Linkedin’s Recent research, found that most B2B businesses are overly focused on Performance Marketing, resulting in a de-prioritization of creative advertising. In fact, according to research from the B2B Institute, nearly 80% of B2B marketing budgets are spent on Performance Marketing or lead generation.
What’s more because B2B sellers are intent on proving the ROI of they’re usually complex product, they prioritize communicating functional benefits rather than the power of emotion in their marketing. This leads to a shortage of impactful, B2B creative that underestimates the amount of emotion tied up in our decision making. Consequently B2B companies are investing in talent that can show them the money immediately, rather than talent that can help build a brand that drives long-term profitability. As demand for hard skills, such as data analytics has grown dramatically in the last five years, the demand for creative skills such as design, creative strategy, branding, and art direction have dropped precipitously.
LinkedIn’s economic graph shows that while the share of technical skills in the ad industry has increased by 47%, the share a creative skills has decreased by 17% over five years. However, when you talk to B2B buyers, you learn that they value memorable creative that drives emotional impact, as much as their B2C counterparts. Currently B2B buyers, don’t believe brands are engaging them with their creative. According to the B2B Institute, 71% of B2B ads score 1 on a scale of 1 to 5 of creative effectiveness. Meanwhile research shows that creative is the biggest contributor to sales in an ad campaign with great creative driving 10 to 20 times more sales.
If B2B ads did a better a job of engaging them business buyers would make better decisions, LinkedIn’s internal data shows that delivering creative that resonates emotionally with your targets will boost the results of your campaign on your platform. They found that brands that harnessed emotion in their ads, acquired on average, 198X more followers than the rest of the other companies on LinkedIn this year. They also found that emotion impacts the lower funnel. Brands that elicited emotion with their ads had a 44% higher average click-through rate compared to the rest of the company on LinkedIn This shows that creativity also drives growth in the lower funnel and is very much worth the investment.
