22 wishes for B2B marketing in 2022

Yes, we know we’re already two months into 2022, but we have high hopes for this year. In this episode, we discuss our 22 wishes for B2B marketing in 2022. Read the quick list below, and listen to the episode for more details.

Interested in our wishes for 2021? Revisit last year’s episode.

Umault’s 22 wishes for B2B marketing in 2022

1. Stop thinking of making a video as a goal in and of itself. 
2. Everyone should read B2B Institute's 2030 B2B Trends: Contrarian Ideas For The Next Decade report.
3. More asynchronous video messaging and fewer camera-on meetings. 
4. Morph your marketing KPIs to allow you to have more time to do brand-building marketing. 
5. Bosses, start to give marketers more time to make things good instead of pushing quick returns. 
6. “Not boring” B2B is soon going to be standard. This year is the time to invest in creative marketing.
7. B2B brands stop seeing emotion as a four-letter word. 
8. Develop confidence in marketing's role in the company. You are important!
9. Make distribution a clear part of your B2B brand's video strategy. 
10. Make some smart work. 
11. Attend in-person conferences again. 
12. Make everything shorter.
13. Stop using that stock footage of a robotic human hand to represent the future. 
14. Rethink gated content. Give away your content for free. (And check out our video “The Stalking.”)
15. Social media marketing isn’t free. Start investing in it properly. 
16. Use creativity as your secret weapon in B2B marketing. 
17. Focus more marketing efforts on wide and out of market prospects. 
18. You need to ask yourself, does anyone care about this? Don’t be a “no one” meme.
19. Think about ads and marketing as a strategic asset.
20. Every ad can be a Super Bowl ad. Make some Super Bowl ads this year.
21. Hug more people this year (with their consent, of course).
22. Stay healthy and have boundaries.

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Episode Transcript

Guy Bauer: Keep in mind, like, you are valuable. If the product and sales folks knew how to market, they would do it. They don't know how to do it. You know how to do it, believe in yourself and change your mindset.

Hope Morley: Hello and welcome to Death to the Corporate Video, a podcast with tools and advice for how to make B2B videos your prospects actually want to watch. I'm Hope Morley. 

Guy Bauer: I’m Guy Bauer. 

Hope Morley: I know it's already a couple months into 2022, but we are doing a show with our 22 wishes that we hope to see this year in 2022. We did a show like this last year with 21 wishes for 2021 and it was a lot of fun. And I actually looked back at the show before we did this one. Guy, did you go back and look? 

Guy Bauer: No. 

Hope Morley: One of your wishes was that the Cincinnati Bengals would win a playoff game. 

Guy Bauer: Oh my gosh. 

Hope Morley: And we actually said in the show, at least one of these wishes has to be a long shot. 

Guy Bauer: They won a playoff game. 

Hope Morley: They did. Yes. So I would like to think that, you know, we made that come true for you. 

Guy Bauer: Thank you. And incidentally, this show is being recorded on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2022. 

Hope Morley: Yes. You're right. So 22 is just the theme of the day. We picked a very appropriate recording day for this. 

Guy Bauer: And we're going to keep it like one minute per thing, right? Rapid fire.

Hope Morley: We'll rapid fire go through our 22 wishes. So we're going to switch off. I'm going to go first. We haven't seen each other's lists either. So who knows if there's going to be some overlap here, but let's go.

Guy Bauer: There will be. We'll play it off. 

Hope Morley: All right. So I'll go first. My, And these are in no particular order, really. But my first wish for 2022 is that people stop thinking of quote, unquote, making a video as a goal or a result in and of itself. And what I mean by that is that, as video ad makers we still get a lot of marketers coming to us and they think somehow the goal of making a video is just to make a video.

You know, it's a thing that they want to check off. It's something that they're just trying to do, and they're not really thinking about what this ad can do for their business and have, like a longer term goal with it. And they're still thinking of it as just, oh, it's a thing that we need as opposed to an integrated asset as part of a broader marketing and sales strategy. 

Guy Bauer: Cool. Yeah, I like that one. All right. Number two. I think every B2B marketer should read the B2B Institute's 2030 B2B trends contrarian ideas for the next decade.

If you just Google the B2B Institute, you find this report it's called 2030, like the year 2030, 2030 B2B trends, contrarian ideas for the next decade. I think if you read this, you will be on the cutting edge of B2B marketing over the next decade. So read it. 

