How do early-stage B2B companies create market awareness?

By Robbie Vann-Adibe, Partner at Inpulsus.

Nearly 6 years ago I wrote a piece as Chairman of Traackr, one of the leading Influencer Relationship Management technologies, about how Influence Marketing should be the primary marketing approach adopted by early stage businesses. So fast forward to here at Inpulsus - we very much believe this to be even more true today.

Creating market awareness for early stage B2B companies

I will address this post to the community of B2B technology based startups, but the comments also hold true for B2C, B2B2C (and everything else!) as well as for non technology startups.

First and foremost, the world of performance marketing has become evermore costly and less effective. At Inpulsus we speak to many CMOs who ‘came of age’ in the era from 2005 - 2015 at the peak time of performance marketing when essentially, buying the right ads on Google or the correct banner campaign allowed you to get your product in front of your target audience. That dynamic has changed dramatically now; PPC (Pay Per Click) rates have increased across the board and the primary beneficiaries have been the major search and social platforms. Yet, conversions have decreased.

In a recent conversation with a senior PE player in the UK market the comment was thrown out that according to an analysis they had just performed, of the £2.1bn that went into “true  venture” businesses in 2020, as much as 50% of that money may have gone directly to the platform players, Google, Facebook, Amazon on PPC-related marketing spend! This is a staggering sum but at the same time when I discussed this number with other players in the UK market most said the number was pretty accurate.

And the issue is, that for many of the marketing organizations we talk with, there is not enough money available to spend their way to a level of awareness that will trigger purchase.

So how to break through the noise to create awareness in your target market/prospects without huge media budgets? At Inpulsus we believe the answer is an approach that puts Influence-based marketing at the center of a company's overall marketing mindset.

First-hand experience in early-stage B2B Tech.

As an investor I have always been more interested in what some investors call Blue Ocean opportunities as opposed to Red Ocean Opportunities. A Blue Ocean opportunity is where the technology/idea/approach is so radically different that essentially there is no competition for the offering; a Red Ocean offering is one where there are many potential competitors whose offerings aren’t very differentiated from yours and hence you end up fighting each other for market share (turning the water red - with blood - yours or your competitors!).

When I invested in Traackr in 2010 and became its Executive Chairman, Influencer Marketing as a category of technology platform didn't really exist. The challenge for the company was one which all Blue Water firms face - namely to educate the market as to why their offering was the solution to a problem/opportunity that their target customers didn’t know they had!

And educating markets is a VERY difficult thing. In current times it’s even more challenging as prospects are very skeptical of ANY message companies put out - which is why Influence is typically the ONLY answer as to how to create awareness.

To reiterate, Influence Marketing is a marketing approach in which a community of informed individuals, who have inside and expert knowledge of a focused area, become the primary “influence” for peers who are seeking new solutions, new insights and recommendations for their business.

In the B2B technology world, there is typically an ecosystem of players that are often considered to be part of the ‘Influence Landscape’ of a company. They may have a variety of profiles - for example academics studying the area and making breakthrough advances in the use of the technology, or leaders within companies who are using these technologies successfully and who are happy to share their experiences with their colleagues of the impact of these approaches. Another very common profile, especially in Deep Tech, are independent consultants who make a living helping companies implement these technologies and in a very strong position to assess whether a new technology is actually a major delta to the current state of play.

Depending on the desired outcome, Influence-based approaches can be used to impact the marketing and sales funnel at a variety of points. At the top of the funnel, creating brand awareness is a key result of Influence Marketing and we often measure this via Share of Voice across competitive brands and the overall product/service ecosystem. In the middle of the funnel - consideration - Influence can have a direct impact on growing a qualified pipeline by creating demand that can be converted through Calls to Action [CTA]. And in the case of sales, Influencers can be linked to actual attributable mechanics, such as discounts, referrals, to prove their value in revenue generation. 

For any executive who has been in this arena for any real length of time the concept of Influence is not new - it went by a variety of names and manifestations - remember “Word of Mouth Marketing”? What has fundamentally changed is the rise of the various social networks which means that technology can be used to monitor dialogue in the relevant areas (and new areas of discussion discovered), pinpoint who these influencers are, measure their impact and help scale Influencer relationships over time.

Getting unstuck - let’s use a modern marketing approach

At Inpulsus we speak to many companies that are ‘stuck’ - often investors who have been early stage supporters of these companies find themselves having backed an innovative company - that no one knows about. As incredible or groundbreaking as their service/product is, they just cannot find a way to break into the mainstream; and the marketing budget just seems to be burning up on Google or other related ad traffic that never seems to convert. 

In 1991 Geoffrey Moore first published Crossing the Chasm. It became a bible for many early stage companies - at its core it described how early stage companies became real companies. He summarized the 3 dependencies for doing this as, "a compelling use case that will create pull, a whole product that nails the use case, and a word-of-mouth community that can communicate and reinforce the marketing message."

This third dependency has evolved into structured Influence Programs that educate the relevant early adopter prospective customers and create the initial traction that 'carries' the company over the adoption 'chasm'.

Inpulsus takes its clients on an informed and data-driven valuable journey to understand the landscape of the market they operate in; what the key conversations are that the company should be participating in (or initiating); and what the potential Influencer profiles and related content strategies are that would work for the company.

This approach works equally well for B2C as well as B2B businesses. At Inplusus, we work with organizations at all stages on the maturity ladder to help them create the appropriate type of strategy and execution to impact their desired sales and marketing goals. In other words, whether you are just beginning the process of creating a program, or already have a program in place and are trying to figure out how to scale it, vertically, nationally or globally - Inpulsus can help you take the appropriate steps.

Our recent work for a UK client, Upside Saving, provides good rationale for putting Influence Marketing at the center. Inpulsus led the Fintech team through an accelerated workplan to uncover the right conversations in the crowded space of Open Banking - revealing the most active and potentially relevant Influencers and how to join forces to bring value to the conversation. For Upside, this resulted in an 18x program ROI supported by growth in Share of Voice within a highly competitive #fintech and #retaildata segment.

So what is a good first step?

Redirect a portion of your PPC budget towards building an always-on Influence program to create brand awareness that you control and manage. The reallocated budget is more likely to be on staff, tools, and content rather than PPC spend which vaporizes pretty quickly with lessening impact.

Now, we should also make clear that at Inpulsus we do believe that PPC-related programs very much have a role to play in the sales and marketing funnel. After momentum and engagement-led metrics point the way, PPC can be effective. A very recent article with CEO Brian Chesky of AirBnB, outlining their embrace of brand awareness over PPC, highlighted this better use of PPC, “We think of performance marketing as more of a way to laser in to balance supply and demand rather than a way to just purchase a large amount of customers." Like AirBnB, we believe that PPC is a targeted tool that sits on top of a structured Influence Marketing program and is best suited to amplification and boosting.

The effectiveness of an Influence Marketing approach is now very clear; multiple industry analyses reveal that IM programs are 2-4X more effective than their equivalent PPC programs.

If you would like to explore this topic further, let’s have a conversation!