Helping Customers Gain An “Edge” With Performance Branding

Deep in the cavernous underground laboratories of the B2B Institute, a LinkedIn think tank, we have been partnering with our customers to experiment with new approaches to B2B marketing. We’ve worked with some of the most respected brands in B2B, like AIG, BT, HP, Infosys, Oracle, SAS, and Workhuman. These are the leading B2B marketing organizations in the world, home to a brilliant community of marketers who are pioneering a new approach to B2B marketing.  

We call this new approach…performance branding. And today, we are excited to announce the launch of B2B Edge, a new consultancy from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute that helps B2B marketers gain a competitive advantage through performance branding. 

So, what is performance branding? 

Well, the conventional approach to B2B marketing is so-called “performance marketing.” According to LinkedIn data, B2B marketers spend 92% of their budgets on bottom-of-funnel, direct response objectives. We hyper-target buyers who are actively in the market for our products and try to convert them with hyper-rational creative. The goal is to generate a lead, at the lowest possible cost.

This is a common practice, but is it a best practice?

Not in isolation. Performance marketing ignores the top of the funnel, where marketing can create outsized value. Enter performance branding, the necessary complement to performance marketing.  

Like performance marketing, performance branding is data-driven and financially-framed. But unlike performance marketing, the goal is not to generate a lead – it’s to generate a memory. 

According to our research with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, 95% of B2B buyers are not actively in-market at any given time. These “future buyers” are the source of future cash flows, which is how businesses are valued in financial markets. Performance marketing can help you convert the 5% of buyers who are in-market today. Performance branding can influence the 95% of buyers who are out-of-market at any time. Performance branding creates a memory that links the brand to a buying situation, a memory that will be recalled and acted upon when those buyers eventually do go in-market.  

Performance branding is how brands actually grow, and it’s one of the biggest upside opportunities in B2B. We’re launching B2B Edge to help more B2B businesses seize this opportunity. 

Our goal with B2B Edge is to fill some of the biggest gaps in the industry. First, there is the knowledge gap. There’s a growing community of B2B marketers who study the empirical research coming out of the B2B Institute, but few know how to translate those theories into practice. Second, there is a funding gap. Whereas performance marketers have grown their budgets by doubling down on metrics and dashboards, brand marketers struggle to secure internal support from finance and sales. Lead generation sounds like a science, brand building sounds like an arts and crafts project. CFOs prefer math to magic, which is a major reason why brand marketing is so chronically underfunded in B2B.

Our consultancy service fills these gaps by combining our industry-leading research with the first-party data assets of LinkedIn. Together with our customers, we quantify and maximize the value created by brand marketing, and then link it to business outcomes that a CFO can understand. We use data to prove that brand building increases both short-term sales and future cash flows, as well as pricing power, talent acquisition efforts and category optionality. 

Here are some of the ways we’re implementing B2B Edge to deliver value for our customers, fusing theory and practice to change how B2B companies go to market.

Finding An Edge In Strategy: Performance branding is designed to influence the 95% of customers who are not yet ready to buy. But how do you identify future buyers? We use LinkedIn data to analyze the career paths of B2B buyers to help identify the audiences that have a propensity to move into decision making roles over time. Over 10% of professionals change their industry, company size, and function every year, according to our 2030 B2B Trends Report. That means in 10 years, most audience segments will experience 100% turnover. We help customers intelligently target the buyers of today and tomorrow, which can substantially improve long-term results.

Finding An Edge In Creative: Performance marketing communicates the rational, functional benefits of a company’s products. That’s useful information if you are in-market, but it’s an annoyance if you are out-of-market. The result is boring, generic creative, which is unlikely to generate sales. According to our “Cashing in on Creativity” study, 71% of B2B ads score 1 on a 1-5 scale of creative effectiveness, with five marking the most impactful creative. Meanwhile, research shows that great creative can drive 10-20X more sales. The question is: how do you know if your creative is good or bad? We use LinkedIn data to test the quality of brand creative and optimize for attention, branding, and messaging while helping our clients identify the creative assets that link the right brand to the right buying situations.

Finding An Edge In Distribution: 40 years of research says that marketing effectiveness is mostly a function of reach: the more category buyers you reach, the more sales you’re likely to deliver. We help customers plan their media for on-target reach, using metrics like “Extra SOV” to right-size media budgets based on market share and category size.

Finding An Edge In Measurement: Performance marketing optimizes for narrow sales metrics, like cost-per-click and cost-per-lead. Performance branding optimizes for broad business metrics, like situational awareness and pricing power. We connect brand inputs to financial outputs. For example, we helped SAS prove that buyers exposed to their “Curiosity Forever” brand campaign were 20% more likely to fill in a lead generation form and 30% more likely to open a message from their sales teams. Potential employees were 25% more likely to respond to SAS’s recruiters. These data points helped the company prove the value of brand building to their partners in finance.    

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These are just a few examples of how we use proprietary data and research to help customers sharpen their competitive edges. We believe performance branding represents the future of B2B marketing, and we’re making that dream a reality with B2B Edge.