Hope Morley: I'll also link to it in the show notes. 

Guy Bauer: Awesome.

Hope Morley: My second wish, third wish overall, I would like to wish for more asynchronous video messaging and fewer camera on meetings. As we've all gone remote over the past couple of years, we've moved a lot more into Zoom. I think last year we actually had a wish that we had more phone calls again, and fewer Zoom meetings, but mine is, you know, let's just forget meetings altogether and use a lot more video messaging.

I have become an evangelist for video messaging over the past year, and I hope everybody experiments with it a little bit more this year. 

Guy Bauer: Yeah, we've been doing it a ton. I like it. The only thing that you don't know, I guess with services like Loom and BombBomb, maybe you do have this insight is if they watched it, because when we use Vimeo, I have no clue if they watched it or not.

Guy Bauer: But I agree. 

Hope Morley: Some do that. 

Guy Bauer: Yep. All right. So number four, is to find KPIs that allow you more time to build a brand because traditional marketing KPIs force you to make short-term decisions. So think of new KPIs that show progress that feed into your goal of building a brand. I'll give you a little short story.

I used to be a producer of a morning radio show. Somehow every quarter we were the number one show. Now we were never the number one show overall. We were always like number one in men, 25 to 34. And number one. Men and women, 18 to 21. There's all these subcategories that we could be number one, and somehow miraculously we'd be number one, but the station manager would have.

Choose which metrics to put us number one in. So the same thing you can do that is find metrics and KPIs, where you can show progress to your stakeholders, that feed into the overall goal of building a brand and get you out of that short-term decision-making because the short-term and the long-term are at odds with each other.

Hope Morley: Yeah. Absolutely. I actually have a related wish that I'll go into next. That I think that once you have those KPIs established, I have a wish that the C-suite and bosses would start giving marketers more time to make things good instead of pushing quick turnarounds and quick results. I think a lot of people are so working on like you said, a quarterly turnaround basis that they want to see results by the end of the quarter.

And for a lot of us, that often means that a new quarter starts and you have like a couple of weeks ramp up and then you talk to your agency and you get this whole thing. And then you suddenly you're left with four weeks till the end of the quarter and you're rushing to push something out. But really getting some long-term thinking and having time to make things good could be a lot more effective if you just give yourself an extra month. 

Guy Bauer: Yeah, easier said than done. And I think my point can help enable yours, is changed the KPIs to allow you to do this, you know, slowly morph them. All right. So that was number five. Here's number six. The idea of non boring B2B marketing is soon going to be table stakes. So I think it is blue ocean now. That if you're working for a B2B brand and your marketing is not boring, you do have an upper hand on your competition, but that is going to go away very soon. And so the next frontier is it'll be a competition of creativity. So invest and develop relationships in creativity now. And yes, you can exploit the non boring B2B thing probably for another year or two, but eventually it's going to move on.

Hope Morley: Yeah, I'll jump to, I'll move this wish up to wish seven, cause it's a little bit related, but I think moving beyond just not boring, my wish number seven is that B2B brands stop seeing emotion as a four-letter word. And I think that going forward, not boring, doesn't necessarily mean emotional marketing, but I think pushing that creative boundary. You can start integrating more emotion into your marketing as a way to push that envelope beyond just not boring, into true effective brand building marketing. 

Guy Bauer: And a lot of people too, they confuse emotion for, well, we have smiling people in there, you know, like that's not emotion. Emotion is eliciting an emotion out of your target audience. 

Hope Morley: And emotion doesn't have to, sorry, just one thing. Emotion doesn't have to mean like emotional. Like it doesn't have to be like sappy or sad. Emotion is an all encompassing feeling that we have as humans that can be sad, funny, inspirational, angry, whatever emotion that you have. Go watch inside out and get brushed up on all your emotions. 

Guy Bauer: Yeah, exactly. All right. Cool. Number eight is develop confidence in marketing's role in the company. I think that this is a lot of blame falls on the C-suite I find in B2B brands, but usually marketing is a second fiddle to sales or product. And I think that's how marketing views itself. And keep in mind, like, You are valuable. If the product and sales folks knew how to market, they would do it. They don't know how to do it. You know how to do it, believe in yourself and change your mindset. You are important, you are super valued, valuable to the organization. And I think if you just – who was the character on SNL, like, gosh, Uh, Al Franken. I forget the character, but gosh, darnit and I'm worth it, you know, whatever.

