Journal

Getting creative with the evidence: 5 ways to inspire ideas with data

Info

Date:
24 Jul 2024

Duration:
10 minutes

Topic:
Opinions

How can B2B businesses use the data demanded in modern marketing to develop creativity, not stifle it, and find audiences for the stories they want to tell?

 

All businesses collect a breadth of data that can be used to drive and validate decisions. But it’s ideas that will become the greater differentiators of brands over time.

Knowing how to apply data to have better, and more creative, ideas and engaging B2B content is key.

All of us have the ability to find the data that we need to give us more connection points between brands and audiences. In B2B communication, it’s never been easier to find supporting data that builds that sense of credibility – but engagement with the content still comes from the story.

Data gives us the opportunity to think more flexibly about the stories that we tell, solidify brands and enable them to move into other categories.

So, where do you start when you’re looking to use data to your advantage? Borne’s Head of Strategy, Chris Bosher, was invited to speak at the CMA’s 2024 B2B Content Marketing Summit, where he shared five ways to use data better to create more rewarding ways of connecting with audiences.

1. How brands can play with data

 

Extraordinary things happen when we play with data. As an industry, we’re seeing a lot more in B2B communication and content provides ways of playing with data that are simply more creative and which drive greater rates of differentiation for the brands we are producing stories for.

Spotify’s ‘A Song for Every CMO’ campaign, produced with FCB New York, is a great example of how playing with data can lead to creative that resonates.

If you’re not familiar, Spotify effectively took the listening history of 15 CMOs in the US and commissioned a song in the style of that person’s favourite artist, to highlight the benefits of why you might want to use Spotify for podcasting and content and advertising.

What they’ve done is extraordinary – and feasible when you have the resources and the data of Spotify. But one of the things that is really interesting about playing with data is that we tend to only see that in brands and products which are inherently data led, despite the fact that all brands and products will be collecting data of some sort.

We’re familiar with the way that brands play with data in the consumer space, but it’s equally possible to do that in B2B because there’s so much data available. So, the first way to inspire new ideas, is to ask ourselves these questions:

  • What data do we have and what can we do with it?
  • How can the data itself become an idea?
  • How do we engage people around it?

 

2. Zooming out

 

One of the pitfalls of content in the data era is that hitting a good number tends to push us to repeat the conditions that led to it over and over again.

In other words, creatives often hear: “We know what works, we stay in our lane, we don’t deviate from that.”

It’s difficult to argue with this approach, because all businesses are metricised and ‘KPIed’ and under pressure in every marketing discipline –  but it bars us from understanding what opportunities lie outside of what currently works.

Strong brands build a strong enough connection between the brand and the audience that they’re given permission to start doing new things. And the Michelin Guide is an enduring example of a brand moving out of its lane.

Michelin had a really simple strategy. Not many people had cars and those that did weren’t using them much. So, to sell more tyres, Michelin started producing restaurant guides to encourage people to drive around Europe.

At first it was free, but they eventually started charging for it. And now, 100 years later, it is profitable in its own right – although it is effectively still a content marketing platform.

By using data to zoom out and dive into the audience, we can understand what’s more important to them. We can find out about their lives and their experiences. And then we can use the data, not only as an evidence-based approach to mitigate the risk of getting out of our lane, but to make the move confidently by connecting with people in new ways.

3. Finding a feeling 

 

Asking people how they feel about something rather than what they think about it is a much better predictor of their behaviour. And in advertising research, an audiences emotional response is a far better predictor of long-term commercial impact than their rational responses.

High performing marcomms are able to elicit an emotional response from audiences. But historically in B2B, our industry hasn’t always been great in understanding how we’re attempting to make people feel.

We’re really good at understanding what we’re trying to communicate, what we’re trying to say and how we’re trying to position and proposition, but we haven’t been very good at making people feel. In the last few years though, we’ve been starting to see a lot more consumer-style creative thinking being applied to B2B communication.

In B2B, the products and services that are being sold are often designed to solve a problem. So, if we solve a problem practically with our product it means that the brand has the opportunity to be the antidote emotionally.

Everything that we know suggests finding the feeling. Go and use data to uncover what feelings are at play, understand specifically how people feel and not just what they’re interested in. That can be as simple as changing the language of the questions that we ask people when we survey them. But it can also just be our own time to listen and empathise, and we will see greater effectiveness as a result.

4. Long ideas

 

The nature of ideas is changing in an era of data.

It used to be really straightforward to communicate with audiences because there were only about four or five places where we could do that. But the expansion of marketing channels and technology mixes in the last 20 years has driven a completely different requirement for an idea.

We used to use the language of big ideas in advertising – these kinds of burn bright, fade away, short spikes of attention. Nowadays, that approach is increasingly irrelevant, because you cannot guarantee that any volume of audience is going to see something at the same time. There’s only one channel left in the UK that can guarantee that more than half of the audience will see it, which is posters. Everything else is so fragmented, and we’re under huge pressure from platforms to play by their rules

Taking a long approach is key: what opportunities can you create through data to be able to help the idea live in different ways for different people in different moments?

Traditionally data is the thing that we put in. It’s the thing that we go and find out and then we surface it in a story, and we form the idea with it. It’s probable that people at creative agencies will increasingly find the benefits of having ideas that can be changed or shaped or delivered because of the data that we can find, and we can use.

5. Data is a secret weapon

 

If you’re looking to use data to deliver better ideas, then you have to start with more interesting data.

It’s easy for an organisation to look at its own customer data, or to cast its net externally for search and trend reports that might provide some understanding of how people are behaving. But this publicly available data is not inherently a competitive advantage.

So, in a rather unlikely rallying cry for data, we have to go and speak to people and find out things that our competitors are not finding, and then use it if we want data and insights to truly drive advantage for our clients and our brands.

Take Steve Jobs for example. He was someone who knew how to use data as a secret weapon. We think of him as being this resolutely creative person who went out and did exactly what he wanted to do instead of doing things like market research. But he did that to misdirect his competitors. He didn’t want them to realise how much data he was looking at.

Steve Jobs was obsessed with what people wanted. He didn’t give them precisely what they wanted though, because his role was to imagine futures that they couldn’t imagine – something that Apple has been so brilliant at doing. But it didn’t mean he wasn’t listening. He just didn’t want his competitors to know what he knew.

Another example of the power of insight is the McDonald’s ‘Raise your Arches’ campaign. Research made such a difference in this case that it was recognised with a Market Research Society Award.

The insight was the ‘sod it’ let’s just go to McDonald’s moment. It is really interesting that you cannot see ‘McDonald’s sod it moment’ in data. That is not how people work. The role of brilliant research, of going out and understanding customers, is trying to articulate things that people do or think or feel. It’s the insight that drives that work so brilliantly.

It’s not necessarily just a McDonald’s insight either. It is a fast-food insight, it’s a category insight. So, the advantage that McDonald’s receive in that data point is that they’re the only ones that found it. It’s not that it entirely relates specifically to their brand, it’s just that they’re the only ones that bothered to go and discover it.