Phoebe Gunning Head of People
Phoebe was one of the first writers to join Shelf in 2020. She is a veteran of SEO copywriting and has been writing primarily for the supply chain logistics and FinTech industries during her tenure. She also really, really likes Pink Floyd. Connect.
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5000. Keep that number in mind, it will be important later. For now, let’s ponder a hypothetical scenario: what would happen if the internet broke? Not metaphorically but quite literally broke from the global infrastructure supporting it collapsing.
Fibre optic cables down. Radio waves permanently scrambled. Servers wiped out. All access to the services, entertainment and communication we take for granted every day, gone.
Sure, there’d probably be pandemonium, stock market crashes, recession shockwaves and an estimated $43 billion in global revenue lost per day, every day, but let’s focus on what really matters:
How the hell would we market anything without any digital channels?
Think about it for a moment. I mean really think about it. Societal apocalypse aside, let’s say we managed to restructure society into one that doesn’t require the internet, the cloud, social media platforms, and other 21st-century technologies and services to function – how would B2B marketing survive without any digital channels powering it?
This is a good time for an age test: your current level of speculative concern is a pretty good indicator of how recently you were born. If you’re a Millennial or Gen Z young-timer, this idea is pretty concerning. If you’re an Atari-raised Gen X’er, you’re probably smiling. You’ve lived through it, after all.
Believe it or not, not that long ago B2B marketing didn’t just survive – it thrived – without any digital channel sustenance: the 1980s. And, in this booming age of consumer apathy, we marketers could benefit from reexamining some of its most successful pre-digital marketing methods.
Back to the Cold War…I mean cold call: 80’s B2B marketing
The introduction of digitalisation to B2B marketing is fairly recent. Up until the launch of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, marketers relied on traditional, by-the-book marketing methods.
We’ll skip the extended history lesson but, in short, B2B marketing was born in printed trade catalogues in the 1800s, primed in smaller sales brochures and manuals in the 1930s to 1960s, and refined in direct networking and personalisation tactics in the 70s and 80s.
How did pre-digital B2B marketers do this without the instant reach and automation prowess of digital channels?
Simple. They invested heavily in brand awareness and relationship building sans the data-obsessed, always-on, lead-ravenous digital marketing methods we live and breathe today.
Riding on the wave of the tailored marketing evolution during the marketing era of the 50s and 60s, the 1980s managed to strike a fairly level balance between tech-centred and traditional printed advertising. Radio, television, and nationwide adverts and infomercials provided the mass market reach. At the same time, printed media like billboards, trade and technology magazine ads, brochures, and personalised direct mail spoke to the customer as an individual.
B2B marketers and technology companies invested heavily in building personal relationships with business clients. Trade shows were the norm and networking through meet-and-greets was an invaluable way to reach and establish client relationships. Telemarketing and cold calling took personalisation even further.
Take heed: we’re not suggesting you revive telemarketing as a sales tactic. It well and truly belongs in the marketing graveyard and privacy acts like POPI make it harder to utilise as a sales strategy. But don’t look at the strategy, look at what it proved.
Telemarketing propelled direct customer interactions and its success cemented the importance of prioritising relationship building over broad-based mass advertising in the B2B space. Not just cold calling, but face-to-face meetups, networking, direct interactions, and printed media like tailored brochures.
Trust was nurtured over time in multiple ways. Ways that might be considered “outdated” by today’s standards and harder to measure, sure. But their effectiveness warrants a closer look and poses an interesting question:
Have we become overly reliant on digital channels as mediums for effective B2B marketing? Has digitalisation become our crutch, stifling creativity and connection in hard favour of measurable metrics and performance tracking?
It’s time we acknowledge digital fatigue
5000. Remember that number? That’s how many digital ads we see per day on average, according to the University of Southern California. You know how many adverts people saw in the 1970s and 80s? Around 500.
500 vs. 5000. It’s no wonder people – not clients, not consumers, not customers – people are digitally fatigued by the non-stop online bombardment.
It seems strange that in an era of hyper-personalisation, marketing feels so…impersonal. How many cold outreach emails flood your inbox daily, fueled by bots collecting your consented data from every page of the internet you visit, given to more bots that auto-generate an email supposedly designed to speak just to you?
If we’re feeling the digital fatigue as marketers, we can bet consumers are feeling it ten-fold.
Given the degree of oversaturation of digital marketing everywhere online, it may be time to reexamine the heavy investments we’ve made in purely digital channels, hedging our bets on data and measurable metrics that track action but can’t capture or quantify emotion.
The age of analogue is back, just in time: surviving the apathocalypse
As difficult as they may be to measure, traditional marketing methods might just incite more interest and excitement from consumers. Let’s look at a recent example.
Ever heard of Marina Prieto? Neither had the rest of Spain, until she became a viral sensation thanks to some masterful harnessing of OOH advertising by JCDecaux.
In 2023, subway ad investment dropped by 7%. In response, JCDecaux convinced brands that this advertising medium really worked in what is now their most successful B2B marketing campaign in the company’s history.
How did they do this? By introducing Marina Prieto to Spain and, eventually, to the rest of the world in their “Meet Marina Prieto” campaign. Overnight, pictures of Marina appeared in vacant billboards across Madrid’s subway with no context or explanation. Confusion and intrigue followed and people began sharing the pictures online, taking selfies with them and asking who this mysterious woman was.
As it turned out, Marina Prieto is a cheerful, 100-year-old grandmother with an Instagram account that details her day-to-day life. The only problem was that she only had 28 followers and almost no engagement with her content. That all changed.
After the campaign’s launch, Marina became a viral sensation. Her online following skyrocketed by 39,285% and her engagement jumped by 13,405%. Marina began receiving brand deals and the campaign made impressions across 14 countries beyond Spain.
Aside from changing one grandmother’s life at age 100, JCDecaux proved an outstanding point in their campaign: traditional analogue marketing isn’t dead. In fact, there seems to be a hunger for it among consumers. It just needs to be harnessed strategically within the B2B space.
When we make room for creativity within B2B advertising, magic can happen. Results-driven magic, of course.
Are we telling you to give up on automated marketing platforms that tailor campaigns according to user segmentation based on historical data, customer journey stage and communication preferences?
Of course not. They have their important place in the B2B marketing ecosystem. But harnessing the power of direct, analogue advertising methods may be exactly what we need to break through the static white noise of digital oversaturation.
We’re in a war against consumer indifference and branching out beyond digital channels to incorporate more traditional marketing efforts is the key to B2B marketing surviving the apathocalypse.
Brand first, machine later
There’s no one-size-fits-all here, of course. You need to consider certain factors pertinent to your industry, your market, and your audience. We’re not saying throw out the metrics, just make room for marketing that speaks to the humanity of your leads, your prospects, and your conversions.
We need to remember there are people behind the data representing them. If they don’t know or care about you or your brand, why would they bother clicking on another email, another advert, another digital invasion of their peace of mind? People don’t like feeling like another cog in a machine – your machine, to be exact.
A lot of businesses are put off by the idea of analogue marketing because it’s harder to measure the success rates of their efforts. But investing in more traditional marketing tactics that focus on relationship building, inciting intrigue, and nurturing excitement and hope can be just as effective as (if not superior to) tracking click-through rates, bounce rates, and costs per lead.
Good B2B marketing shouldn’t just live on digital channels, it should also thrive in the real world. It should exist in a union of people and performance. The heart and the brain. The brand and the machine, working together. Don’t be afraid or hesitant to look beyond digital channels to find that all-important heart that speaks to people.
Thanks for reading. Now get back to whatever you were supposed to be doing on the internet!
