The B2B Effectiveness Ladder: how to deliver long-term value in B2B marketing | WARC | The Feed

The B2B Effectiveness Ladder: how to deliver long-term value in B2B marketing

B2B marketers can improve effectiveness with larger, longer-term and more broadly targeted campaigns, according to research from WARC, LIONS and the B2B Institute, LinkedIn’s marketing think tank.

Key insights

• B2B creative remains dominated by marketing that is at the least effective end of the spectrum – the bottom run of the B2B Effectiveness Ladder – and which is struggling to deliver long-term commercial value.
• On average, B2B campaigns spend less, run for shorter durations, and use fewer media channels, meaning they skew heavily toward short-term, rational, and tightly targeted marketing.
• B2B campaigns generally have lower Creative Commitment than B2C. This composite measure of the media budget, duration and number of media channels highly correlates with effectiveness and has declined in recent years.

The B2B Effectiveness Ladder

The B2B Effectiveness Ladder is a hierarchy of the six main types of effects that B2B marketing produces, from least to most commercially impactful, and reflects the objectives and results that are more important to B2B marketing:

• Level 1: Response Trigger - drive high rates of campaign response and interaction
• Level 2: Lead Generator - improve the value of the brand’s sales pipeline
• Level 3: Sale Closer - produce short-term sales or market share gains
• Level 4: Fame Maker - get customers and the media talking and sharing
• Level 5: Brand Builder - grow B2B brand equity
• Level 6: Strategic Asset - grow the brand and business over the long term

Key quote

“B2B marketing is made more powerful when we exploit powerful B2C concepts. Creativity, emotion and fame are all tools that B2B marketers should be using to amplify the engagement and ROI they see from their communications efforts, and indeed to increase the value of marketing in their organisations” – James Hurman, Founder of Previously Unavailable and author of the report.

The B2B Effectiveness Code is available to download here. The study includes expert commentary, evidence, best practice examples, data analysis and recommendations to help the B2B industry market more effectively.