How Global B2B Brands Create Campaigns

Most smaller scale companies look to large B2B brands and believe that because they don’t have the same budgets, resources or people, they can’t build the same kind of campaigns themselves. This article is to explain exactly how you can. Whilst this guide is a quick overview of the process, Bordeaux & Burgundy deliver these campaigns at huge volumes for our clients, helping them reach ambitious commercial targets without having to match the marketing spend of global brands.

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What do global B2B brands do?

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The likes of Google, IBM and Apple create campaigns through the methodology of having core pieces of content that the campaigns themselves are built around. They then use these core pieces of content to create different variations of content types (short-form written, video) and host all of this in one place. Once that's established they generate ads across a multitude of channels and use the ads themselves to create a personalized access point for their audience (e.g. if we’re targeting healthcare providers in Canada, then we create ads for that - we don’t change the content itself!) This allows these large brands to create personalized experiences without the huge cost of editing or creating long-form content for specific audiences.

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Step 1. Core Content

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The core content will be your most time-consuming and expensive aspect of your campaign. It should include original research, discuss your audience's challenges and position your product as the perfect solution for those challenges. Most importantly, the content should provide value without any extra steps to your audience, whether that’s guidance, advice, inspiration or statistics that may back up a hypothesis for their own solutions. Core content comes in the form of:

• Report
• Whitepaper
• Webinar
• Industry Guide

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Step 2. Secondary Content

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Your core content should have a lot of information in it covering several different topics or aspects of a particular subject. Secondary content should break this down and cover these topics individually through the form of shorter-form content. For example, if we have a “2024 Trends Report” we can create a blog for each individual trend that’s discussed in the long-form piece. Whilst this will require minor edits to become a polished piece, it is far less time consuming and costly than creating this content from scratch. A 7-10 page whitepaper or report can easily become 3-4 short form blog posts that can be hosted and promoted as standalone content. 

Moving past written content, if we take a large report, we can host a webinar with industry experts to discuss this whitepaper or report content and then break this webinar into small video snippets to again create more standalone content. From a single piece of core content you can create between 5-10 short videos that can be hosted on a landing page and used as ads or organic content across your social media.

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Step 3. Landing Page

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Once you have all of the content outlined above, you should create a landing page to host it all. The landing page should be easy to navigate and highlight content in a well organized manner either by content type or topic covered.

If you want to take this a step further, you can personalize the experience for your audience through dynamic landing pages - which essentially take the exact same content and change copy or organize the page slightly differently depending on what ad they clicked on to access the landing page.

Using our previous example, if your 2024 Trends Report appeals to both healthcare providers and manufacturers, you can alter copy slightly to focus on healthcare providers if they have accessed the landing page through a healthcare ad (this is achieved through a simple UTM link associated with each ad).

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Step 4. Personalized Ads

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Creating hundreds of ads with slight variations and elements of personalization is far more cost and time effective than creating individual long-form pieces of content for hundreds of different types of ICPs or personas. However, the impact of simply creating a personalized ad as an entry point to the very same core-content will make your audience feel like they’re being directly spoken to as if the core-content was made just for them.

These ads should link back to the landing page and utilize every piece of content you have created. For example, if you have 3-4 blogs, 5-10 videos, 1 webinar and 1 report, you should have 20-30 ads for each individual piece. These should link directly to the content in the ad but because it’s hosted on the landing page, should offer other content on the same page.

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Step 5. Optimization & Opportunity

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Optimization comes into play when you have more ads at high volume of engagement, however, finding an opportunity to extend the reach or personalize a campaign doesn’t necessarily need the same engagement. For example, if we’re looking at our data and it shows that we’re getting engagement in a specific region more than the other, we can either double down by creating more ads that call out to that specific region or we can create different variations of ads to appeal to those regions that aren’t performing as well. The whole point behind this is that we’re not changing the expensive, time-consuming aspect of the campaign to optimize for success, we’re changing the low-cost, time efficient aspect (the ads) to get more traffic to the landing page and increase overall conversions.

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Summary

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The whole purpose of this approach is to reduce the cost of personalization and increase the effectiveness of material that you only have to develop once. Spending a lot of time and money on something to simply renew it instantly or spend even more money and time to create several variations of it knowing that it won’t guarantee success is a bad approach. Focusing on squeezing as much out of the content you’ve already produced as possible through effective organization of content and focusing your efforts on producing personalized ads is the way that B2B brands create global campaigns at scale.

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If you want to see this in action, then you can download our core-content guide which includes a walkthrough of exactly how Google does this for their cybersecurity solutions.

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