Sometimes it seems like there are more

Sometimes it seems like there are more ‘don’ts’ than ‘do’s’ in the business-to-business creative handbook. Don’t get too emotional. Don’t be flashy. Don’t use humor. Don’t use color.

Participants in Direct’s recent roundtable on B-to-B creative argued for the opposite. Do use drama. Do make your campaigns push buttons. And above all, do treat your prospect like a living, breathing human being.

“Business-to-business creative gets to the core of who they are as a person and that’s how it affects them to make a decision,” said Neil Feinstein, director of creative strategy for True North Inc., a direct/interactive agency in New York.

“People are people,” said B-to-B catalog veteran and consultant Mary Ann Kleinfelter. “It isn’t shocking.”

For the roundtable, Feinstein and Kleinfelter joined Citi-Group’s commercial business group marketing director Mary Malcolm and Kathleen Aston, president/CEO of Acton, MA-based agency Dragon Direct Marketing.

B-to-B consultant and regular Direct contributor Ruth P. Stevens moderated the discussion, which covered a wide range of creative issues, including how to get past both physical-world gatekeepers and their electronic counterparts, filters and spam blockers. Jazzy dimensionals can work, all agreed, if they’ve got the right stuff.

“In the banking business, you’re trying to get to that key decision-maker to have a meeting,” said Malcolm. “It has to have relevance — it can’t just be something in a box.”

Of course, said Aston, “at the end of the day, if it’s bad marketing, it doesn’t matter what vehicle you’re using. It’s not going to do well. But those people who understand their craft and what audience they’re talking to, and [appreciate] the benefits of the product, can make any medium work.”

Participants:

• Ruth P. Stevens, president, eMarketing Strategy (moderator)

• Kathleen Aston, president/CEO, Dragon Direct Marketing

• Neil Feinstein, director of creative strategy, True North Inc.

• Mary Ann Kleinfelter, consultant, Marketing Solutions Today

• Mary Malcolm, marketing director, commercial business group, CitiGroup

STEVENS: Is the term ‘B-to-B creative’ an oxymoron? Traditionally, all of us were told by our mentors that business buyers were very rational and need a lot of facts, that they’re not making emotional decisions. The theory was that when they’re making purchase decisions we should give them lots of facts and be very cool and not focus on creative selling. What do you think?

KLEINFELTER: Baloney. (Laughter.)

FEINSTEIN: You can never underestimate the power of adding drama to your marketing message. I could stand up on stage and read the dictionary. And Jude Law could stand up on stage and read the dictionary. Whose version do you think would be more interesting? Information can always be presented in a dramatic, informative, rational and emotionally rich way.

MALCOLM: I’ve been in financial services marketing for a long time and I think years ago it was all paper-based, boring. But now there’s a combination of things happening. With the Internet, everything is so visual now. I think you have to go along with that.

KLEINFELTER: It used to be thought it was either/or. Either you had to be creative or you had to just give the facts. Now, that’s not the case. You can have both. Some jobs actually lend themselves to a very creative approach. Take Gall’s, the uniform people. It’s a dramatic job — they sell uniforms to firefighters and police and they can show rescue scenes happening. People go into those careers because they really have a commitment, and they feel they do a good thing. They see this drama as very attractive. It’s in keeping with what appeals to them as customers. But they still have to have that information. They have to know that vest is going to protect them when a bullet heads their way. So it’s a very serious thing.

FEINSTEIN: Business-to-business creative gets to the core of who they are as a person and that’s how it affects them to make a decision.

ASTON: [In our creative,] we use humor, things that are provocative or tongue-in-cheek. At the end of the day, [a prospect is] a person first and a businessperson second. You need to do something out of the box to get them to open your piece instead of somebody else’s. You need to give them the basic facts and benefits, and entice them.

KLEINFELTER: You do still have to be kind of careful, though. I remember one of the least effective things I did at Day-Timers was showing a person who was terribly stressed on the cover of the catalog. It looked like he was about to cry. I think the line was something like “Don’t look like this. Make sure you order your diary.” That really backfired. It was plenty dramatic but it was pretty negative. You have to be sensible and keep the customer in mind.

ASTON: It’s difficult when you’re working with clients because they tend to resist doing legwork. They’d rather [say] “come up with something and let’s do a campaign.” I think you need to be able to spend more time understanding who your audience is and be able to have the time to do a couple of different creative ideas to get feedback and really gauge that before rolling something out. The hard thing is that a lot of times that isn’t included in the budget.

