purchasing process that I was brought through as a buyer and the stories they told in that and how even the person that sold in to us came in and told the story on the day and how that's reflected on their site and stuff I thought was kind of best practice for that so I'd be the one that ID and it stands up to me yeah Schuster okay and then I mean go final question here and I think it's an interesting one especially as at LinkedIn we're very much about personal brand and we think that our LinkedIn profile can really help you build an authority in your industry or in your sector so how much of what we've talked about in the last hour applies to personal around good question I think a lot of it can be applied actually I've done a couple of presentations myself on kind of building a professional brand and what's funny is probably the most common question you get asked is do I need a professional brand I do we need to have one it's not a case of whether you need to have no not you already do have one it's whether you're going to actually proactively choose to manage it or not and when it when it does come to managing your brand again we could get into a few different areas but I think and LinkedIn is obviously as the largest professional network in the world is obviously a great place to start and you can you should see your profile essentially as a blank canvas think about some of the dynamic content that you can that you can share that really shows off your personality and your brand whether it's videos or whether it's like Doc's that you want to upload think about the your profile photo think about the the the background image and actually another one that that's really important is having other people tell your story so that's a great storytelling principle as well so I'm LinkedIn that can come in the form of recommendations or endorsements and so we're you know we're much more likely to believe Trip Advisor than a hotel themselves or Amazon reviews etc so when you have other people telling your story it tends to be believed even even more than when you're telling yourself I think there's loads of stuff that's applicable I went to a presentation it was like it a kind of a leadership kind of coaching session and a guy called Brendan Meyer who is the the captain of the temporary hurling team a lot of people might know what hurling is but it's a sport we play in Ireland and you know a you know tough sportsmen character and he spoke about his values and the process he went through to identify identify his values and I honestly think you can set out your own vision your own mish like where you want to be how are you gonna get there what your values are you know um you know be ish I'm gonna be you know my you know optimistic I'm gonna be whatever your values are and it'll become a reality you've got some kind of a structure about your own brand so I think it's a such crossover they're actually you know if you post on that but they're yeah I think I think they're Rudy is I hadn't thought of a question before but I think Carla's here yeah and great guys I'm gonna wrap up there thank you so much for coming in today I'm yes okay see I was like there's names for money so a couple of honey names have come in wild bee to bee honey bee to bee harvest better buzz honey so Kevin I'm gonna let you think about those have a think about it let me know which one you decide is the best and will actually send that person a LinkedIn goodie bag with a jar of honey hopefully and so great thank you again guys I really enjoyed the discussion and everyone thank you so much for being here with us today we've really really enjoyed it it has taken a huge crew to get this whole thing set up today so I want to say a huge thank you to everyone you can't see behind the scenes and we really enjoyed it if you have any feedback please let us know on hashtag live or what marketers I will put up a little post somewhere to let you know what Kevin decided on the honey as well so thank you so much guys have a great day [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Views: 3,362

Keywords: linkedin, linkedin marketing solutions, social media, marketing

Id: 3UZ2ZF6w1PY

Length: 62min 14sec (3734 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2019