B2B Banter | B2B Marketing Campaigns

Best of B2B Marketing Campaigns in 2023

Top 3 B2B campaigns that rose to the top because of unique storytelling

Every year we rate best marketing campaigns but they are almost always from a B2C lens, whether it’s Mark Ritson’s list or Hubspot’s year-end list. This leaves us fellow B2B Marketers craving more.

The world of B2B has gotten very interesting. This first blog of 2024 in B2B Banter is dedicated to all the B2B marketing innovators working every day to humanize the brands they support and appease not one type of consumer but a diverse group of buying committees. In 2023, brands went above and beyond the traditional product pitches, crafting campaigns that resonated on a deeper level with their target audiences. We saw humor disarm, data delight and community build bridges. In this blog, I will deep-dive into 3 B2B campaigns that according to me were creative, innovative, and effective.

GFK’s generative AI B2B campaign

Not sure how many saw this but GFK did this innovative campaign where their CMO Gonzalo Garcia Villanueva goes head-to-head against a ChatGPT-powered bot named Ruby. Growth from Knowledge (GFK) is an 89-year-old NeilsenIQ company that provides state-of-the-art consumer insights through advanced analytics.

Campaign Objective: Gfk has been a pioneer for a long time in using AI to create buyer insights. With ChatGPT trending no one was talking about how they are integrating in their businesses. The objective was to establish GfK as a thought leader and an expert in integrating AI within business using a video campaign to drive brand awareness. They were tracking impressions through the landing page gfk.com/AI

Execution: The anchor content of this campaign is the Video showcasing the debate between the CMO and ChatGPT-powered AI that focused questions around the latest trends in Marketing — the aim is to answer the primary question “Can robots really take away our jobs?”

To promote this video the campaign and paid media plan included teaser videos for social, a landing page, social media posts, paid search, paid social, email and newsletter campaign, programmatic advertising, online publications, and B2B influencers. No channel was left behind to create a comprehensive and impactful campaign to generate awareness and engage the audience establishing GfK as a leading authority in AI integration.

They ensured that the campaign fully embraced AI tools. AI-powered video tool Studio D-ID created the avatar Ruby. Its voice 11Labs enabled the robot to communicate effectively. Beatoven.ai was used to incorporate AI-generated intro and outro music. New Leaf was responsible for filming the video and production of the video.

Results: While the budget spent by GFK on this campaign is confidential, given its scale and reach it’s safe to assume that this was a significant investment by the company. The campaign was a success for GFK, generating a lot of buzz and engagement. For more details on the result head over to GFK to read their award-winning proposal.

Gympass’s True Crime Podcast — Murder in HR

Gympass is a corporate wellness platform whose purpose is to create a healthier and thriving corporate workforce. It regularly boosts about 15,000 clients and 2 million employees subscribed to its services which feature personal health coaches, gym memberships, and wellness app subscriptions like Headspace and Calm. This year Gympass CMO Ryan Bonnici thought about an innovative fun way of telling their story. With podcasts being a popular and growing platform to showcase thought-leadership content, instead of just advertising on any podcast show, they decided to build their own show. Guess the genre they selected for this podcast — instead of a boring podcast talking about health and well-being, they decided to tap into the most popular crime category. Never have I seen a B2B brand launch a crime podcast show for brand awareness.

Campaign Objective: This was an experiment for the marketing team in Gympass to build brand awareness. They had earned the credibility and freedom to take creative risks as the reward for hitting their numbers consistently says the CMO. The target audience for Gympass is HR executives and benefits teams. Through this podcast, Gympass wanted to tell a story about their brand. They wanted to highlight Gympass’ purpose beyond physical fitness which includes personal trainers, nutritionists, and even therapists.

Execution: This campaign was just 1% of the marketing budget for Gympass. Since they knew this was a risk, they didn’t worry much about the results. Before writing the script for the podcast, the marketing team did rigorous listening of their audience. They wanted to build content that would be fun but also relate to their target audience of HR leaders. The team did an email campaign asking HR leaders in their database about their wildest stories from companies that they have worked for. They also had a Slack community governed under Chatham House rules where HR leaders could anonymously post weird employee and corporate situations. Gympass looked at all those absurd corporate tales to build the script in partnership with Caspain Studios. Murder in HR casts Kate Mara as the new employee experience manager at an AI-driven tech startup Piece of Ship where her colleague is killed on the first day. She then partners with the company’s chief people officer to interrogate jealous, competitive, and toxic colleagues to solve the murder mystery. The podcast was launched on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and other platforms.

Results: This podcast was downloaded more than 1 million times and ranked as the №1 fiction podcast and 38th most-popular podcast overall in the US. Because of the narrative and the way Gympass branded itself throughout the podcast — they not only build awareness about their brand and products but also how it weaves into the organization’s culture.

Autodesk’s redefining B2B Marketing storytelling

Autodesk- a B2B software design company has been on this journey with their new CMO Dara Treseder and Ryan Reynold’s marketing agency Maximum Effort to break the norm of B2B storytelling with fun and humor. Since November 2022, Autodesk has been consistently applauded for its non-traditional ad campaigns. Their focus has been to humanize B2B marketing. Storytelling for their ads has been from the perspective of the people who either use their product or experience the end result.

Following the success of the Walking Dead ad campaign in 2022, in March they launched the Oscars campaign built around a fictional Hollywood legend Otto Descinski (Otto Desc) only to reveal when presented with an award that Autodesk — the software that created the visuals.

Campaign Objective: While Autodesk is software used by millions of businesses to make everything, from engineering, construction projects, manufacturing, media and entertainment, and education — the brand had never invested in media commercials in this manner. The customers were more familiar with the individual products than with the overall Autodesk brand. With a focus on brand awareness, there are larger stories to tell on the impact of Autodesk in the world. The team wanted to tell that story. Autodesk used the timeframe for the Oscars as the perfect time to launch this ad. It aligns with the theme but it will also reach the scale in terms of viewership. Maximum Effort strategically partnered with the Autodesk marketing team to understand how to create and use the brand to drive business value and results.

Execution: Autodesk made a conscious decision to avoid B2B’s tendency toward stern, rational marketing. They tapped into Hollywood actors for this campaign. This builds credibility and keeps the audience hooked until the end. Like all B2B brands, the focus is always on ROI. Hence this brand awareness campaign needed to be supported by demand gen, industry, and portfolio marketing followed by digital and e-commerce teams driving sales.

Results: All ongoing campaigns are driving traffic to Autodesk.com — it has seen 4% more visitors than last year and recently they got a 14% bump. But more than these vanity metrics, combining metrics like views and clicks with lagging indicators like direct revenue that increased 18% including Autodesk’s online store which now makes 37% of all company revenue — is an impactful story from marketing contribution to the top line.

B2B marketing has come a long way in terms of humanizing brands and crafting engaging stories. CMOs are constantly pushed to prove ROI. Many shy away from brand awareness activities because tying them to revenue gets difficult. In all three examples, the purpose was brand awareness, but they successfully integrated that into other micro-marketing campaigns and activities that are more focused on driving ROI. The above examples caught my eye last year, but I am sure there are many more B2B ads that I may have missed. Feel free to share in the comments section if you have liked any this year.