You probably wouldn’t guess it, but B2B buyers are just as emotionally driven as B2C buyers. In fact, according to research, 39% of marketing leaders are harnessing storytelling, emotion and humor in an effort to make their campaigns stick.

But with the noise getting louder than ever, the demand for high-quality, high-velocity content is on the rise. And it’s your job as a B2B marketer to deliver.

Today, we’re revealing the core components of a successful B2B marketing campaign and sharing real examples to help you conjure up your own high-impact programs.

A business-to-business (B2B) marketing campaign is an organized effort from a company to connect with other businesses as potential customers. Unlike business-to-consumer (B2C) campaigns which typically target the general public, B2B campaigns are geared towards other organizations. These campaigns can take various forms and include a variety of content formats, such as digital marketing, webinars, targeted email campaigns, and more.

Although there are some important differences between B2B and B2C campaigns, the two are more similar than you might think.

In tech specifically, B2B audiences are starting to behave more like B2C audiences due to increased competition in a rapidly maturing SaaS market. Marketing methods that worked in the past, such as ads, outbound, and search engine optimization (SEO) are no longer enough to win and hold their attention.

And this is especially true in today's instant gratification consumer landscape, where highly connected prospects expect the content they want, when they want it.

Insider insight: Before he joined the world of B2B, CallMiner CMO Eric Williamson delivered major B2C campaigns for Google, Acura, JetBlue and more. Here’s why he believes both B2B and B2C campaigns should keep a strong focus on the fundamentals:

“What I’ve found with B2B, especially in tech, is that people that aren’t from marketing end up in marketing roles, especially when you’re small. What’s missing with this approach is some of the fundamentals of marketing. Things like how to put together a proper creative or campaign brief; how to think about the value or brand versus demand generation and figure out that mix; what’s the proper creative process, and how to give feedback.”

With the shift from “push” to “pull” marketing, B2B marketers are now faced with more options than ever for their campaigns.

SEO, mobile, video, influencer marketing. With more formats to choose from—and more noise than ever for prospects to sort through—it can be difficult to know where to start with your next campaign.

So, what makes a B2B campaign really tick? Let's dive in a little deeper with a closer look at the critical components of a successful B2B campaign.

Developing a deep understanding of your target market is the crucial first step in planning any successful campaign. Take time to get to know their industry and role requirements, as well as their biggest pain points and emotional drivers.

And remember, B2B sales cycles are long. It can easily take one to three months (or more!) for a potential prospect to be ready to buy. But once they're in-market, research shows that “inspiring” brands are five times more likely to be their first choice.

Launching a B2B marketing campaign without a documented strategy is like driving to a new destination without a GPS. Sure, you could wing it. But you’ll feel way more confident behind the wheel with an established route to follow.

Get everyone on the same page with a clearly articulated plan laying out exactly what success looks like. Once the campaign is over, you'll have everything you need to identify what did and didn’t work. And with the right data, key performance indicators (KPIs), and metrics, you can make informed, evidence-based adjustments to future campaigns.

In the digital age, one format does not fit all. Audiences across the B2B spectrum are known to engage with content in a multitude of formats. Whether it's in-depth research, a thought-provoking podcast, or an engaging video marketing series—the strength of your campaign lies in its versatility.

In addition to your meatier long-form assets, consider integrating bite-sized content pieces like video highlights, case studies, and social media posts into your next B2B campaign. These shorter formats can attract time-constrained prospects, while slowly nudging them towards longer, higher-intent content.

Without a doubt, the right tools are fundamental to an effective B2B marketing campaign. Given the longer buying cycle, you’ll need a clear way to not only execute your campaign, but also to track and measure your region of interest, opportunities generated, and easily view key accounts as they move through the pipeline.

This can include email marketing tools, social media platforms, digital event platforms, content repurposing software, and more. Be sure to look for tools that integrate easily to ensure seamless data transfer across your campaigns.

Powerful branding is so much more than having a great logo. It’s about creating a unified, recognizable identity that infiltrates every customer touchpoint within your broader campaign. Consistent branding increases trust, loyalty, and your conversion rate.