So yeah, you need some, uh, what is that called? Self-actualization or whatever, but yeah, more self-esteem. Yeah, like you are very important. You can do it.

Hope Morley: That was very motivational. 

Guy Bauer: Here you go.

Hope Morley: Yeah. I feel inspired. All right. Number nine. I would like to see distribution

becoming a clearer part of most B2B brands' video ad strategy. I see lot of B2B brands have great, have great distribution plans for other forms of paid media and paid advertising, like 

banner ads, and all sorts of different sorts of sponsorships and things like that. But when it comes to video ads, we still see a lot of B2B brands that think of video as something that you put up on YouTube with no real thought to what you're going to do with it. You stick it on your website and you just assume that people are going to watch it. As we talk to these brands, we'd see that they don't really think past making the thing into what they're going to do with it. 

Guy Bauer: You know, back in 2010, 2011, if you had a video, you were cutting edge and it was being seen but it's 2022. Everyone has one and they're all over the place and yeah, you need, you need to get it seen and you need to have a distribution strategy paid, earned, shared, and owned for sure.

Hope Morley: Yeah, social is so noisy. YouTube is so noisy. Even on your own website, like you're saying you have to have video content on your website, now it's not even

table-stakes anymore. It's just expected. 

Guy Bauer: Well. That is what table-stakes is.

Hope Morley: I don't know. I'm not a gambler. You are, you can tell me. 

Guy Bauer: Yeah. So number 10 is I think we need to get smarter and this isn't just limited to video ads. This is everything across the board. What's so funny is as B2B brands, you're marketing to some of the smartest people on the planet, right. Stakeholders inside of B2B companies. Yet we fill our content it's filled with over explanations, cartoons.

I mean, it's all like the most. Just it's all mansplained. If, you know, even if it's not, it's not a man doing it, but it's just that tone of just let me explain to you your business. It's all like very slow and kind of, like I said, over explained and how is it cartoons have taken root in B2B out of all the sectors it's B2B that cartoons need to be in.

Start treating our audience like they are the smart folks they are. We need smarter work. That leaves things up for interpretation.

Hope Morley: Yeah, absolutely. Wish number 11. I wish that we all start going to in-person conferences again in 2022. I think that they're coming back, But, uh, I want to see the confidence that we can all get out there, interact with other people in person and learn from each other. Because there's so much knowledge out there. And I think. We need to get more smart people in a room, and to really bring this industry forward we got to get people together.

Talking about things, making connections and in-person conferences are a great way to do that. 

Guy Bauer: I agree, the virtual conferences it's too easy for me to leave. I've attended three of them over the past few weeks. And I leave after the first 40 minutes because I don't know, speaker does something boring or something weird happens. I'm like, eh forget it. I have other work to do. But when you're there. You know, you can't just leave your there and then you meet people. It's yeah, it's just, there's no substitute for it.

All right. Number 12, number 12. Shorter, everything. You don't need to say everything at once and all the B2B marketers, we always talk about a journey. We don't really do that. We talk about a journey. If you think about our journeys should be little popcorn trails, you know, what do they call that? Breadcrumb trails?

Right? Give little, little breadcrumbs along the way. That's a journey. Take them on a journey. I feel like most B2B marketers, just give a full Thanksgiving dinner meal as the piece. 

Hope Morley: Right at the beginning of the path, 

Guy Bauer: Exactly! Lead people on a journey. And you don't need to say everything at once. All you have to do is intrigue me enough to take the next step.

That's the breadcrumb. So just think, little breadcrumbs instead of full meals. Shorter.

Hope Morley: All right. Lucky number 13. One thing I want to stop seeing in 2022 is so many people using stock clips of a robotic human hand to represent the future. And it always shows that fingers like curling in and suddenly everybody is using that to show how futuristic and cool they are. I'm over it.

Guy Bauer: Number 14 is I think we really need to rethink gated content. And I think that this is a trend that we're going to, I now see more and more people. This was a contrarian view. A year ago. And I think people are starting to really rethink gated content, and understand that people really don't want to give up their email. And if they do, they're giving you a fake one. Like one of those, like my wife has, she has a catch all email address she uses to get spammed, you know, but she doesn't care. That's not her email. So. We have to, again, we have to be smarter. We have to just put great stuff out into the world and assume people are smart.

