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Business-to-business customers are people, too.
ZoomInfo provides the data and technology that helps b-to-b clients enter the market, find customers and expand their business. On its surface, it’s a technical and impersonal service with little emotional appeal. From a marketing perspective, however, ZoomInfo sees value in speaking to individuals and taking a more consumer-based approach.
“There’s a lot for b-to-b to learn from b-to-c,” ZoomInfo CMO Bryan Law told Adweek back in May. “At the end of the day, you’re still marketing to people.”
Earlier this month, the company put that ethos to the test by launching its first large-scale ad campaign with help from Boston-based creative agency Colossus. The campaign’s three 30-second spots each open with ZoomInfo’s sonic signature—a hybrid chant/yodel—and a pink-to-deep-red ombre backdrop emulating the company’s logo color.
With its relatively new identity established, ZoomInfo launches into a quick-cut “Brand” video that visualizes the company’s data offerings in fluctuating charts, cascading digits and stacks of files, while illustrating growth in office-tower comparisons and animated ZoomInfo site charts.
“It’s not enough to be differentiated anymore: You have to be distinct, you have to stand out and you have to actually look and act and feel different,”said Jonathan Balck, founder and managing director of Colossus. “That’s been true in consumer marketing for so long, and now the smart b-to-b guys like Bryan are seeing that.”
Where b-to-b marketing would typically explain a company’s product, its applications and effects in painstaking detail, ZoomInfo’s “Engage” spot simply compares old-school business dinners, golf outings and phone calls to the platform’s one-stop suite of contacts (and the accompanying growth charts). You could tell people exactly how long it take your product to get them from first contact to sale and how that compares to the industry average, or you can simply imply “Win Faster” with monster trucks and open-wheel race cars.
For a b-to-b company like ZoomInfo, it means leaving some of its precious data and findings on the table in favor of concise storytelling. It also requires occasionally building relationships with and fostering trust in the same creatives you once may have avoided.
“We are all marketing to people,” Law told Adweek during a more recent interview in Seattle.” People all have brains that work in fairly similar ways, so you need to stand out or be distinctive.”
