Did you know that the average person encounters around 10,000 online marketing messages every single day?
That’s right, 10,000.
That doesn’t even count offline marketing messages we encounter: logos, product labels, billboards... the list goes on.
With stats like this, we can’t stress enough how important it is to generate creative and engaging marketing content, especially in the B2B space.
If your marketing is dull and uninspiring, it’s bound to get lost in the sea of the thousands of other marketing messages your consumers are encountering every day.
Don’t let that happen to you!
Ido Sarig, CMO of Indiggo, met up with Caroline S Lane to demonstrate the value of creativity in B2B growth marketing, and how to execute on it, even if you’re not the most creative person.
Take just a few minutes to learn:
Why creativity in your B2B marketing can help your company stand out (and some examples of successful campaigns)
The skills necessary for creating and executing an innovative marketing campaign
How to attract and hire the team necessary to support your strategies
Looking to shake up your B2B marketing materials? Tune in now to get inspired!
CAROLINE: Hi. Today I am here with Ido Sarig. Ido has led marketing for multiple companies and advised multiple companies as well. And today he's the CMO of Indiggo. Ido thank you so much for being with me today.
IDO: Well thank you very much for having me, Caroline. It's a pleasure.
CAROLINE: So today we're gonna talk about quite an exciting topic. We're gonna talk about creativity and marketing, and it's not always easy to be creative, especially in the B2B space where it's not necessarily usual to see creative campaigns. And so, my question for you is why is it, why is it important to be creative in marketing, even if you are in B2B, and how can marketers produce creative campaigns even if they don't feel like they are themselves a creative person?
IDO: Sure. So, I think it's very important to be creative, not even in B2B but especially in B2B. There's two main reasons why it's important. The first one is, we are today bombarded by marketing messages. I think recent estimates that I've seen that the average person is exposed to between 40,000 and 60,000 marketing messages a day, of which online advertising accounts for at least 10,000 ads that we see while we're browsing the web. And this also includes things like product labels, TV commercials, product placements in movies, sports team logos and so on. If you're exposed to that many marketing messages a day, and you as a marketer wants to have your brands stand out, you wanna rise above the noise and be noticed, you have to be different. And that's by definition if you're gonna be doing something similar to what everybody else is, you're not different. And being different requires creativity.
And to put these in concrete terms, if you're a CMO of a B2B IT company, and every B2B IT company in your space has a website that uses stock photos of what I like to call shiny, happy people smiling as they work in an office. Or maybe they have a revolving carousel of impersonal graphics that have geometric shapes and arrows and networks, you're not going to stand out by doing something similar to that. But you know what does stand out? What if I put a big bold high-risk picture of a chimpanzee and I set it against the bright orange background, and this is something I did for a software company called BDNA or where I was previously the CMO. That catches your eye, that makes you go, "Hmm, what does that chimpanzee have to do with software for IT as discovery?" And now I've hooked you with the creative high-risk imagery. And I have a chance to use DNA as a metaphor. A small change in DNA makes a big difference in outcomes, that's true in genetics. Humans and chimpanzees are almost 99% identical in DNA but the 1% makes a difference. And that holds true in IT infrastructure as well. But you've got to be able to pick up on those differences and this is what BDNA does and then the name plays on the DNA as well. The second reason is creativity enables you if you are a smaller company, it enables you to compete cost-effectively with better resource companies. I don't know if you're a sports fan if you watched the recent Super Bowl, but you probably know that the Super Bowl is not just the highlights of the football season. It's also in many respects the highlights of the advertising season where all advertisers put
their best minds to work on creating creative ad.
CAROLINE: Yeah.
