81% of marketers plan to increase their investment in human-centric strategies in the coming year.
NEW YORK, June 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Triptent, a leading creative branding ad agency, today launched its first-ever research-based white paper titled B2B Gets Personal: Building Trust through Emotion, highlighting the challenges and opportunities in B2B marketing tactics. The white paper reveals that making B2B marketing more human not only improves brand perception but also leads to real business results.
For decades, B2B marketers relied on facts and data. Now, they’re discovering that authentic storytelling and empathy are key to customer engagement and long-term brand success. Although they understand the importance of brand building and customer relationships for sales growth, many lack the data to truly understand their audience and 47% struggle to justify an emotion-driven strategy to stakeholders.
“The only way for companies to break through is with humanity. As someone who has worked on both the corporate marketing and agency side of the business, I’ve observed the challenges that marketers face in this crowded space,” said Wendy Lurrie, Managing Director, Practice Lead at Triptent. “The findings from this survey highlight that B2B decision-making and emotional connection go hand in hand. The transactional marketing approach is gone. It’s essential to build relationships with audiences that help them understand how a product’s capabilities can solve their unique problems.”
Key findings indicate:
- Emotion is a competitive advantage in B2B marketing as marketers realize that making customers feel understood is a powerful tool. Sixty-nine percent (69%) of respondents believe investing in brand and human-centric marketing provides a competitive edge in performance marketing. Using real human stories and emotions enhances clients’ understanding, builds trust between clients and suppliers, and improves marketing effectiveness.
- B2B marketing is really P2P (person-to-person) marketing. Stories that capture the genuine challenges and triumphs of individuals resonate deeply with audiences, fostering a more meaningful engagement with the brand or product. Effective B2B marketing focuses on trust and personal connections, but tight resources and difficulty in understanding customer emotions make it challenging to invest in building relationships.
- B2B marketers expect their agency counterparts to act as an extension of their team, leveraging industry knowledge to enable faster, more agile execution. Among marketers who don’t find partnering with an agency effectively helps achieve their marketing goals, understanding of the industry (55%) and execution speed and agility (50%) are the top improvement factors they seek in agency partners.
“At the core of successful B2B marketing is the power of human stories. It is vital to connect with our clients through real emotions and experiences, this is how we build trust and continue to drive engagement,” said Joe Masi, Chief Executive Officer at Triptent. “Human-centric marketing presents a big growth opportunity for B2B marketers and we’re eager to continue to see results from this strategy for our clients at Triptent.”
This survey was conducted by Centiment, a B2B respondent survey tool to gather quantitative and qualitative insights, on behalf of Triptent and includes responses from 856 B2B marketers in the US.
View the complete findings in the white paper, B2B Gets Personal: Building Trust through Emotion.
About Triptent
Triptent is the antidote to the traditional advertising agency. With a team of experienced strategists, account managers, creatives, designers, editors, and production executives, Triptent eliminates the bells and whistles, bloated budgets, and arcane processes, ensuring great ideas become world-class content through their in-house production capabilities. Triptent develops custom workflows and team structures to match the way clients work, championing better integration and greater creativity between agencies and brands. Find us online at www.triptent.com.