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16: Why Most B2B Advertising Fails: Buying Journey Misalignment and Attention Repellent Ads (Problemotional Advertising)
49 Plays11 months ago
Why are B2B Problemotional Ads needed? What is Buying Journey Alignment? What are Attention Repellent Ads? What causes most B2B ads to waste ad budget? In this episode, Dylan records reading from our research article on a massive problem in B2B advertising we've found. If you prefer to watch the video or read the article, click here:
https://blackcamel.agency/humphub-research/why-most-b2b-advertising-fails-in-2024/
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Transcript
Introduction and Bookmarking Tips
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, what's up, guys? This is the video and audio version of the article below the exact same content, except that I'm reading it out. And depending on how you prefer to consume content, perhaps this is a better way for you to do that. Otherwise, you can just read the article below. You don't have the time to watch or read the article. I suggest that you bookmark it for later when you're planning your B2B ad campaign. All right, here we go.
Challenges in B2B Advertising
00:00:24
Speaker
CMO, VP of Marketing, Marketer. B2B advertising has a massive problem. And if the problem is left unsolved in your advertising campaign, you'll face ad budget waste, spending money on ads that aren't maximizing the ROI. At the ad level, it results in lower click-through rate, higher cost per impression, higher cost per click. And at the campaign level, it results in fewer high intent and qualified inbound calls, lower win rate, longer sales cycle, all of which leads to higher customer acquisition costs and ad budget waste.
00:00:56
Speaker
These are all very common symptoms of the problem. This problem is why your leads, if you can call them that, don't have any intent to buy. It's why you're seen as just another of the same thing in your category. It's why buyers feel no urgency and reschedule sales calls. It's why sales team close on average 1 out of 1000 leads from a LinkedIn lead gen campaign. It's why only 11% of B2B organizations are satisfied with their current PR and marketing agencies. So what's the problem? Most B2B companies use attention repellent ads in their top of funnel, causing their campaigns to be ignored. And because most of the could-be buyers ignore your ads, you end up with ad budget waste. So what's an attention repellent ad, or AR ad for short?
Impact of Attention Repellent Ads
00:01:38
Speaker
Exactly what the word says. An advertisement that not only doesn't attract attention, it actually repels it. It sends people in the opposite direction. People aren't just indifferent to your ads, they actually perceive them and your company negatively.
00:01:50
Speaker
Your ads are like fingernails scratching on a chalkboard. And when your ads don't attract attention nor keep it, it doesn't matter how valuable your service or product is, how amazing your offer is, or that you've invented something completely new and groundbreaking. That's because in marketing, the reality doesn't matter. Only the perceived reality matters. Attention is the first step to changing someone's perception, initiating their buying journey. Attention is the first step that cannot be skipped. Advertising is a battle for perception, but perception can't be changed if no one is paying attention. Welcome to Ignoredville, the number one destination for advertisements that no one sees or remembers. Town Square is packed with flyers and posters, fluttering in the breeze, each one a desperate plea for attention that never comes. The digital screens flash and dance, but they're just background noise to the bustling crowds. The way that attention-repellent ads get you sent to Ignoredville
00:02:42
Speaker
happens in two ways. Your ads are too mind-numbingly emotionless to be consumed and remembered, or your ads market the solution before marketing the problem.
Aligning Ads with Buyer's Journey
00:02:53
Speaker
The reason AR ads are problematic is that they're missing buying journey alignment. So from our research on the B2B buying journey, the first message buyers should see is about the problem, and it should be communicated in an emotional way. Later on in the journey, it should become more solution focused and communicated in a rational way. An easy way to remember this, the ad message changes along with buyer's awareness, from problem focused to solution focused. The ad medium changes along with buyer's decision making, from emotional to rational. Just to be clear, ads that market the solution in a rational way are not the problem itself.
00:03:29
Speaker
It only becomes problematic when these types of ads are used in the top of funnel, or in a loose sense, the first thing that people are seeing from your brand. Top of funnel ads instead need to market the problem in an emotional way. So before I explain what attention repellent ads look like, how they'll waste you hundreds of thousands of dollars, and how they'll get you fired from your CMO position, you first have to understand why advertising of 2024 is nothing like advertising of the past.