STEVENS: My experience in B-to-B is that there’s almost never a test-and-rollout opportunity. There’s some exceptions, but most business audiences are too small to have a classic test-and-rollout scenario. They don’t budget for it because they don’t expect it. What are some techniques you’ve been using to break through inbox clutter?

MALCOLM: When I was at JPMorgan Chase, we had very good success using oversized colorful postcards with headlines like “Stop Supporting Thieves” for fraud protection. The theory in banking was always, well, your logo will be on the letter and they will open it because they are your customers. I don’t think that’s the case.

KLEINFELTER: Postcards are hot. I think it’s a combination of people finding new ways to do them and also the postage increases continuing. It all goes back to [the idea that] even if you tested something in 1942 and it didn’t work, maybe it’s a good time to retest.

FEINSTEIN: Imagine the desk of that businessperson you’re trying to reach. It’s filled with reports, it’s filled with No. 10 envelopes, maybe 9-by-12 envelopes. It’s a sea of white. What’s going to work is a thing that stands out. We’re having a lot of success in the small-business market with self-mailers because businesspeople simply don’t have time. If a message can make an impression right away without having to be opened, it’s going to work. I think the important thing to remember when you’re developing any kind of creative — whether it’s the inbox on the desk or in e-mail — is that there’s a lot of filters your creative is going to run up against. A logo used to be enough, but it’s not enough anymore. Think about the inbox — in a business situation, even before you get to the subject line, you’ve got business servers that are screening; you’ve got mailrooms that are not delivering things that are not appropriate; you’ve got electronic gatekeepers that shunt anything that even smells like a piece of spam off to bulk mail folders. When you get through the gatekeepers, that‘s when that thing has to take hold. So you’ve got to deal with all those filters and then let the creative deal with the human filters.

ASTON: Our audience is mostly all B-to-B and we’re usually targeting high-level decision-makers. That being said, our experience has been that self-mailers and postcards don’t work. In fact, they tank almost every single time. We’re up against mailrooms that are instructed to toss anything that looks like unsolicited mail. That’s a big issue, especially if you’re approaching multiple titles within an organization. You get past the mailroom to the [administrative assistant], and they’re going through it a second or third time, tossing anything that looks unsolicited. The campaigns we construct are usually continuity programs that hit at least three [times] and often include an e-mail component as a follow-up. We’re doing odd sizes, small dimensionals, large dimensionals. Even if they don’t include an expensive premium, it’s just the idea that they include something inside and the curiosity factor. We didn’t do a lead-generation program last year that fell below 3% and we had a program that did 13% or better. Self-mailers need to reflect the level of decision-making authority you’re going after and their environment.

KLEINFELTER: I think postcards are really popular today because in the old days you couldn’t get enough information on a postcard to really satisfy a B-to-B sale. Now you can use them to drive [prospects] to the Web and give them so much information. But I think you make a good point. I suspect some people aren’t doing very good math. Just because the postcard or self-mailer is cheaper, sometimes they’re not tracking it back to the lead conversion or the buyer. Or more importantly, back to a repeat buyer, past the trial buyer.

MALCOLM: I totally agree. It depends on who your audience is and what you’re trying to sell. The success we’ve had with postcards was to existing clients to get them to think about additional products. They already knew who we were.

FEINSTEIN: I agree. It’s a volume game. When you’re talking to senior-level people, a postcard is not necessarily the way to go. There are so few of them, so you can’t make a postcard pay out at the end. If you’re mailing to 2,000 CEOs with postcards and getting a .1% response, what is that, one person responding? Unless you make a $100,000 sale, it doesn’t pay out. In my case, I’m mailing to small business marketers with hundreds of thousands of people, so yeah, it pays out.

ASTON: To contradict myself, I did just recently have a major success with a self-mailer. It’s one of the few that really pulled and we did upward of a 35% response rate. It was for BTB and basically they didn’t have any money, so we just reinvented a creative we were doing for another event to drive attendees to a booth or a tabletop at a show. The mechanism that we used was a scratch-off ticket. In four hours they had a 35% to 40% response rate at an educational conference. If you can add a little extra like a peel-off label or a scratch ticket, you can make those work if you’re really stuck.

STEVENS: Dimensional mail has been the clutter-busting workhorse in the executive suite for decades now. Has anyone seen any new techniques in dimensional mail that we should know about?

