The magic lies in the most basic and important building blocks in the advertising arsenal: words, images, and ideas.
Take a look at these two opening paragraphs for a lead-generation letter. Which one do you think got the best results?
Opening A:
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, over half a million American homes are robbed every year. Here’s how to avoid becoming one of them.
Opening B:
I never thought it would happen to us. We came home to find our front door open, snow blowing into the house, many of our prized possessions gone. I felt sick to my stomach. And I couldn’t stop thinking, “What if the children had been home?”
If you guessed “B”, you’re right. It generated far more qualified leads, closes, and sales than the letter with the first opening. It continued to beat test after test in sales of a high-end home security system. In fact, it remained the company’s lead-generation control for twelve years.
If you think about it for a minute, it’s easy to guess why the second approach worked better than the first. It’s emotional. It tells a story. It paints a vivid picture. It’s designed to resonate with the target audience of homeowners with families. While the first opening has important facts, the second implies a burning question—what happened next?—that keeps people reading. And it sparks an additional question — what would I have done? — that can light the fire of action.
(There’s one more detail hidden in that opening paragraph that contributed mightily to our success—an intentional counter to an objection we discovered in focus groups. More on that later.)
What’s less obvious is that a variation of this approach works just as well for B2B lead-generation, including to technical audiences, as it does for homeowners. Because while a very great deal of ad messaging to B2B and tech audiences is couched in no-nonsense business language, and focuses on a straightforward presentation of features and benefits, what’s often forgotten is that the recipients are still people.
They still have fears, concerns, worries, wishes, and hopes. They still have emotions. They can still imagine themselves in scenarios that resonate with them. Most of all, people love stories—and they remember them.
In the Venn diagram of target audiences, it’s even possible that the target of this home security letter could also be the target of your tech B2B lead-generation at work. They have different priorities and concerns at the office. At home, they might be afraid of a break-in. At work, they’re more likely to be afraid of losing their job. But they’re not different human beings.
We tend to think of tech and business decision-makers in terms of their role, and speak to them in a way that’s focused primarily on what we’re selling. But ad copy is much more effective when we remember that they are people, first and foremost.
That’s why a five-step approach to B2B lead-generation creative (“creative” is the collective name for marketing words, images, video, etc.) usually works much better than plain-vanilla business-speak. It’s a thoughtful, methodical process that requires a deeper dive into research, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and a little time to think about it and develop non-obvious ideas. But it’s a small upfront investment in exchange for greater lead-generation success.
Here are the steps:
1. Understand the pain points of each stakeholder, and speak to them.
It’s not just about knowing what’s different between the pressures on a tech decision-maker, a business decision-maker, and an end-user. It’s also understanding what’s different about each of those roles in their industry.
For instance, the most important benefits of a development platform for a tech decision-maker in the international banking industry may be its ability to offer both scale and speed. For a tech decision-maker choosing a CMS platform, the most important benefits may be that it’s robust and user-friendly, so that they won’t have to spend time on troubleshooting, training, and support. For the marketing, sales, and product teams that need to use the CMS, the idea of getting more done in less time might seem appealing, but in testing, it turns out to be almost three times as effective if you can show them that a product’s features and ease of use mean that overworked people will have less to do.
2. Realize that the tech that makes a product special may not be the first thing that captures attention.
It might be a particular architecture that makes an application revolutionary, but it’s usually the benefit of that innovation that grabs attention.
For example, when a data-optimization application sent out an upgrade notice to users that highlighted its fantastic new algorithm, it got barely a 7% response. When we changed the message to, “If you wouldn’t run your car without a gas gauge, then you shouldn’t run your computer without this”, we got a 42% response. The algorithm was still an important detail to support the claim, but a lot more people got past the envelope with the other message.
Choosing a concept that captures imagination is more important to achieving the first action—getting the reader to keep going is more important than talking about the key attributes of your product.
In consumer marketing, a system that taught children to play the piano is another good example of how this principle works. The magic that made the application innovative included a renowned piano teacher and programming that customized lessons on the fly to suit each child’s skills and progress.
However, that wasn’t what sold it to parents. What sold it to parents was the idea that their child could use the system independently, meaning that parents could let their child play on a device for an hour a day, unsupervised, without guilt, because they were learning something.
Magic that made it work: Renowned teacher, advanced algorithm.
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What parents wanted: Peace and quiet, a guilt-free computer game for their kids.
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What kids wanted: fun on a computer.
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What caught attention: Ducks.
Grab attention, tell a story, captivate both parents and children, sell a lot of piano-teaching systems.
But wait, there’s more…
The parent, in this case, acted as the IT decision-maker of the family. They assessed the value of the piano-training application and determined whether it suited the needs of the end-user, i.e. their child.
But like IT decision-makers everywhere, parents knew that their purchase would be wasted if it wasn’t implemented. What worked to make that argument wasn’t the advanced technology or the award-winning piano teacher. Nor was it the appealing prospect of an hour of blessed peace each day while their child learned.