Evolution of Advertising Overload
00:03:57
Speaker
Let's rewind to 1980. The Godfathers of Positioning, Al Rice and Jack Trout, published their book called Positioning, The Battle for Your Mind. They studied hundreds of businesses and their products. Why some succeeded and most failed. And through their studies, they recognized a new phenomenon in the 70s that didn't exist in the 50s and 60s. Modern buyers suffer from ad overload. They realized, thanks to technological advancements, people were being bombarded with more advertisements than ever. They had new access to huge amounts of information
00:04:26
Speaker
Thousands of new businesses were popping up, all making the same promises. This was a change that they recognized in 1980. That's 44 years ago. Before the immense amounts of information, ads, and choices that we now suffer from thanks to social media and the internet. Since they first discovered it, this problem has grown and continues to grow. In 2007, the average American was seeing 5,000 ads a day. Today, we're seeing 10,000 ads a day. in the looser sense of word, anything trying to sell us something. And that number is growing. Social ads, content, Google ads, signs, emails, et cetera, all fighting for our attention. There are so many different options of products and services that it is impossible for the human mind to distinguish the differences between them. And as a result, the human brain does two things. It ignores the high majority, and it clumps the rest together into categories where the brands are seen as interchangeable, which are then also ignored.
00:05:18
Speaker
So in other words, an extremely miniscule number of ads are consumed, remembered, and actually influence buying behavior. So unless your B2B ad campaign is adapted to ad overload, it will fail, and you'll lose your company thousands of dollars.
Pitfalls of Prioritizing Professional Image
00:05:31
Speaker
So how do you create a B2B ad campaign adapted to ad overload and ensure it achieves buying journey alignment? You avoid the following two traps that result in creating and using attention repellent ads. The first trap is called the professional image trap. The first root cause of attention repellent ads is from most B2B companies attempting to maintain a professional image in everything they do. They believe that failing to do so will result in buyers no longer trusting them. After all, people don't buy without trust, especially in B2B. And the intention of this way of thinking is good, but the end result is not. Your company wants a professional image because you want to show that you take things seriously. You care about what you do and you care about your customers.
00:06:12
Speaker
The problem, however, is that when you prioritize your professional image in advertising, it often becomes the fastest way to being ignored. It's not that having a professional image is wrong, it's that this often translates, in real life, to doing emotionless boring shit and making it about you, not the buyers. So, you start with the intention of caring for your customers, but end up only caring about yourself. We need to communicate that we stand for quality, excellence, and greatness because when buyers see that in everything we do, they trust us as if there are companies that stand for defectiveness, inferiority, and insignificance.
00:06:45
Speaker
It's why the images on B2B ads and websites are all stock photos of people in suits, drinking coffee, smiling, and shaking hands, having a jolly good time. It's why companies use professional language that means absolute jack shit. Cutting edge, state of the art, world class, turbo charge, hyper charge, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Slap your logo onto any kind of stock photo where there's people in suits drinking coffee and smiling and high-fiving. You'll look like any other B2B company's ads. Have fun fitting in and getting ignored. The obsession with this professional image has resulted in everything becoming emotionless. Your boring ads are scrolled past. Your webinars are mind-numbing. Your e-books send people to the eye doctor. Your website and landing pages have a bounce rate higher than a bouncy house.
00:07:34
Speaker
Without emotion, your ads will not be consumed, remembered, nor influential in buying behavior. Whether we like it or not, B2B buyers are emotional human beings. Our advertising message will make zero impact if it is not communicated with emotions in mind. In an analysis of the IPA Data Bank, which contains 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns, campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well as those with only rational content. Emotional content generated 23% more shares on social media compared to purely rational content. Highly emotive ads are three times more likely to be remembered than ads with a weak emotional response. Now you might say, this sounds good and all, but surely you can't sell a $500,000 service with purely emotional content. And if this thought crossed your mind, you're absolutely right. The buying journey starts emotionally and gradually becomes more rational. That's because the buying journey starts with capturing attention and being remembered.
00:08:31
Speaker
Emotion does this best, but the buying journey ends with thoughtful decision-making, which is what logic does best. So the conclusion from this trap here, to avoid the professional image trap, you must use top of funnel ads that communicate the message in an emotional way. But here's the thing. You could score a 10 out of 10 in emotional communication for your ads, consumed and remembered forever. But if the message that you're communicating isn't right, the rest of the entire funnel results in huge ad budget waste. That's because the message is the main factor in changing perception and influencing buying behavior.
Consumer-Centric Advertising Strategies
00:09:05
Speaker
And the high majority of B2B topofunnel ads have the wrong message. So this brings us to the second trap, the solution promotion trap. The second root cause of attention repellent ads is by making your solution the main message of your topofunnel ads before making them problem aware and or the problem highly visible.
