Will B2B mean 'Back-2-Back' for this year's DMA Awards' Grand Prix winner?

Scott Stockwell, B2B Council Chair and Founder, Workmatik:

With B2B taking the DMA’s prestigious Grand Prix award, and Tom Stein, Cannes’ Creative B2B Lions Jury President declaring “it’s just the best category...it’s audacious” this might just be the year when B2B means Back-2-Back. Now the DMA Awards are open for entries, we - the DMA's B2B Council - reflected on what sets that work apart and makes it audacious.

Strategy

Claire Wood, B2B Council Co-Chair and Chief of Staff and Marketing Services Director (Central Business Services), Deloitte:

Every award-winning campaign starts with strategy. Whether it’s Account-Based Marketing (ABM), or an entire marketing campaign, your strategy should encompass the same core components.

You must know your market. A thorough analysis of your targets, including demographics, preferences, and behaviour helps you understand your customers' needs and how to reach them. Microsoft Xbox’s 2018 winning campaign surfaced and provided insight into gamers’ desire to personalise their controllers. The campaign took this insight and developed a capability that ultimately delivered a marketplace where the best handsets could generate benefits for their designers. where the best handsets could generate benefits for their designers.

Clear, marketing objectives must align with business goals and be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Channels to reach your audiences come next including social media, email, experiential, content marketing and advertising. Tailoring messages and content to each channel maximises your impact. As they say, “what’s measured or rewarded gets done”, so use your data and analytics to track your performance and adapt your campaign for continuous improvement.

To set yourself apart from your competitors you must communicate your unique selling proposition (USP) effectively by understanding your brand's strengths and what sets it apart in the market. Consider your customers’ journeys and make sure your marketing strategy addresses every stage from awareness to conversion and retention.

If you’re ABM or relationship marketing, invest in personalised experiences. Provide valuable content. Nurture customer relationships. Finally, regularly review and adapt your marketing strategy based on performance data, market trends, and feedback from customers and stakeholders. Flexibility and agility are key to maintaining a robust marketing strategy in an ever-evolving business landscape.

Creativity

Bindi Sharma, B2B Councillor and Business Partner, RAPP

B2B communications are often perceived as rigid and transactional but can be transformed into a dynamic force through a creative lens. By infusing storytelling, design, and emotion, businesses can craft compelling narratives that resonate deeply with their audiences.

Creative B2B communications go beyond the mundane. They turn data into stories and value propositions into memorable experiences. This approach captures attention and builds trust and long-lasting relationships. It humanises the exchange and reflects a deep understanding of the users’ needs and aspirations. You might say the approach and thinking of how B2B and B2C communications are developed have converged

Toolstation’s 2022 Gold B2B entry demonstrated this perfectly. It started with data-driven insight into their trade audience. They took a more B2C approach in their app, using ‘movie inspiring’ typography and short, sharp compelling copy. They added a dash of humour, which was well received by their trade targets. The creative adapted to dwell time, channel and each customer's place in the purchase journey. They ensured customers were captured via a suite of multichannel, contextualised communications that travelled with them from website to store car park to point of purchase.

In a world crowded with information, creativity becomes the key differentiator that elevates B2B communications from mere transactions to impactful connections.

Results

Grace MacDonald, B2B Councillor and Manager II (Business Marketing Lead UK), Pinterest:

You’ve started with your strategy. You’ve found insight in your data, and you’ve crafted your creative approach. It’s time for results. B2B engagements are generally a larger scale than B2C and so too needs to be your measurement attribution windows. As Les Binet & Peter Field have stated in their research, it’s critical to take a combined short and long-term approach to measurement and results. As B2B sales cycles tend to be long and complex, it's near impossible to evaluate the impact of a B2B campaign once it has completed. You rarely experience the marketing dopamine hit of ‘click-to-cart’ that direct to consumer brands enjoy.

There’s always a short-term engagement and long-term business impact story to tell. Royal Mail’s B2B Gold and 2023 Grand Prix winning campaign’s hyper-targeted ABM direct mail showed this. Knowing this campaign did not expect an immediate fiscal return the team focused on three metrics: engagement (% of the brands scanned the QR codes on the boxes to visit the landing page), relationships (meaningful contact with 100% of the target brands and booked), and business impact (sales pipeline opportunity, as a result of the opened doors, is around 346 times the cost of the campaign activity).

It takes a multifaceted approach that goes beyond traditional metrics to prove B2B marketing results. Royal Mail’s highly effective method used ABM to focus on personalised campaigns for specific high-value accounts. This allowed marketers to track engagement at a granular level and provided insights into how specific accounts were interacting with the campaign.

Advanced analytics and data visualisation tools can help prove B2B marketing results significantly. They identify patterns and trends that are not immediately apparent using traditional reporting methods. Predictive analytics can forecast future trends based on historical data which helps marketers adjust their strategies proactively. By combining these advanced tools with a long-term measurement approach, B2B marketers can demonstrate the immediate impact of their campaigns and provide evidence of sustained business growth and ROI.

To create award-winning B2B campaigns, start with a robust strategy, inject creativity into your communications, and focus on measurable results. Use data and analytics to continuously refine your approach, ensuring your marketing is both impactful and aligned with your business objectives. Microsoft's Xbox campaign identified gamers' desire for personalized experiences; Toolstation leveraged data-driven insights to engage their trade audience with humour across multiple channels; and Royal Mail’s ABM campaign focused on hyper-targeted engagement and measurable business outcomes. Implement these principles, and you’ll be three steps closer to creating impactful marketing efforts. If you’re already doing this and more, enter the DMA Awards and try to make it a Back-2-Back year for B2B.

This piece was written by members of the DMA’s B2B Council. You can apply to join the community here – contact the team for more details.