But keep in mind: consistency does not mean monotony. Be ready to shake things up with fresh visuals or new tones of voice for specific campaign themes. As long as it aligns with the fundamental tenets of your brand, nothing is off the table.

In a world where multichannel marketing is the rule, the right distribution strategy is critical. Your strategy could include any number of channels from email marketing, social media marketing, B2B content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), partner marketing, and more.

Whether your aim is to flood LinkedIn with relevant content or carefully distribute customized content to a select group of accounts, the key is to choose the places where you know you’ll find your audience.

As more marketers embrace integrated multichannel campaigns, the call for strong data is getting louder. If you’re like most marketers, you don’t have time to compile manual reports from a bunch of different channels and platforms.

You need a streamlined reporting system that gives you the birds-eye view of how your campaign is performing, plus the ability to drill deeper into the data where necessary to identify the right opportunities.

Insider insight: During her tenure as Content Marketing Manager at Goldcast, Meisha Bochicchio delivered integrated B2B campaigns, featuring a highly targeted webinar as the major lightning bolt moment. She then took a “breadcrumb” approach, repurposing the event content into blogs, emails, testimonials and other formats to build anticipation across multiple channels.

“Integrated marketing campaigns aren't just a good idea—they're the foundation for allowing your B2B marketing team to execute and scale profitable activity. Without integration, you end up with a bunch of fragmented marketing assets working in silos and an impossible-to-measure ROI.”

The best B2B marketing campaigns are a combination of powerful messaging components all working together to create an emotional connection to your audience. And let’s just say, you know it when you see it.

These seven B2B marketing campaigns will help inspire your next brainstorming session and put you on the right track toward delivering a powerful message that wins hearts (and opportunities).

Audience: Mission-driven businesses of all sizes

Formats: Rich media

Channels: TV ads, billboards, YouTube, social media, and audio channels.

Canva’s first global brand campaign of 2022 definitely made a splash. The campaign, titled ‘What Will You Design Today?’, featured global brands like Zoom, UNHCR, and FastCompany using Canva's templates to create beautiful designs that help advance their mission.

The goal of the campaign was to champion Canva users who, whether representing large or small businesses, are united in their desire to make a change. It included inspirational business stories, like the story of Melati Wijsen, the founder of Bye Bye Plastic Bags whose efforts led to the prohibition of single-use plastic in Bali.

With a mission to “empower teams of all sizes to collaborate and design together”, the campaign features a number of short videos showcasing Canva’s features. Currently, the campaign’s most viewed video has a whopping 98 million global views.

Audience: Global brands with Gen Z buyers

Formats: Video

Channels: Paid social, trade publications

Pinterest’s 2024 B2B marketing campaign, ‘The P is for Performance’ targets advertisers who want to reach the self-described “fast-growing Gen Z-favored platform where nearly half a billion people go to search, save and shop every month.”

The campaign features high impact mini-movies showcasing the brand’s latest product suite.

“Pinterest is an iconic brand, and we wanted to create pop culture jewels to tell a story that turns performance marketers' heads with an unmissable, totally unique Pinterest style. What better way to talk about high action in the lower funnel than to lean into the timeless genre of action movies?” said world-renowned commercial director Tim Godsall.

The campaign plans to use paid social, programmatic, and trade publication channels across the UK, US and Australia, with plans to launch in other global markets later in 2024.

Audience: E-commerce business owners

Formats: Film, digital and print

Channels: Digital publications, Super Bowl ads

The first time Oscar-nominated actor John Malkovich teamed up with Squarespace was way back in 2017. The campaign transformed the actor’s made-up “stolen domain” ordeal into a marketing program that led to the launch of 100,000 new businesses.

In the ‘Make Your Next Move’ campaign, Squarespace tells John Malkovich’s story of fashion design entrepreneurship (yes, he has his own fashion collection) and celebrates a range of entrepreneurs across industries, inspiring them to launch their own ventures using the Squarespace platform.

