B2B Marketing Promise: Why Great Design Won’t Fix Weak Messaging

[EP007] Optimising Your B2B Marketing Promise

Maelien: [00:00:00] We all know that running an offer is a great way to sweeten the deal for someone looking to buy, and the chances are if you run an offer, your sales are gonna increase. But the promise comes before the offer, especially in B2B.

Louis: This is the B2B Performance Marketing Podcast by web marketer, here to help you make the right moves with your B2B advertising.

No spin, no smoke and mirrors, just honest insights from the advertising frontline.

Maelien: Welcome back to the B2B Performance Marketing Podcast. I’m Maelien.

Louis: And I’m Louis. There’s something we’ve seen a lot, especially in B2B. So to set the scene, imagine we’re speaking to a new client and we’ve spoken about their business, we’ve run through their website and their landing page and their analytics, and at first glance, everything looks solid. There’s nothing wrong with their traffic quality, the product or service is really strong, everything is really nicely designed, but the problem is, is that just not many people are [00:01:00] converting through to inquiry. And it’s a real head scratcher because on the surface it really feels like it should all just be working.

It’s this kind of thing that typically leads to a loop of tactical testing, so testing new creative, landing page headlines and forms, but nothing really seems to move the needle in a meaningful way. And the reason is, in this type of situation that we’re gonna be speaking about, you really have to zoom out to see what the problem is.

Now, one of my personal biggest bug bears with marketing communications in general is when things look and sound good, but they don’t actually say anything. Because I think back to the beginning of my career as a junior graphic designer and I really used to use a lot of big words and pad paragraphs out with a load of waffle to make it sound good. And people that I was working with used to tell me, that sounds really good you should work in marketing. But over the years as I’ve [00:02:00] progressed in my marketing career, I’ve actually believed more and more strongly that that’s bad marketing and it’s getting worse with AI generated content. The challenge is that content that looks and sounds good is nowhere near as effective as content that’s just really clear and resonates with the audience that you’re speaking to.

Content that taps into a real understanding of the pain points, of the people on the other side of the screen. And on that note, in this episode, we’re gonna be talking about something that’s incredibly powerful, but is also really, really easy to overlook, which is your marketing promise. And look, we’ll hold our hands up here, we’ve probably done a really bad job of positioning the promise of this podcast, so here goes- we are here to help leaders of small or under-resourced B2B marketing teams punch above their weight, and to do that in less than 15 minutes every fortnight. So if [00:03:00] this podcast helps you even take a step closer to that, then that’s a huge win in our books.

Maelien: We all know that running an offer is a great way to sweeten the deal for someone looking to buy, and the chances are if you run an offer, your sales are gonna increase. But the promise comes before the offer, especially in B2B, because products and services take so much longer to buy and even longer to integrate within a business.

So before anyone even thinks of buying here, they’ve already made that decision. Whether they think that you offer the solution to their problem, that’s the part that matters most. What are you actually claiming you do? And for who? That’s where your promise comes in. If it isn’t strong enough to get someone to care, then no offer is going to save it.

And where it often goes wrong here, is that businesses take inspiration from category leaders, and that’s a big problem. So people already know what they do and trust them not to do a bad job, which is backed up by the classic line that “no one gets fired for buying IBM”. But if you are not well known in your industry and someone lands on [00:04:00] your site cold, you don’t have the same advantage here, so your promise has to work so much harder.

Louis: Now, this speaks to something called ‘the curse of knowledge’, which is when as marketers we know too much about the product or service we’re promoting, and we lose track of the fact that the audience doesn’t. When you are a category leader, you can get away with that, like Maelie just said, but if you are an SMB, you just can’t afford to take that risk.

Now, going back to 2010, the marketing advice you’d see everywhere was “sell the sizzle, not the steak”. And the idea behind that was solid. It was all about selling the emotion, not the technical specs. But today the problem, if you follow that too closely, is that you just end up selling hot air.

And on the other extreme, you end up with something that’s too straightforward and basic, and it doesn’t resonate with potential buyers who have complex needs. We have to remember that potential buyers are coming with a [00:05:00] specific problem and they’re looking for a specific solution. And so, if we’re looking to get an emotional response by being too straightforward and simple, the only one that we’re gonna get is, yeah, and? So what? before they move on with their day.

Maelien: We have to remember that the average person sees hundreds of marketing messages every single day, and that’s why your promise has to do two things. Show that you actually understand the person you’re speaking to and prove that you can actually help them, specifically. If it’s too generic, then people won’t care, and if it’s too vague, then they just won’t get it. Let’s look at a few examples.

Now, I know Click- ups current promise is the everything app for work, but when they weren’t a category leader and they were growing fast, their promise was to save one day every week.

This spoke to time poor teams who needed more hours in the day. Now, that’s a pretty powerful promise. Imagine being able to save a day a week.