And if it's really good, they'll bookmark it for later use. And then your brand name is on it. And we made a spot about it called The Stalking. Look it up on YouTube.

Hope Morley: And I will link to it in the show notes. Number 15, we're on 15, 15.

It's 2022. I would like people to stop thinking of social media marketing as free. I see this still a lot, especially in B2B that they think that you can just put something up there. Social media for brands for a long time has been pay to play. Those networks are not going to make it any easier for people to see your content. If you want to be effective on social there's two things, one you have to pay to sponsor content and two, you need to pay to have someone manage it for you properly. And you need to have someone who's dedicated to that.

If social is going to be a key part of your strategy, because if it’s gonna work for you, it can't be an afterthought and it's not gonna be free. 

Guy Bauer: Yep. I concur. Number 16 is creativity is the secret weapon. Creativity is the secret weapon. What are we talking about after the Super Bowl? We talk about which ones were the best, what makes the best ads? Creativity. Creativity can change a brand trajectory for like, for many more years than that spot.

Even where that piece of content even saw the light of day. For example, I recently heard this, I loved it. This man is buying an Aston Martin. And when asked why he's buying it, he says it's because of your ad. And the person had asked him, Martin was like, we don't advertise like. We don't run ads.

He's like, no, it was an ad I saw when I was five and I never forgot it. And that's how creativity can come back and help you for years and years and years, because it isn't an ad. It's a piece of somebody's life of their soul. And so that is your secret weapon. You need to wield it. You can build marketing moats with creativity where your competition will struggle to keep up with you. 

Hope Morley: Yeah. That relates to my wish number 17 is that B2B marketers start to spend some more time focusing on wide targeting and out of market targeting instead of just narrow segments. You know, who you think is looking to buy right now. That kind of lead gen demand gen thinking, which has its place.

And I'm not saying don't do that, but having both, this is something that if you've read that 2030 contrarian trends piece, that we'll link to, they talk about this a lot, but there is a lot of people out there that will be interested in buying your product next year and they need to start knowing now that you're a solution that you're out there and they can start thinking about it. And really creative ads can be a way that you can stay in somebody's mind. So that a year from now, or two years from now, when they are in market. Suddenly you're top of mind and having creative advertising as a way that you can get some, or, well, creativity, gives legs to your advertising and can be memorable for people. 

Guy Bauer: And you don't have to pay for it constantly. 

Hope Morley: Yeah. 

Guy Bauer: All right. Number 18 is I wish everyone would ask themselves this question before putting stuff out. Does anyone care? It's like, does anyone care? And it's kind of like that meme, the no one meme where it's like, no. Blank. And then somebody just starts saying something.

I love that meme. It's all about, I mean, to me, that's marketing. And that that's, that's actually explains a lot of poor marketing, which is you're not using, you know, any current conversation. No one cares about this. You're just kind of spewing stuff into the air without actually asking yourself, does anyone care?

So don't be that meme, the no one meme. And maybe we can put a, no one meme in the show notes, just so you know what I'm talking about, but you just got to ask yourself, does anyone care? And if they don't, then your piece of marketing has to make them care. It can't assume that.

Hope Morley: We've been talking about that a lot of, especially in B2B, more so than B2C or DTC marketing, is this assumption that people care about you leads to so much, like just bad marketing, and misplaced money. You're coming from a place that like you care about your

product and service, but a lot of people just don't, I'm sorry. I'm sure you're lovely. But the same thing goes for us too, you know, like people don't care. Anything that isn't directly giving them benefit right now. 

Guy Bauer: I mean, but that's just survival. That's just survival. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, we have basically every article in our blog is essentially this point, but anyway. Okay. So that was 18. Go. 

Hope Morley: All right. Number 19. Number 19, I would like B2B brands to start thinking more

about ads and marketing as a strategic asset, which is also something that you would need to invest in. So lots of companies are willing to invest a lot of money in all sorts of things that they find strategic for themselves. If that's hiring talent or software things for yourself, whatever it is that you find as a strategic asset and asset for your business. You should have ads and marketing as a category of strategic assets that are worth spending money on. 

