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B2B software marketing is notoriously difficult. Why? Because in most cases there's no product to market! Well, there is, but not a tangible physical product you can place at the center of your content.

Conveying the complex value of modern business software solutions within the finite space of an ad or social media post takes a special type of creativity, elevated through the principles of reaching, engaging, and converting an audience of B2B tech buyers.

Recent research and analysis around these audiences, and how different creative elements resonate with them, reveals a number of guidelines that can reliably produce stronger results. These best practices may in some cases be somewhat counter-intuitive, but they’re proven to work.

To make your B2B software marketing everything it can and should be, you should:

Specialize your targeting

B2B audiences are more specialized than most B2C audiences, but this represents an opportunity. Where B2C marketing usually needs to target very broad swaths of potential customers, B2B marketers can afford to reasonably narrow their targeting right off the bat. While you’ll still want to reach a broad range of companies, roles, and influencers who could be interested in your brand, you can start designing ads and content to speak to those particular audience members right away. 

This makes LinkedIn a particularly valuable platform for B2B software marketing. A recent Gartner report on the top social media channels for software marketers ranked LinkedIn at number one, calling it “ideal for those who want to connect with high-level decision makers such as C-suite executives, vice presidents, and directors.” 

LinkedIn’s advanced targeting features allow you to target your audience with ads based on professional information, such as their job title, organization, industry, years of experience, and more. Use analytics to learn about who’s engaging with your ads, and use this information to further tailor your targeting and content.

The findings may even surprise. For instance, a recent LinkedIn study report in the EMEA region found that “IT is the most influential stakeholder in only around a third (39%) of technology buying decisions,” with more than half of tech decision-makers now sitting outside the IT department.

By continually monitoring your campaign performance and using the demographics tab, you can find out who’s interacting with your content and begin designing future content around their particular pain points.

LinkedIn’s professional audience is naturally primed for longer, more technical or in-depth content focused on solving particular pain points. When you’re able to address those pain points across your full buyer spectrum, you’ve got a recipe for breakthrough software marketing.

Make your branding tangible and recognizable

Compared to B2C brands, it can be difficult to simplify the value proposition of a B2B solution down to a compelling and identifiable “elevator pitch.” 

The data proves it: according to a recent study by the B2B Institute, viewers of the top B2B tech ads took a staggering 18.4 seconds to correctly recognize the brand featured in the ad. This is compared to 6.7 to recognize it in B2C ads. 

This is a problem because using brand elements that feature the brand earlier in the ad is associated with brand recognition ratings 30 to 40 percentage points higher than in ads where branding is only featured at the end. By waiting three times as long as B2C companies to say or show their brands, B2B software marketers are significantly undermining their impact.

Within this challenge lies a potent opportunity: in an industry where offerings can seem overly abstract and unidentifiable, making your brand stand out as tangible and immediately recognizable can win you a huge market advantage.

Find a way to simplify your product or solution into a distinctive brand asset that is both easily linked to your brand and integral to the stories you’re telling. (For examples of how this can be accomplished with intangible products, think of the Geico Gecko or the LiMu Emu.) Show it early and often: Currently, B2B tech ads only feature their brand once every 15.5 seconds on average, while top B2C brands feature it every 5.9 seconds. This is another reason why B2C marketing tends to drive so much more brand recognition than the average B2B software marketing.

No matter how specialized and complex the software product, you can win big by associating your B2B software marketing with an easily recognizable and resonant feeling. That’s what great branding does, whether it’s for car insurance or sales enablement software technology. 

Don’t be afraid to get creative

The “creativity crisis” isn’t just a problem in B2B software marketing—it’s a problem across all B2B marketing. A creative testing company called System1 frequently has consumer panels rate ads on a 1 to 5-star scale. After rating over 40,000 ads, System1 confirmed a correlation between star score and market share growth. For those brands with at least a 10% Excess Share of Voice, they found:

LinkedIn’s B2B Institute ran a custom analysis of System1’s star data on six of the B2B categories and 1700 of the ads they rated, with these findings:

Examining this data another way, a given B2B ad is 154x more likely to score one star than four to five stars.

Dire as this sounds,  it’s also an opportunity. Ads that scored one star in the study above generated an average of 0.25% market growth… while the happy few ads that scored fours and fives generated roughly 2.5% market share growth. That means the highly-creative B2B ads were 10 times more valuable than their mediocre peers.

The conclusion is obvious: B2B marketing has a huge advantage when it’s creatively effective. But what does “creatively effective” B2B software marketing look like?  Our studies show that ads evoking intense positive emotions are more likely to receive attention, be remembered by potential customers, and therefore contribute to ultimate conversions. As for which creative elements trigger these positive emotions, we found: 

B2B Software Marketing Tips to Take Away

B2B software marketers should avoid the urge to let highly rational and technical messaging bog down their campaigns. The path to differentiation lies in strong creative with distinct branding that speaks directly to a targeted, qualified audience.

 The B2B Institute finds that the best B2B software marketing is:

• Highly targeted at decision-maker’s pain points, not generalized
• Focused on making its branding as clear as possible, early and often
• Creative and memorable, appealing to emotions just as much if not more than logic
• Designed to equate the brand with powerful and clear positive emotions using an everyday setting, cutscenes, and a coherent story arc.

For more data-backed insights on making your B2B software marketing everything it can be, keep up with the LinkedIn Ads blog.