Or ‘Jasper AI’ now [00:06:00] that they’re a category leader, their marketing promise is the AI your marketing deserves. But when they weren’t, their promise was to write blogs 10 times faster.

Now, this is tied to a specific audience- the people that are writing blogs, and it’s tied to a specific pain point- the fact that blog writing takes way too long.

And finally there’s ‘webflow’ who now say “turn traffic into revenue”. But before they were as established as they are now, their promise used to be “build with the power of code without writing it”, which is a much more powerful promise than saying something generic like “no code website builder”.

Louis: So, as you hopefully know by now, we like to make every single episode actionable, and we’ve set the scene around why a marketing promise is so powerful. So now let’s look at how to land on a good one. We’re gonna run through three steps here, which is to gather insights, to create drafts, and then to run experiments.

The first step is to make sure that we’re starting with knowing the [00:07:00] specific problem that’s being solved and also specifically who it’s being solved for.

There’s a few things you can do here to uncover this, and ideally we’d recommend that you do them all. Now, the first thing you can look at is to interview your best fit customers. So the ones that you’d like to have more of, the ones that have stayed with you for the longest, or upgraded their products or service, or referred or recommended you, you know, that kind of thing. And you’re gonna wanna know things like what made them start looking for a solution like yours.

What were they doing before they had a solution? What almost stopped them from buying? What’s changed since? Or what the improvement has been? And also what would’ve happened if they hadn’t taken any action? Also, loads of other things that you can go digging through for gold dust insights, so things like your own four or five star reviews, competitors one and two star reviews, live chat transcripts from your website if you have them, [00:08:00] sales call or demo recordings and conversations with anyone in the business that’s customer facing as well. As you’re going through all of these things, you’re really looking for insights that are gonna help you speak in the customer’s language.

You are also gonna want to identify the most common or most painful challenge, and you are also gonna wanna quantify the transformation, you know, the before and after. And you can clay all of this in a simple Word or Google Doc. Just list out all of the words, phrases, challenges, and transformations in different sections.

And then once you’ve got a good bed of research, it’s time to start writing.

Now, full disclosure, this part is a hell of a lot easier with the help of AI. You can upload your research as a PDF and ask Chat GBT or another AI tool to help you start to craft landing page headlines. And I know we’re talking about marketing promises here, but obviously it’s best to be specific with AI and it’s [00:09:00] gonna recognize landing page headlines a lot easier than a marketing promise.

Now it’s worth mentioning that it’s actually probably a good thing if you end up with loads and loads of headlines. But for the sake of getting the most out of ai, it’s probably best to do it in batches of 10.

Next, you want to take those AI generated headlines and apply the human touch. AI probably isn’t gonna be able to get you to your final versions, so just take the best attempts and then work on them to make them better.

Now, ideally you want to try and make your headlines as short as possible, reducing them to the point just before they lose their impact or their meaning. Much like the examples we ran through a little earlier. And by doing all of this, hopefully you’re gonna end up with a good number of marketing promises to test.

Maelie, did you wanna talk through how to set up some simple tests?

Maelien: Yeah, of course. So I’ll talk specifically about landing page headlines here. But remember the same goes for ads and emails too. So you’re going to want to set up some split testing here, and you can do this a couple of different ways- [00:10:00] using experiments in the ad platforms themselves, using landing page software like Unbounce or HubSpot, or using specific split testing software like VWO.

The key thing here is that you want to test them with the same amount of traffic from the same channels so that the test results are fair. When we talk about tests here, it’s really important to consider speed too, so don’t go testing hundreds of different things because it’s gonna take you months or years before you even get any kind of answer.

So for this reason, you don’t want to test more than two or three headlines at a time.

As an example here, you could test each headline against 300 users, and if it doesn’t convert, move on to the next test. This stage is just a really quick iteration to see if the headlines convert at all. Once you’ve run through each of the headlines here, you wanna take the ones that have converted and run these against a much larger audience size, say 1000 to 1,500 users each.

Once you’ve finished this process, you’ll have a clear idea of which headlines won. [00:11:00] And you’ll be able to pick which one you want to adopt longer term.

Louis: Okay, so let’s recap. We talked about how a substandard promise can mean that your website can look and sound really, really good and still not convert many leads.

We covered why it’s risky to copy industry leaders because with all of the extra brand awareness and brand affinity that they have, they don’t have to work anywhere near as hard as challenger brands.

And finally we ran through how to identify a powerful marketing promise through research and testing.

Maelien: If you took something useful from this episode, please leave us a review. We would love to hear your biggest takeaway. And if you’ve got a burning question or are facing a challenge that you’d like us to explore, just let us know. You can go to webmarketeruk.com/topic and fill in the form. We really wanna make every episode as useful as possible, and we read every single message.

Thanks for listening. Catch you on the next [00:12:00] episode.