Guy Bauer: Yep. And this goes back to, I guess, my number eight, which is developing confidence in marketing's role and, you know, ads being a strategic asset, kind of derived from marketing, being a serious thing inside of a company. All right. Number 20. Any ad can be a Super Bowl ad. There's even a new mountain and Ryan Reynolds, Maximum Effort ad going around now on LinkedIn, where he's like, we just make all of our ads Super Bowl ads, because a Super Bowl ad doesn't mean you're spending $6 million to put it on. It means that it's entertaining! People actually want to watch it. So every ad can be a Super Bowl ad.

The way that content is consumed now is people are looking for that first. Back in the day with TV, you had to interrupt people, but now you can actually serve them through the ad. And that's what a Super Bowl ad is. If it is good, people will watch. So every ad can be a Super Bowl ad.

Hope Morley: People will watch and share and talk about it. 

Guy Bauer: That's right. But it's gotta be good.

Hope Morley: Number 20, my last wish for 2022. And, I'm going to get a little sappy on this one. Guy Bauer: Or 21? 

Hope Morley: Yes. Okay. Number 21 is my last for 2022. 

Guy Bauer: Get sappy. 

Hope Morley: I'm going to get sappy. I hope that we all hug a lot more people this year. That's my goal for 2022. Let's all hug each other again. We've had two years of not enough hugs. So I wish you all lots of hugs for 2022. 

Guy Bauer: And mine is slightly sappy, but my number 22 number 22 is to stay healthy and have boundaries. In some cases, the pandemic helped me build boundaries, but in other cases it didn't, but I think, you know, wherever you are, keep boundaries up and stay healthy and take care of yourself out there.

Hope Morley: Absolutely. 

Guy Bauer: All right. So let's rapid fire recap. Go ahead. Hope. 

Hope Morley: Okay. 

Guy Bauer: Okay. 

Hope Morley: Number one people stop thinking of making a video as a goal in and of itself. 

Guy Bauer: Number two. Read B2B Institute's 2030 B2B trends, contrarian ideas for the next decade. 

Hope Morley: Number three more asynchronous video messaging and fewer camera on meetings. 

Guy Bauer: Number four morph your KPIs to allow you to have more time to actually build a brand. 

Hope Morley: And number five, bosses, start to give marketers more time to make things good instead of pushing quick returns. 

Guy Bauer: Number six, non boring b2B is soon going to be table stakes. You need to invest in creative now.

Hope Morley: Number seven B2B brands stop seeing emotion as a four-letter word. 

Guy Bauer: Number eight, develop confidence in marketing's role in the company. 

Hope Morley: Number nine, distribution becoming a clear part of a B2B brand's video strategy. 

Guy Bauer: Number 10. Let's make some smart work. Get rid of the over explanations in the cartoons. Let's assume our audience is smart. 

Hope Morley: Number 11 let's all go to in-person conferences again. 

Guy Bauer: Number 12, shorter.

Hope Morley: Number 13, stop using that footage of a robotic human hand to represent the future. 

Guy Bauer: Knock it off. Number 14, rethink gated content. People are too smart.

Hope Morley: Number 15 stop thinking of social media marketing as free 

Guy Bauer: Number 16 creative is a secret weapon. 

Hope Morley: Number 17. Don't focus exclusively on narrow and segmented targeting. Focus more on wide And out of market people as well. 

Guy Bauer: Number 18, you need to ask yourself, does anyone care about this?

Hope Morley: Number 19 B2B companies should start thinking about ads and marketing as a strategic asset.

Guy Bauer: Number 20. Every ad can be a Super Bowl ad. Let's make some Super Bowl ads this year

Hope Morley: Number 21, go hug somebody this year.

Guy Bauer: and 22 to stay healthy and have boundaries. Our 22 wishes. And the Bengals win the Super Bowl 23. See I didn't get too greedy last year. I said we would win a playoff game. We did. Now I need to be more specific. I wish for the Bengals to win the Super Bowl.

Hope Morley: All right. We'll see if that happens when we get to 2023. 

There's a couple of things we can pull out from what we just went over, but I think our biggest theme that we're looking at for 2022 is we want to see some creativity and we want to see some respect for marketers. It's our year, marketers. Let's shine.

Guy Bauer: Let's shine.

Hope Morley: 2022. It's the year of the B2B marketer. 

Alright, thanks for listening today. Uh, let us know what your wishes are for 2022. You can hit us up on all the social media channels, Twitter and LinkedIn at Umault that's U M A U L T. And you can also visit us on our website at umault.com. Thanks for listening. 

Guy Bauer: You're welcome. Bye.