And it’s nothing if not emotionally resonant. After encouraging viewers to pursue their passions, the campaign delivers an inspiring call to action for the viewer to, "Make your next move. Make it beautiful."

Audience: Target accounts

Formats: Paid ads

Channels: LinkedIn

Account-based marketing (ABM) isn’t just for enterprise brands. Loom’s highly targeted ABM campaign resulted in an average CTR (click through rate) of 2% to 3.5% and average CPC (cost-per-click) of $4 to $10 from key accounts using a series of personalized LinkedIn ads.

To start, Loom’s marketing team created a target account list, including the top B2B brands they were aiming to grow awareness and usage with. They then created personalized LinkedIn ads and landing pages, automatically adjusting the copy, number of teammates, and logo to make their prospect say: “Wow this ad was 100% designed for me!”

Audience: Marketers curious about AI

Formats: Video

Channels: YouTube, social media channels

If you’re looking for a way to anchor your next campaign in thought leadership, look no further than GfK’s Human vs. AI campaign. In a video which currently has 60,000+ views on YouTube, the CMO of Germany’s largest market research company, Gonzalo Garcia Villanueva, engaged in a head-to-head debate with a robot named Ruby to find out if AI really has what it takes to replace human marketers.

As you can imagine, the campaign knocked it out of the park, winning Silver in the Best Use of AI category at the B2B Marketing Awards 2023.

“This campaign advanced our goal of establishing GfK-NIQ as a thought leader in the AI space. The campaign exceeded our expectations, generating brand awareness with 6.87 million impressions through optimized use of paid and programmatic ads, highlighting our commitment to innovation in the way we deliver our campaigns,” said Ben Murphy, Global Head, Solution & Audience Marketing, GfK-NIQ.

Audience: Candidates interested in working at Dropbox

Formats: Blog posts, videos, user-generated content

Channels: YouTube, LinkedIn, blog, social media

While Dropbox has excellent marketing targeting new customers, its recruitment marketing campaigns are just as inspiring.

The mega tech brand’s Life Inside Dropbox campaign features a dedicated blog highlighting a range of topics, from the future of Dropbox to sharing one female software engineer’s journey into tech. By offering its audience a behind-the-scenes look into its product vision and team culture, Dropbox’s campaign positions the company as an awesome place to work.

What stands out about this campaign is its longevity. What appears to have started as a social media campaign a few years ago has grown into a much larger initiative.

Audience: Aspiring e-commerce entrepreneurs

Formats: Print, digital, rich media

Channels: TV, radio, billboards, social media

‘Let’s make you a business’ was Shopify’s first major brand campaign. It launched in 2019 to over 12 key markets in the US and Canada using a variety of channels to engage Shopify’s audience of aspiring online retailers. Channels included billboards, social media, TV, and more.

With this omnichannel approach, Shopify had one clear goal: become the first brand that comes to mind when people think about starting their new business.

The creative in Shopify’s ‘Let’s Make You a Business’ campaign amplified its core call to action, encouraging prospects to transform ideas into reality, highlighting messages like: “your mom should be your first customer, not your only customer,” and “let’s make what you do for fun what you do for a living.”

As the central mouthpiece for leading B2B brands, digital events are the key to a successful marketing campaign. Whether your goal is to increase lead generation, attract new customers, or grow affinity among a specific group of accounts, the right event—or series of events—can get you there faster.

In the next section, we’ll dive into some clear examples of how B2B events can support your long-term, multichannel strategy and deliver high-value content to fuel your next campaign.

Event type: Webinar series

Goal: Scale webinar programming and collect key data

Results:

• 176 webinars in 2023
• 39% average attendance rate
• 3000+ RSVPs for virtual summits
• 2x content output

Sometimes a B2B campaign has multiple goals. For the team at Modern Sales Pro, they had the two-pronged objective of building a campaign that would grow both their community and sponsorships.

To do that, they used Goldcast to offer their community a regular schedule of two webinars per week, amounting to over 200 over the course of a year. They also needed to collect the right data from their webinars in order to provide sponsors with deeper insights and prove the value of their event series.