FEINSTEIN: We’re actually doing a pop-up mailing for the Echo Awards call for entries program. They create drama rather quickly.

MALCOLM: Before I got to Citi, they did a mailing using a huge tennis ball to invite clients to the U.S. Open. It was very clever.

ASTON: We’ve had a lot of success using Jiffy Paks as part of a continuity program. They come in colors now, which is cool. We just do a white with a color label for the exterior. In a campaign for Surebridge (now Navisite), we used a purple bandanna to reflect a motorcycle theme that we were leading with. I’ve sent things like LifeSavers for a data recovery product. For our own campaign, I used little packages of Icebreakers. ‘We haven’t had a chance to meet, so here’s a little something to break the ice.’ [Prospects] always remember those neat little things. I did another campaign last year to a director-level audience with a little cushy football key chain. The offer was to get your own leather-bound NFL football and win tickets to see the big game. We got a great response to that. It does get them to open up and pay attention.

FEINSTEIN: I have a personal bias about dimensional mailers. People think that just by using one they’re going to automatically get a response. I’ve judged a lot of awards shows and I’ve [seen] a lot of dimensional mailers that were just (a) plain stupid, (b) unaware of who the recipient was and (c) had no relevant message to them. Just because you stick something in a box and wrap it up doesn’t mean you’re going to get a good response.

MALCOLM: And certainly in the banking business, where it’s not direct sales, you’re trying to get to that key decision-maker to have a meeting. It has to have relevance. It just can’t just be something in a box.

FEINSTEIN: Once someone sent us a gumball machine. I don’t remember who it was. It was pointless and a waste of money.

KLEINFELTER: And you’re in the business and don’t remember who it was.

MALCOLM: I’m still amazed that people respond to cheap and sometimes corny little tchotchkes. People still like key chains.

STEVENS: Creatively, something that has plagued me is that most purchase decisions are made by a committee in the business world. We need to be relevant to all the parties in the decision-making process, and that can be everybody from the tech to the supply person to the business manager to the purchasing professional. They’re all very different. How do we handle this challenge?

FEINSTEIN: One word: ubiquity. You have to be everywhere. And that can be expensive.

KLEINFELTER: I think that’s why segmentation was invented, so we can segment these people with different behaviors and different needs and approach them differently.

MALCOLM: Or the same.

FEINSTEIN: We were just launching Thomasnet.com, a site for industrial sourcing. And we talked to industrial buyers, we were talking to senior management, engineers and designers. We were talking to potential advertisers on the site. There was a whole kind of universe of people we needed to speak to and they all had different interests. The advertising, in some cases, was able to be very focused when we were talking about something with e-mail or direct mail. And in other cases it needed to be broad, like when we were talking about radio advertising. So we were borrowing some techniques from consumer and using it in the B-to-B realm. When the advertising was focused on speaking to the users, there was a secondary message to the advertisers saying, ‘Hey, this is where the users are.’ So that’s how we used ubiquity in a good way.

ASTON: One of the basic things we do to control costs is to do one main brochure and version out the letters by changing the first paragraph and then sometimes altering the offer just a bit based on decision-making. If it’s going to multiple title selects within the same company, we keep the offer the same. I did an IT program a few years ago where we sent the CIO a package and also sent the CEO a package and let each know the other had received the information to try to create a conversation. I remember reading a case study regarding a very successful campaign that targeted multiple prospects within a single company, but it was pricey. I don’t remember who it was for. They sent a small TV that had its own connections and they sent someone else a VCR and they sent someone else a videotape. The recipients had to locate one another to put this whole package together and see what it was all about. The tape was obviously the sales pitch.

KLEINFELTER: I think that requires too much cross-department coordination. (Laughter.)

ASTON: What happened is they all had to get together because one had the TV and one had the VCR and one had the tape. It was one of those things that started a conversation and got their attention.

FEINSTEIN: We can’t forget that ultimately the most inexpensive and efficient way is to do it electronically. You can tailor a message without having to do any work.

STEVENS: What do you see as working great in e-mail for B-to-B?

MALCOLM: Webinars — and that all goes back to what we were talking about earlier. The message and creative have to be relevant. Webinars seem to be catching on in financial services, because of the concern about cost and the hassle of traveling and being out of the office.