What made the parents confident that they could overcome the implementation hurdle was a demonstration of a single lesson that had an animated shooting gallery. Every time a child hit a note on the electronic keyboard correctly, a duck quacked and fell over. While it was a lot of fun, the developer considered it relatively unimportant.
If a parent showed that demonstration to the child, and the child wanted to play, the parent could be confident of implementation, justifying the purchase. For some kids, the game was so appealing that they begged their parents for the system. At that point, they weren’t just end-users. The children became influencers or advocates, driving demand.
Now that you know the background, you will not be at all surprised to learn that the best-performing ad for this product lead with the game, made the quality-of-life argument to the parent, and used the tech and the expert as supporting points to inspire trust in the purchase.
That wasn’t the first thing the client was expecting. It wasn’t what they’d done before, or anything like what their competitors did. But it was very effective, because it presented the product’s features and benefits in a way that made it uniquely valuable to the target audience.
You may have noticed that the message that became the lead was actually the last one in the chain. We turned it upside-down to get to the bit that got everyone’s attention. Think about your own product or service and see if there’s a piece at the end of the chain that you should make top-of-mind:
What makes your product or service unique?
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What do primary decision-makers want most?
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What do other stakeholders want most?
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When you demonstrate or talk about your product or service, what captures attention first?
3. Shape your pitch into a story that resonates.
While benefits are important, too often, marketing messages are simply lists of those benefits, presented without context. Marketers assume that target audiences will fill in the blanks about the problems that those benefits solve from their own experience.
We shouldn’t. When we use language that includes cues about prospects’ specific challenges, we’re reducing the audience’s mental load, eliminating barriers to the buying decision, and signaling that we “get” them. Doing that in a story triggers memory, engages experience, and builds trust. Doing that for a development platform doubled their response rate in a single email. When we did it to promote a paid training conference for IT network managers, we cut off a planned six-touch program to three—because after the third touch, the conference was at capacity.
I recently told a 62-word story on the social media platform, Threads, about a simple encounter at a Target store. In 24 hours, it got more than 100k views, over 13,300 likes, and scores of comments and shares. What made it special? Nothing much, except that it was told in a way that resonated with readers and captured their imaginations.
4. Be surprising.
Surprise makes you stand out from the competition, it makes you memorable, partly because human beings love being surprised.
If your competitors are all using the color blue, their tone is serious, straightforward business language, and their stock photos are all of people in meetings, use any other color, try a livelier, conversational tone, and develop more interesting images.
For example, what happens when you need to address an oversaturated audience of IT managers about network products and services? They hear the same messages about your competitors every day, but you want to get, and keep, their attention. For one client, we invented a persona of an IT manager who imagined the schematics of his network as a train map, created some romantic travel images with simple objects on a desk (passport, vintage camera, etc.), and sent out a series of messages offering a sweepstakes prize of a trip on the Orient Express. We tested it against a series that offered a sweepstakes prize of an expensive bundle of network appliances. The train trip beat the network bundle handily.
All it took to make that leap was a little time, some imagination, and thinking differently from industry norms.
Using travel maps as a metaphor for networking systems, to an audience of IT professionals, is not obvious. But a fresh and unusual approach made the offer stand out and get results.
5. Test.
All of the results mentioned above came about through testing—knowing your baseline, trying something new, and refining the process until you get results you can roll out, repeat, and build upon. Your short-term goal is to meet your immediate needs for qualified leads and conversions, of course. But at the same time you’re doing that, you can and should be building a portfolio of ideas and approaches that can make future efforts easier and more efficient.
Now for the hidden detail in the home-security story.
It’s this sentence: “What if the children had been home?” On a surface level, that detail packs an emotional punch just for its content—the idea of children in danger is always going to strike an emotional chord for most adults.
But this one had an additional layer of meaning, and I included it, intentionally, because of something we’d discovered in focus groups.
Where the women in our groups saw a home-security system as a practical, simple way to ensure peace of mind, the men in those same groups saw it as acknowledgement of failure of their own abilities to protect their families, and were very reluctant to consider them.
Further, although many of them were away from home frequently for work, when they thought of their families in general, or their spouses in particular, the men still thought they were the best defense against home invasion or other disaster. But when they thought about their children being home when they (the men) weren’t there, their thinking about a home security system shifted. Then it became something that they were providing to protect their kids from afar, part of a role they very much wanted to play. They went from resistance to acceptance.
We would never have learned that without that research, and would never have applied it had not members of the creative team been in the room when it was done.
Sales reps had been struggling to overcome that objection for years. All it took was one sentence in a story to plant the seed, and giving reps messaging to use during sales calls, to do the trick for a large percentage of their prospects.
Michelle LaPointe is an award-winning copywriter, creative director, and video producer who frequently collaborates with the lovely people and clients at Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
Graphics and image credits: Michelle LaPointe, Envato Elements