“The analytics part of the events right after it makes it really fast for us to contact the sponsors with this is who attended, who didn't attend, attendance rate, the questions asked, and what people clicked on. Goldcast makes it really easy for us to collect the data and create a follow-up to the event that is very seamless and very fast,” says Marketing Manager Eduardo Duarte Ruas.

[If you like event series, don’t forget to check out Goldcast’s suite of high-impact event series tailored to the needs of modern B2B marketers.]

Event type: Live demo series

Goal: Product awareness

Results:

• Multiple opportunities to connect with high-intent prospects

Netskope hosted a series of eight live demos offering their audience an opportunity to get hands-on with the platform as part of their larger Experience Netskope marketing program.

In alignment with their goal to educate prospects and customers, demos covered a range of topics and use cases, including using advanced threat protection, data loss prevention, and more. Each event had a clear tie-in with the broader Experience Netskope campaign, while also functioning as a standalone event with all past episodes available to watch on demand.

Event type: Quarterly thought leadership events, live demos and annual event

Goal: Meaningful connections at every part of the customer journey

Results:

• 1,000 average registrants per event
• Increased global reach
• Faster follow-up from Bloomreach BDRs

Post pandemic, field marketing just isn’t what it used to be. In many ways, it’s better.

For the marketing team at Bloomreach, the idea of providing the best possible customer experience is at the heart of everything they do, including their event campaigns. The goal with every event is to make sure it doesn’t feel like just another meeting. “I wanted a fully branded, interactive way to engage attendees, and Goldcast answered that need,” says Candace Gregg, Senior Director of Global Demand Generation.

Using Goldcast’s advanced customization features, Bloomreach was able to create an event experience for B2B audiences at every stage of the marketing funnel, including targeted ABM events, quarterly thought leadership events, multi-day digital summits, live demos and product forecasting events.

Kristen Nuñez, Global Event Manager with AspenCore, has her work cut out for her. She produces an average of eight to 10 virtual events per year and spends an average of two hours just to create one post-event video clip.

Fortunately, she recently discovered the power of AI in B2B event marketing. With AI-powered tools like Content Lab, she can now create clips in less than five minutes. “It makes a really pretty video for us. We also now have different options of not just using the recording but using different layouts; so we can change it up and not have all of our videos look the same,” she says.

Armed with an efficient process for repurposing her long-form event content into bite-sized assets for her broader campaigns, she can keep up with the always-rising demand for content. Not only that, prospects from all over the world can also head to AspenCore’s virtual event hub to view on-demand content anytime day or night.

For an effective B2B campaign, you’ve got to deliver the “surround sound” effect modern buyers have come to expect. And in 2024, there is no better source of rich, valuable content than an expert-led digital event.

A well-planned, well-run and well-analyzed event can be an excellent asset for any brand. And with the right repurposing strategy, it can also be used to level up the ROI on your B2B campaigns.

With Content Lab, B2B marketers are shaving hours off the content repurposing process by using AI to create more content with fewer resources—and without merely “pumping out” generic messaging. From one long-form video, you can generate any number of content formats, including blog summaries, email copy, social media snippets, highlight reels, and more.

What would have normally taken weeks, thousands of dollars, and a gaggle of freelancers to do, now takes hours or even minutes. And with 74% of attendees saying they love being able to log on and attend events from anywhere, events are also a great way to boost your brand’s global reach and presence.

Last but in no way least, you have to be able to measure the success of your B2B marketing campaigns. Digital event platforms like Goldcast make this easy through deep event analytics that deliver real-time insights into attendee-level intent data.

In the end, the key to a winning campaign comes down to your ability to effectively combine the “art” of B2C marketing and “science” of B2B marketing. And your event strategy is a great place to start.

The firsthand video content generated from digital events and long-form podcasts is authentic, conversational and highly interactive.

With an overwhelming number of choices, B2B prospects need to see the bigger meaning behind your team, your product, and the values you stand for. And the right digital events can help you deliver.