KLEINFELTER: You definitely have to add value to things. People like getting white papers, going to Webinars, so they can get more information without having to schlep around. Recently, I saw an offer on a Web site for this e-newsletter, [stressing] that it was only sent once a month. It was addressing the sensitivity that people have to their mailboxes being full, that dichotomy that they want to get value-added information but they don’t want to be inundated. I thought it showed a high degree of sensitivity.

MALCOLM: The other creative challenge is spam blockers and subject lines.

FEINSTEIN: I just had an issue where open rates on an e-mail I did were on the low side, but once [recipients] got into the e-mail, the interaction and the clickthrough rates were outstanding. So what it said to me was that the creative inside the e-mail was working well and either the subject line was working badly or it’s that old issue of deliverability. Maybe they were sitting in someone’s bulk mail folder.

ASTON: E-mail is tough. It’s working for continued conversations for people you’ve already had contact with, when you have their e-mail address and they want to hear from you. A lot of my clients are doing well with newsletters.

FEINSTEIN: The adage that ‘The richer the e-mail, the better the response rate’ still holds up. I tested it for a software company that swore up and down that their tech-savvy audience wanted text only. We did highly rich e-mails that outpulled. For an entertainment company we work with, for a very select audience of 200 we send out rich media, flash-based e-mails with embedded videos and the open rates — the view rates — are just off the board.

MALCOLM: For several years, we did holiday e-mail greetings. Tremendous open rate, rich text, beautiful graphics, video. We got some push-back from our own people, [saying,] ‘This isn’t businesslike enough, I don’t know.’ People e-mailed us back and said, ‘This is such a nice message, thank you so much.’ I was very surprised.

KLEINFELTER: That’s a good point, that some of the push-back is coming from our own organizations and not from the recipients.

STEVENS: The Web can be a creative playland for some people. Business marketers have been chastised if they use too much flash, for example.

FEINSTEIN: Flash should not be used as eye candy to create a dramatic intro. Flash is an incredible technology that can make your Web site so much more user-friendly and work smoother and more intuitively. That’s the way flash should be used.

KLEINFELTER: As a businessperson, if [flash] stands in the way of the e-mail being user-friendly, I don’t care how high-tech it is. It just isn’t going to work for me.

MALCOLM: [E-mail] has been a great tool. In some banking products, the technology products can finally be deadly if you’re just describing them in a letter. If you have a way to show what it can do, it can have so much more of an impact and be so much more interesting.

FEINSTEIN: The Broadmoor Hotel uses flash for its reservation system. It’s astounding how smart it is and how you can click on a couple of dates and see availabilities. This is marketers recognizing the needs of the end user and using flash as a tool to build a site that meets those needs.

STEVENS: Back in the print world, has anyone seen any breakthrough creative techniques in solo direct mail?

KLEINFELTER: Let’s look at the glass half full. There’s a lot of opportunity. Some mailing packages are a little on the boring side. We want our communications to look corporate, and to reflect the seriousness of our corporate image. But they still can look good. Color won’t disrupt anything or make them look less serious. And you can put stuff in there to bulk them up. I remember at Day-Timers I developed something called the Dollar Sample Kit. The mailing package promoting the kit contained one little monthly diary to show people how the diaries looked. It was in a No. 10 envelope, but it was bulked up so people said, ‘Oh, it’s not just a letter, there’s something in here.’ So they’d open the envelope. There’s a lot of opportunity to make B-to-B mailing pieces more exciting and compelling.

ASTON: At the end of the day, if it’s bad marketing, it doesn’t matter what vehicle you’re using — it’s not going to do well. But for those people who understand their craft and what audience they’re talking to and understand the benefits of the product, you can make any medium work. If you’re doing e-mail or [traditional] mail, a lot is contingent on the list. A bad list can sink a program. You’ve got to reach the right person at the right time.

FEINSTEIN: I think what we’re seeing is that mail is integrating into a multilevel strategy. Businesspeople don’t consume only one medium. Mail is supporting e-mail, it’s supporting print ads and it’s all a marketing stew that’s really where mail is becoming most effective.

MALCOLM: We’ve done a couple of campaigns for cross-sell, and we have some really nice self-mailers. But we knew going in they were just a conversation starter for the salesperson. It was just part of the whole package.

FEINSTEIN: Ultimately, so much B-to-B ends up at that salesperson. Mail and the Web and e-mail and whatever are all supporting that person who has to go in and say ‘sign here’ for a $100,000 contract.

