How To Build a B2B Campaign Out of Two Pieces of Paper and a Paperclip

At POSTMKTG, we pride ourselves on an ability to develop high-value marketing assets. It’s a thing that separates us from mere advertising agencies. An excellent recent example is the interactive calculator we designed for UST. UST is a regional manufacturer of industrial voltage regulators. The company competes globally with multinationals like ABB and GE. It used this calculator to power its Fall 2017 campaign.

Now, high-value assets, like web apps, white papers, webinars and calculators, take money, sometimes a lot of money, to develop. So it is a fair question to ask, why make the investment? To answer that, we have to examine how media has changed, and how these changes represent both a challenge and an opportunity for brands like UST.

How do you get people to pay attention to advertising?

Sorry all creative directors, ever, but outside of the Super Bowl, people don’t like ads. To get people to pay attention without getting angry, marketers long ago learned they must associate ads with content people want to consume, like TV shows or the news in a newspaper. But here’s the thing – despite all the changes in technology, this is still how advertising works. The only big change has been who produces the content. Assets used to be the work of TV networks, radio stations, newspapers and magazines. Now it is the work of individuals – bloggers, vloggers, you and me – who, through our posts to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social channels, create a world of crowd-soured content.

For consumer brands, social channels, powered by crowd-sourced content and curated by AI-driven targeting algorithms, have proven capable of compensating quite nicely for the loss of traditional paid media opportunities.

But for B2B brands, things have gotten complicated. Search engines have all but put print and online trade journals out of business. But nothing on the crowd-sourced or social media side has stepped in to fill the gap. Consequently, B2B brands have had to become independent producers and invest in creating their own high-value entertainment and information assets with which to associate their advertising. Web apps, webinars and white papers are the go-to solutions. But the costs of production of these things can be stunning. Often tens of thousands of dollars or more.

So we asset producers have to be creative.

Making something out of (almost) nothing.

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