Sprout Webinar Review: “How to Transform B2B Marketing with Personality and Emotion – with LinkedIn”

“A lot of B2B brands are scared to not create informative content… they are scared to take a leap into posts and content that aren’t focused on sharing information. That’s why we are having this conversation today; B2B brands need to take a leap into informative content that makes their audience feel, connect and share,” said Tom Boston. 

I recently attended a webinar with Sprout Social and LinkedIn called, “How to Transform B2B Marketing with Personality and Emotion.” Below are three points from the webinar that can help the B2B marketer use emotion with their brand: 

1. Why so serious, B2B?
At the beginning of the webinar, all three panelists agreed that B2B brands have struggled with engagement on social media. Using terms like “serious”, “information heavy” and “focused” to describe many social strategies. Compared to B2B’s counterpart, B2C has seen high success in the use of emotion in its content, specifically humor. 

Brad Janitz stated, “I think B2B companies are finally realizing that the emotional connection is important for their brands. B2C has been doing this forever, whereas B2B are hesitant but are aiming for the same results as their B2C counterparts and the emotional connection is the next step.”

 

Using social media can be difficult to portray on social media, especially on a business-focused platform like LinkedIn. One of the most common questions that formed during the webinar was, “Does the content from brands that aim to have a reaction from their audience outperform content from brands that don’t on LinkedIn? It does.”

2. Voice and tone
All three panelists agreed that there is a gap between marketing and their target audience and using humor, or an appropriate voice can be a bridge for your audience to connect with your brand.

“If you can do humor and hit the right note… then that is the winning formula to bring in an audience,” said Wensy Antoli. “If humor isn’t the choice or isn’t applicable for your brand, I think a great starting point would be thinking about the brand’s identity at the pub and then how the social brand would also be online.”

Antoli also brought up the brand archetype wheel to help identify your brand’s voice and identity, especially if humor isn’t as applicable to your audience. Janitz added that giving brands a specific voice or identity is an increasingly popular decision for B2B marketers in 2022.

“In an ideal B2B landscape, marketing should invite the potential customer inside and sales should be closing the door behind them,” said Janitz. “By creating a voice, tone and brand identity that connects to your audience with emotion, then you’re already halfway there.”

3. This isn’t a “trend or fad”
Last but not least, using emotion is not a trend or fad just for B2C to use. In this webinar, all three panelists shared that other B2B brands have used humor or thoughtful emotional strategies to reach their desired audience. Other companies like Slack, MailChimp, Squarespace, and others have created unique voices that draw in new audiences and increase engagement. 

This webinar not only reaffirmed that B2B has more to take from B2C, but these three panelists shared exactly how to go about developing a voice and brand identity and how to use humor for engagement and growth.