STEVENS: Back on the print side, what about the catalog world?

KLEINFELTER: Creatively, there’s been a lot done. The people who have done well with their creative and copy efforts are addressing the person behind the businessperson. The offers that made sense before still do, like free or reduced shipping and handling, or things of value like white papers or Webinars. It’s just finding what’s relevant and what makes sense. You see catalogs test a wide variety of things but you keep seeing the ones that are really hot. New Pig gives away boxer shorts. I can’t imagine a product that’s more serious than hazardous waste cleanup.

STEVENS: Let’s talk about print.

MALCOLM: We’re doing very targeted print, either in local or targeted vertical industry publications in the B-to-B world. We’re fortunate — because Citi has a large ad budget, we get a halo effect. The brand is so strong, I’ve actually had some folks tell me that in the markets where we have a retail presence we don’t have to advertise as much because a lot of the heavy lifting is done for us.

KLEINFELTER: Maybe that’s worth testing. In the markets where you’re already strong, sometimes what you’re getting for the dollar spent is actually better because you’re starting with a foothold. Another thing that’s seen a comeback is space advertising and media. But to your point, it’s very selected and there’s two issues to be considered. One is to the [issue raised] earlier about whether people are really doing the math. The second is up front: It looks like a good bargain, because it’s highly negotiable and you can do a lot with remnant space right now because it’s wide open price-wise. You just need to make sure people are doing the math all the way.

FEINSTEIN: The issue we’re coming up against with all our clients is the math. [Print] isn’t holding up against direct response metrics. We’re finding the metrics of it are brand metrics. ROI isn’t the issue, it’s reach and frequency and those kinds of things.

STEVENS: The corollary is that if we direct marketers can get the brand people to insert an offer and we put a back end in place — fulfillment, conversion processes — then we can get the lead-generation benefit from the awareness efforts.

ASTON: Branding is always beautiful, but budgets being what they are and upper-level management demanding to see some kind of ROI, it amazes me that some of the media plans aren’t being tracked. And they can’t track because they don’t have any offers in the ads, other than a phone number or Web address. You can’t even measure what publications are reaching your audience and which aren’t so you can put your marketing dollars where they really work. Most people just kind of forget that [print] can drive revenue.

KLEINFELTER: And there are more ways of making that easily trackable than ever. Even unique toll-free numbers are easy now.

STEVENS: What does everyone think about the notion of landing pages as a Web-based response device?

FEINSTEIN: Landing pages or microsites that provide information, they’re huge, because of the IT issue. Anytime you say to the IT department, ‘We need to modify our Web site,’ they say, ‘Well, we can get to it in six months.’ Marketers don’t have that time. We’ll develop a microsite and creatively coordinate every piece of the campaign to focus the message at the landing page. Everything supports it. There’s a halo of that message being out there in multiple mediums driving it to this one page. Let’s face it, everybody wants to go online, they want to stay anonymous until they’re ready to identify themselves. A landing page is really the best solution we’re finding to give them information and then give them immediate access to a salesperson or to make a purchase.

KLEINFELTER: People want to stay anonymous while they gather information because they’re afraid we’re going to release this huge sales force right at them.

MALCOLM: We have complex products. We had some great demos so you can get [prospects] there and they get the information, but you don’t have to go through this painful process.

ASTON: We do landing pages with every program we do and sell it as a bundle. Most are simple, just to reflect the creative recipients receive and to state the offer and information.

STEVENS: What kills me is when the corporate home page is used as the response mechanism. Let’s wrap up. Any final thoughts on the state of business-to-business creative? Any interesting recent campaigns you’d like to share?

FEINSTEIN: We just did the coolest thing. We were at a trade show and we were running a contest where you could win a custom motorcycle by Orange County Choppers. The bike was there, so that was drawing people to the booth. When they got there, we were taking digital pictures of them with the bike with a cutout of Paul Teutul Sr. from the television show and e-mailing them the image. My open rates on those e-mails were close to 100%.

MALCOLM: For most of our products and services, you have to get a salesperson involved. We did a promotion offering a free business statement online. It was something that’s been out there but we didn’t promote it. We didn’t even have a good response vehicle, but the phones rang off the hook because it was free. In banking you don’t get a lot for free. I think it was pent-up demand.

KLEINFELTER: It makes a nice offer if you can draw attention to things you’re already giving people and position them as a value-add.