Brand is back baby!
- 89% of B2B marketers now prioritize improving brand awareness over increasing sales¹.
- 90% of B2B buyers will go with a vendor from their day-one shortlist².
- 83% of B2B content marketing efforts focused on building brand awareness and interest³.
Remote working, multi-regional teams, and the ever evolving buying journey has made targeting B2B buyers harder than ever. It’s why global brand campaigns have become so important – to build trust, raise awareness and turn passive buyers into brand advocates.
But reaching audiences across the globe comes with a unique set of challenges, and opportunities, for us marketers. It also raises a few questions:
How do you build brand awareness with global audiences over time?
How do you ensure your message resonates with everyone?
And how do you drive conversions without relying on a one-size-fits-all approach?
It’s a big topic to unpack. That’s why we chatted it through with Kavita Singh on the B2B Marketing Podcast. And for you wonderful folk, we’ve condensed down the very best insights into this handy blog.
Let’s dive into our 5 lessons for delivering an award-winning global brand campaign.
“You need to look at the brand strategy, the values, the purpose, and build from that. What we’ve found is that often, it needs to be overhauled to match the business’ current state.” Chris Willocks
Brand campaigns have to germinate from a strong brand strategy and identity; otherwise you risk work that doesn’t feel connected to your business as a whole.
A brand-centric campaign is the perfect opportunity to revisit your strategic work. Sometimes it reinforces that you’re onto a strong, connected idea. Often it is outdated and in need of an all-important refresh. And occasionally it may not exist altogether – a very useful piece of intel in itself.
Your campaign idea therefore needs to align with an up-to-date brand strategy that includes your proposition, the values you’re built upon, the target audiences you’re aiming to reach and the personas those groups include. Putting yourself in the audiences’ shoes is a good way to deliver an early stress-test for your strategy work.
“Keep it super simple, focusing on the repetition of consistent elements, like visuals, tone and messaging. It’s all about making that brand more memorable in order for the audience to actually recall it.” Chris Willocks
For a campaign to work across different audiences, languages and geographies, more than anything it has to be simple. This is your starting point. Once you know you have a clear and compelling message that translates widely, the next step is to look at how you deliver it.
It’s a well known adage (concluded by cinema marketers in the 30s, funnily enough) that you need to see something seven times on average before it sticks in your memory. But with the rollout of a global campaign, this can sometimes be forgotten in the rush to ensure disparate audiences are kept happy.
These ideas are supported by a recent IPA study, which showed that creative consistency is a cornerstone of long-term growth – so a simple, easily recognisable campaign can have even longer lasting advantages.
A good example of putting simplicity into practice is Radish’s B2B marketing awards winner for KellyOGC: ‘no fluff’. The idea of honesty and straight talking works across different mediums, audiences and geographies, while remaining easy to understand.
“When we are working with internal marketing teams on getting the sign off for budgets and C-level buy-in, we focus on helping them to communicate upwards about how the idea will support the overall business objectives.” Renaye Edwards
Ah, the CEO buy-in, a stage where many an exciting idea has been left in a crumpled heap. But fear not, again there are clear strategies that can give you the best chance of clearing this hurdle.
Above all else, these conversations need to be in a common language, helpfully distilled to ‘data, dollars and decisions.’ There’s space for the esoteric and the intangible, but when trying to get sign off and budget approved, you need to be meeting the C-suite at their own table. Techniques such as projected ROI are useful tools to use at this stage.
But there’s also a subtler set of skills that can make all the difference as you look to get a campaign off the ground. Like using competitor analysis to drive home the risk of inactivity and stationary, safe ideas – the risk of falling behind. Or working with internal marketing teams, giving them the data and insight that shows how a great brand campaign can reverberate through a business’ long-term success.
“IEmployees have been an undervalued marketing resource for businesses over the years. If you can get your employees to become brand ambassadors, you’ve got a great amount of reach and free advertising.” Chris Willocks
Campaigns go off the rails when they are created by marketers to impress other marketers. That’s why you need to combine customer insights with employee engagement throughout the whole process, from idea generation, testing and ultimately, execution. Just think how valuable it would be to get frequent insights from your sales team on how a campaign is landing in a specific region, rather than waiting for the campaign to end to discover key learnings.
Let’s use an example. A great showcase of employee buy-in was with our award-winning global campaign for KellyOGC, ‘No Fluff’. By getting KellyOGC to agree to set aside time for their employees to take in the new campaign and celebrate it through internal social competitions and launch events, it soon gained ground-up, viral traction online across LinkedIn. With employees whole-heartedly behind the “No Fluff” campaign, KellyOCG could grow the campaign further by capitalising on brand trust.
“There was a point made when we tested a promising campaign with the Asian market that had bare feet in the visuals. That was just not something that we’d thought about and culturally it was seen as quite disrespectful. So I think it’s an example of why testing is a must.” Renaye Edwards
OK, admittedly the example is pretty unique, but it illustrates the importance of regional expertise when creating a global campaign. Rolled out globally, certain ideas and imagery will land very differently and oftentimes can take you by surprise.
Pressure testing in different markets is therefore an unskippable stage to global campaign success, ensuring that unexpected cultural nuances don’t slip through the net, and that the central idea is widely understood.
A key component of getting insight and context across global markets was using the right partners and experts for regional success. The criteria was simple: you want in-market partners, to opt for boutique over global, and to enlist the support of ambassadors with an existing reputation.
Simple steps, skyhigh success
To recap, here are six key takeaways you can apply to your next campaign:
- Build your campaign from the ground up – if brand strategy, values and purpose haven’t been defined, then define them first
- Focus on a clear, simple idea that works on multiple platforms and can evolve with time
- Use the voice of the customer to support ideas through review stages without being diluted
- Involve employees across regions and get their live in-market feedback
- Use testing platforms to harness customer insight and pressure test your ideas
- Measure success in the right way – leads are for demand generation, not brand
When a campaign begins to look across countries and continents, it can be easy to end up in a complexity spiral. So keep it simple, work with the right people, and harness the power of employees and customers.
Mic drop.
To find out more about our award-winning brand campaign work with KellyOGC, take a look at our case study.
Or if we can help you to achieve similar success at scale, let’s talk.
¹ https://www.brand-theory.com/blog/b2b-brand-awareness-8-ways-to-dominate-your-market
² https://www.marketingweek.com/brand-building-b2b-funnel/
³ https://www.leadforensics.com/blog/24-must-know-b2b-marketing-statistics-for-2025/
Selbey Anderson Group of agencies