CEO — TURTL
From a bootstrapped company operating out of Nick's bedroom, Turtl is now used worldwide by hundreds of large enterprises including the likes of Cisco, Bloomberg, Baker McKenzie, Lexus and Nestlé to provide content which is proven to be 73% more engaging and 71% more memorable.
Prior to Turtl, Nick ran his own product consultancy business and delivered projects for companies including LexisNexis, RCGP, The National Lottery and the University of Oxford.
In my view, the ‘old world’ of B2B marketing is characterised by an over-focus on appealing to the analytical side of the brain, and not enough focus on the emotive side.
In other words, B2B marketing has tended to view the customer as only lacking the relevant facts and evidence to make their decision. The reality, however, is that this isn't how humans make decisions; emotive factors are far more important in the B2B decision making process than in the B2C process. As such, ‘old world’ B2B marketing has potentially neglected the precise tools and approaches that can have the biggest impacts.
The problem with the 'traditional' approach to B2B marketing is that as decisions become more complex and harder to analyse, humans tend to rely more on emotive decision-making strategies and less on analytical evidence.
Although somewhat counter-intuitive, this actually makes good sense. B2B decisions typically involve so many parameters and possible outcomes (both good and bad) that we cannot arrive at a comfortable decision through analysis alone.
Moreover, there are typically critical elements at play in these decisions which cannot be navigated through analysis alone, such as company politics, historical successes and failures within the company and an individual’s personal objectives and ambitions.
Because of this inherent complexity and importance embedded within the B2B decision-making process, we lean towards emotive decision-making strategies.
Do we trust the brand? Have we heard good things in the market? Does the brand share our values? This is well demonstrated by the famous notion that “No one ever got fired for choosing IBM” – an incredibly powerful statement which causes buyers to look past facts, stats, numbers and any kind of quantitative analysis to what really matters, namely that IBM will not let you down and you will not regret your decision.
For these reasons, ‘old world’ B2B marketing which over-obsessed on data and hard evidence missed significant opportunities to persuade on an emotive level.
That’s not to say this kind of marketing failed in any sense, more that it did not take full advantage of what we know about the human decision-making process.
B2B marketing should absolutely not lose the analytical, evidence-based element that it has historically been so proficient in. This is critical in satisfying the needs of analytical side of the brain, particularly during the latter stages of consideration.
What B2B marketers should do, however, is to try to place more emphasis on the emotive side of decisionmaking. By considering prospects as relationships to be formed, rather than as students to be educated, marketers can have a bigger impact and find more effective ways to persuade their audiences to their advantage.
Turtl helps balance the analytical and emotive elements of content creation, ultimately enabling brands to more easily take
advantage of both of those levers across their buyers' decision-making process.
Our personalisation and analytics features can then be used to narrow in on the content that specific audiences want to read --to continue to deepen client relationships, drive better customer experiences overall, and ultimately drive more revenue.