00:09:25
Speaker
There's a large number of business people that believe people buy brands. They give credit to the brand for huge business success. They say consumers buy Google because of the Google brand. They say consumers buy Volkswagen because of the Volkswagen brand. They say consumers buy Red Bull because of the Red Bull brand. They say consumers buy us and who we are. As if they care about us, a group of complete strangers. If this was the case, why was Google Plus such a huge failure? Why was Red Bull Cola a failure? Why were there so many Volkswagen failures? These are all some of the strongest brands in the world, right? If buyers bought because of the brand, these would have all been a success. Or at least it wouldn't have resulted in billions of wasted dollars like it did. Christopher Lockhead, the godfather of category design, caused this misled obsession, the big brand lie. Al Rice and Jack Trout,
00:10:18
Speaker
the godfathers of positioning, call putting a brand name on every new product the line extension trap. B2B marketers that make the brand or service the focus of their top of funnel message is what we call the solution promotion trap. These marketers have overlooked one cold hard piece of economic truth. They often describe and promote a brand as a solution. But here's the thing. People don't buy solutions without first having a problem. Buyers don't care about us. They care about themselves and their problems. And in each of the failure examples that I talked about earlier, they marketed their brand. They made the brand the main focus of the message. And it turned out no one gave two shits because no one buys a brand. What they buy is the solution to a problem marketed by a brand.
00:11:02
Speaker
The reason each of those companies were initially successful was because they were the first to evangelize a unique problem and make buyers aware of it. By doing so, they became the obvious solution. and brand in the mind of buyers. That's because brands and services are about us, problems are about them, the buyers. When we say, we're the best cybersecurity platform, we're experts, believe us. We care about you, buy our service. No one believes you and no one cares because they think you're just trying to sell to them. But when we make the message about their painful problem, you're showing them we care and that we want to help them solve that problem. And consequently, they care too.
00:11:43
Speaker
Falling into the solution promotion trap is why you aren't trusted. Buyers say, you just want my money, I don't trust you. The outcome there is you get ignored. Falling into the solution promotion trap is why your service or brand is perceived as interchangeable. Buyers say, there's a hundred other similar services that all make the same generic promises. I could probably get this somewhere else. The outcome there is ignored, few inbound calls, low win rate, and low lifetime value. Falling into the solution promotion trap is why your your service or brand is perceived as a nice to have and not a need to have. Buyers say, I can see how that might help, but I have limited time and more pressing matters. Hey, I have problems.
00:12:26
Speaker
The outcome there, you're ignored, few inbound calls, lower win rate, and long sales cycles because there's no urgency and no prioritization. So the conclusion to the solution promotion trap is that to avoid it, you must use top of funnel ads that focus on the painful problem for the message. So if the brand isn't what the brand market is claiming it is, what's the point of the brand?
The Power of Problem-Emotional Advertising
00:12:48
Speaker
Your brand is simply the name they remember in relation to the problem. You didn't buy Slack because it shoved its logo in your face to create brand awareness. You bought it because it was the brand that made you aware of the problem, or at least more visible. Your company's communication was fragmented.
00:13:04
Speaker
Slack's app of communication channels and workspaces became the only obvious solution to this problem. You didn't buy Salesforce because it was just top of mind. You bought it because it was the brand that made everyone aware of the problem, or more visible. CRM that is on-premise is a huge hassle, inflexible and expensive. Salesforce's cloud-based CRM became the only obvious solution to that problem. You didn't buy Loom because it was a video tool. You bought it because it was the brand that made you aware of the problem. Communicating through meetings results in tons of wasted time. Loom's video messaging for work became the only obvious solution to that problem. So when you own the problem in the buyer's mind, you become perceived as the irreplaceable need to have solution.
00:13:47
Speaker
This is the reason why problem-emotional advertising exists. B2B advertising that markets the painful problem in an emotional way in the beginning of the buyer journey. It's advertising that isn't sent to ignore Deville. It's advertising based on psychology. Advertising that gets your brand remembered in relation to the problem. It's advertising that achieves buyer journey alignment. Advertising that differentiates your brand in a crowded category. Advertising that makes buyers say, I need that. Advertising that attracts buyers in the short term and the long term. Advertising that results in ad campaign success, profitable and scalable growth.
00:14:24
Speaker
So if you've fallen into either of these traps, the professional image trap or the solution promotion trap, you likely have attention repellent ads. How do you know for sure if you're using AR ads? How do you visibly distinguish them from problem emotional ads? In Article 2, we analyze various examples of both types of ads to help you identify what to avoid if you're currently in Ignorville experiencing ad budget waste.