Six B2B Marketing Campaigns We Love

1. State Street Global Advisors: Fearless Girl

The perfect melding of company mission, zeitgeist and imagery. Even if you didn’t know who was behind it, you surely saw the bronze image of the girl standing in front of Wall Street’s charging bull in New York’s financial district.

The key lies in what the image stands for, namely individual ethics and the responsibility of standing up to power and the establishment – an exact match for State Street Global’s responsible investment culture, specifically its SHE fund that invests in businesses with female executives.

Crucially, the campaign was also a mirror to our changing times (#MeToo) and provided multiple photo and social media opportunities, which ultimately translated into increased brand awareness for the SHE Fund and a 384% increase in its average daily trading volume.

2. EU Automation: BoOM, the Book of Obsolescence Management

Obsolescence management may not be everybody’s idea of a page-turner, but EU Automation’s BoOM campaign married a great B2B PR asset with superb execution to deliver a clearly identifiable ROI.

Starting with the title of the book, the BoOM campaign demanded attention and got it, with a high-profile social media and PR campaign that engaged a niche, ‘hard to get at’ audience, namely production engineers. What we really liked was that the success is incontrovertible – a number one listing in the Amazon Manufacturing chart for three weeks and the top 10 for three months.

3. Powwownow: Call & Conquer

A really great multi-channel campaign, so good that, here at WPR, we switched to e company from one of their competitors. In an era of increasing work stress, email bombardment and gridlocked roads, Powwownow took the initiative and launched a campaign to remind business people everywhere that a call is much better than an email and much quicker than jumping in the car. The campaign aimed to give Londoners, in particular, an alternative to commuting misery.

Yes, it had expensive Tube, radio and taxi ads, but it also had great social media legs with a ‘#CallAndConquer’ hashtag and fast reaction to business mobility news stories, such as the Tube strike. A campaign that proved B2B can be fun.

4. American Express: Small Business Saturday

We’ve done a lot of great work over the last 25 years, but we’ve never created a National Holiday. The premise is simple, one Saturday every year consumers are encouraged to shop in a local small business to show their appreciation for the work those businesses do in creating local jobs and boosting the economy.

What’s great about the American Express campaign though is that they keep reinventing it, adding new partners and ideas every year, such as developing custom marketing materials, including posters, social media posts, and press releases to help small businesses promote themselves – all the time keeping the campaign fresh. Most importantly though, Small Business Saturday accomplishes the nearly impossible, namely convincing small businesses that a big business, like AMEX, really does care about them.

5. Electrolux Professional UK: Fine Dining

OK it’s one of ours, but we’re unapologetic about it. There really is no harder to reach, harder to please audience than high-end Michelin starred chefs, but that’s what this campaign set out to do.

The only way was a peer-to-peer approach, which let Nigel Haworth to do the talking in a 60-second video that outlined the benefits of the Electrolux Thermaline range, for both his kitchen and his workforce.

Traffic was driven to a dedicated landing page via a story-led social ad strategy and proactive PR campaign, including editorial visits to Nigel’s Northcote restaurant (it really wasn’t difficult to persuade editors to sign up to that one!). The campaign garnered 21,000 views of the initial video; 1,027 clicks through to the Northcote case study and a 500% increase in web traffic from social media.

6. CBRE: Urban Instagram

Less of a campaign more of an evolving series of images that place a company in its context. Global property giant CBRE is using Instagram as a way of demonstrating that there is more to it, and its people, than just counting square footage.

What we really like about it, is that Instagram allows CBRE to make it clear that the company and its people are passionate about the built environment, architecture and the communities it operates in.

Some of the images are user-generated content, often workers, others are professional, including entries for CBRE’s Urban Photographer of the Year competition, but almost all are evocative, thought-provoking and, crucially, generate real engagement from followers.

If you’d like help creating your own B2B marketing campaign, please contact us.

The Author: Tom Leatherbarrow is a Director at WPR specialising in B2B PR and marketing.