IDO: If I asked you which ads, do you remember today, two months after the event, I'm willing to bet that one of those ads would be the oatmeal commercial which was very creative. It had the CEO of a company standing in a field playing an organ and singing about his company. That's unusual.Or maybe you remember Reddit's five second ad where the creativity was in the format. Just 5 seconds versus the traditional 30 or 1 minute, 30 seconds second format. And that is what creativity does. It enables a small company with a small marketing budget to stand out because I'm willing to bet that it works better than the millions that was spent by bigger brands like Michelob Pringles. And I'm pretty sure you don't remember what their ad was all about. And in the B2B space I think it works very similarly. If every company in your space is for example, exhibiting at a big trade show like CS or RSA, if you do the exact same thing, you're gonna rent a booth, you get lost, you get lost. Those shows are a zoo, and you will be dwarfed by the big spenders. You're not gonna be able to compete with IBM or HP or RSA themselves because they can afford to buy the biggest booth space and have dancing girls and race cars. But if instead you take your marketing budget and not even participate in that show at all, and you put it into something like a traveling trade show, you put the booth inside a semi-trailer truck, and you drive that truck around to your most strategic customers and you do half day workshops in their backyard, in their parking lot, then you stand out and you do so with a much smaller budget. And that's a very creative idea that was used by my former colleague at Wendover, Michael McCabe who was the CMO there.
CAROLINE: All right. Let's… Yeah, so I love to think about how creativity not only can make you stand out but can be much more effective in your communication. And when you talk about the Reddit ad right, everybody was talking about the Reddit ad. Not only did they get the attention of people at the moment, but then it generated that attention in the long term, right? Because people were shocked. People were like, oh, this is new, this is different. And everybody talked about it. So, yeah.
IDO: Absolutely. And then the second part of your question is, you know, do you have to be creative to produce creative marketing? And I think you know, it of course helps if you personally are a very creative person. But I don't think it's a must have for the CMO. I'm thinking about myself. I don't think I would rank creativity as one of my top three strengths. But what is important are three other things. One is you need to first of all recognize the importance of creativity. Number two, you need to be able if you're not creative yourself, you need to be able to attract creative employees to work for you on creative ideas or maybe find creative agencies as an outsource resource. And you need to be able to recognize the creative ideas when you see them. And three, almost as important, once you have a creative asset you need to be able to make the most of it. And I think I tick all of these three boxes without being the most creative person in the world myself. And I'll use my current company Indiggo as an example. Videos that explain what a company does are all the rage these days. They are very popular, almost every company has them on their website. And we do too. But instead of having the usual animated graphic, which is a two minute explainer video with animated graphics, we have something creative and something a little bit different.
We have a video that features live professional actors with some professional, with some computer generated animation that in terms of messaging what it does is it plays on the multiple meanings of "ball". We have multiple balls in the air as a metaphor for having too many tasks and possibly dropping them. And this is the problem that we actually solve as a company so it's part of our main messaging. But "balls" also is an idiom for courage or guts, and "balls" has a third meaning as a slang term for testicles. And that piece, that last piece is a little bit edgy, right? It might even put some people; it might even put some people off. But it actually works because it is different and because it is edgy. And in fact, I think when you first contacted me to do this podcast, that was the one thing that caught your eye.
Now I didn't create that video. It was already there when I joined the company. But what I did was recognize the value of this unique creative ad asset and now I make the most out of it. So, when we redesigned our website, I made sure that it was front and center on our homepage. When LinkedIn enabled companies to have a featured product on their product page, I made this the featured video on our LinkedIn page. I made it part of my own LinkedIn profile. I put it on YouTube, I shared it on Facebook. And once this podcast goes live, I'll be sure to promote this podcast. And I will drive people who will want to see what I'm talking about on Indiggo.ai which is our website.
CAROLINE: Right, so and I would encourage everybody to go and look at this video because it really stands out, it's very different, and it really makes you think of, it has the same vibe as like BGC videos that you could see on TV and you're like, "what is this about?" Right? Like what's happening and it's intriguing and it's fun and I mean, I'm sure that you get reactions from it one way or another and so you stand out, right, and people remember you so, yeah thank you for sharing all of this with us. Again, to the viewers please go and watch the video it's really worth it. And Ido, thank you so much for being here today. Really appreciate it.
IDO: Thank you very much Caroline, I enjoyed doing this.