Discover proven strategies to spark creativity, reduce risk, and craft impactful B2B campaigns that resonate with your target audience.
A great advertising campaign starts with a big idea. Following every best practice in the book won’t matter if the core premise of your campaign doesn’t have a real chance to resonate with potential customers.
Of course, turning this light bulb on isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. Coming up with the idea that will drive your ad campaign can be the most abstract and enigmatic step in the entire process. It requires creativity, vision, and a deep understanding of your target audience.
Creating something new and different inherently means taking risks. With these proven methods and techniques, you can minimize the risk and maximize the reward of B2B campaign ideation.
What’s the Big Idea? 6 Techniques to Inspire Your B2B Campaigns
Breakthrough ideas don’t often materialize out of nowhere; they need to be inspired and nurtured. Use these approaches to set your team up for success, developing repeatable models for ‘aha moments.’
Create a process or framework
Creative ideation can’t be quite as regimented or automated as campaign budgeting and bidding. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a guiding framework in place.
Smart Insights shares one example of a company using a defined process to develop a big idea, explaining how the food brand belVita followed a four-step formula to spark their #MorningWin campaign:
- Start with a clear brief/challenge
- Uncover a compelling insight
- Find the brand connection
- Articulate the idea clearly and succinctly
As another example, Wunderman Thompson executive creator director EJ McNulty shared a post on the LinkedIn Collective highlighting key storytelling questions that can be used to surface a campaign idea that differentiates your brand:
What can you stand for that others can’t? Where can you show up where others don’t? What can you say that others won’t?
Use popular storytelling conventions
Stories are generally an excellent way to conceive and communicate ideas. If you want your ad campaign to be emotionally impactful and memorable, placing a story at the center of it is a smart plan.
Thinking about your brand, its solutions, and the problems it solves through different storytelling lenses can help surface new ideas and angles. Try playing with various famous storytelling techniques, such as the Hero’s Journey, the Comedy of Errors, and Overcoming the Monster.
Also Read: Brand Building is the New B2B Marketing Mantra
Build from a simple audience-driven insight or hypothesis
Big ideas can evolve from small and subtle beginnings. Dive deep into the challenges, idiosyncrasies, and common experiences your audience shares. High-performing ad campaigns are often driven by a message that connects in a specific and direct way with a large portion of your buyer category.
The idea behind an ambitious campaign from our team at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions centered on a simple sentiment that many in our B2B audience can relate to: no one gets what you do. This riff on the specialized and esoteric nature of B2B marketing inspired numerous creative directions, such as parents befuddled by their children’s acronym usage or their jobs working in a magical cloud.
Offer a fresh perspective on a major industry issue
Chances are you have a finger on the pulse of your industry or niche. You know, the big topics that are on people’s minds. Unfortunately, so does everyone else. Talking about the same things as media and competitors in the same way won’t make your campaign stand out. But offering something new or thought-provoking around these topics will.
Research by LinkedIn and Edelman around B2B thought leadership found that 81% of decision-makers prefer provocative ideas that challenge their assumptions regarding a topic. Nearly three out of four (71%) said they use thought leadership to stimulate their thinking and generate new ideas for their organization.
In other words, your big idea can succeed if it helps your audience stumble across their own.
Challenge your tendencies and assumptions
For data-driven marketers, letting go can be the hardest part. Once you’ve had an idea or approach that worked in the past, it can feel safer to follow the same blueprint repeatedly. But in a world of fast-changing user behavior, preferences, and channel usage, sticking to the same script is a recipe for going stale with your ad campaigns.
The economic philosopher John Maynard Keynes once said, “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” Staying committed to the same static playbook can stymy your marketing team’s innovation and growth.
As a leader, you can combat the gravitation toward the status quo by implementing exercises and dedicating time to generate new ideas and spur outside-the-box thinking.
Also Read: B2B Influencer Marketing: A Growing Trend
Take an experimental yet measured mindset
The problem with unconstrained creative ideation is that it can become aimless and, at worst, wasteful. Marketing leaders beholden to budgets and goals can’t afford to pursue every idea or suggestion and fully see it through.
Use past campaign data to inform your decision-making: How has our audience responded to this type of messaging or ad format in the past? Use A/B testing to analyze how different choices and changes influence audience response – just ensure you get enough data to draw meaningful conclusions. Gather whatever feedback you can as you build and run your campaign, staying adaptive and reactive to trends.
Ultimately, nothing will be more crucial to your B2B ad campaign ideation than a talented and creative team empathetically tuned into the brand audience. Following the right frameworks can help ensure your big ideas lead to big results.
