The F Company

Marketers buying stuff: Shortlist 3-5 options, get demos. Marketers promoting stuff: Talk about themselves as if they’re the only players in the market. In complex B2B, no one simply Googles you and decides to invest €100k on the spot. Buyers are thorough; they research, compare, and analyze multiple alternatives, a process that demands significant time and effort. Assisting them in this decision-making journey increases your chances of winning more deals. So, why shy away from mentioning the competition? Here’s how to help your audience choose you: 🔍 Compare features to show clear benefits. 🌟 Highlight differences to stand out from alternatives. 📄 Create "Us vs. XXX" content to make comparisons easy. 🤝 Be honest about when your solution isn't the perfect fit. Accept that you're not the only option. Embracing this reality will enhance your marketing efforts, leading to more qualified leads and shorter sales cycles. Understanding how your buyers make decisions and buy is crucial for successful B2B marketing. #B2BMarketing #MarketingStrategy #DemandGeneration

Want to hear a life lesson from our Senior Paid Marketing Specialist and the PPC team lead Jens? Look no further! 👇 "As a senior paid marketing specialist and team lead, I know how easy it is to get caught up in the nitty-gritty details of a campaign. That’s why I firmly believe in setting clear priorities and deadlines. I often remind my team, 'If you focus on the essentials, everything else will fall into place.' I'm learning that instead of overanalyzing each detail, it's more important to strategically allocate our time and effort. A critical skill in paid marketing is recognizing when a campaign is 'optimized enough' – striking that balance where it's time to go live. Efficiency often trumps perfection because in marketing, agility and adaptability are key." What other skills do you think marketers benefit from? #lessonslearned #TFCpeople

Are you sure you know your competition? 🧐 Think again if you believe your biggest rival is just another brand offering a similar solution. 📢 The primary competitor you're facing is the existing method your customers use to solve their problems. 📢 The truth is, competition is everywhere – and it's not limited to companies in your field. It might come from different modalities of solving the same problem. For instance, Voi e-scooters don't only compete with other e-scooter companies but also with public transport, walking, biking, and any other means of transportation. It might be a DIY solution and the comfort of doing things the old way (the “good enough” way they have always been done). In any case, your real battle is convincing customers to leave behind the familiar for your innovative solution. This brings us to a crucial point in the debate around demand generation: Demand originates from a need to solve a pain point. Customers may not be aware of all solutions, including yours, but they're acutely aware of their problems. So here’s an approach you can take to help lower the barriers to change and position your solution as a viable, preferable option: ↳ Understand your customer's pain, profoundly. ↳ Define all the ways your customer solves this pain today. ↳ Educate your customer on the alternative, lowering the threshold to change and adapting a new way. ↳ Build awareness making your customer solution aware and placing them as the hero of the story. The biggest hurdle? Overcoming your customers' resistance to changing their problem-solving methods. To do this, focus on building trust, nurturing a long-term relationship, and supporting your customers at every stage of their journey — even before they're ready to make a change. #B2Bmarketing #demandgen

How to find focus in a world full of notifications? 🛎️ Our very own Mira will tell you: “We marketers have all been there: With all the project things, messages, and tens of newsletters we’re somehow subscribed to, our notifications are wilding like they’re having a 24/7 party, stealing our attention to different things throughout the day. We’re used to quick context switching, but keeping focus when new notifications pop up so often is a challenge I’ve learned to solve. Learning to calendar my days and minimize distractions has made a significant difference in my way of working. I wouldn’t have believed it a couple of years ago, but now I would never go back to not practicing these things. Research shows that it takes up to 23 minutes to refocus on a task after a distraction. Meaning, that getting distracted many times a day sneakily steals a lot of mental energy and productivity from you. Sure, sometimes it’s important to be able to react to things quickly, but it’s also important to focus on certain tasks. When I first started blocking time on my calendar for tasks and dedicating that specific time to them, it was like stepping into a new world. Plus, after each day I had a concrete view of what I got done – which was a great productivity boost." Struggling to get started with focus time? Here are five tips for making the best out of it: - block time on your calendar for specific work and stick to it - close irrelevant tabs and keep open only the ones you need - use the focus-time feature in your communication channel, paired with pausing notifications - put your phone out of reach - listen to brown or white noise What are your favorite tips for focusing? #lessonslearned #TFCpeople #focus

Did you already pause everything advertising-related for the summer? You might want to reconsider. Here are some quick tactical tips from our Paid Marketing Specialists to try this summer when running ads on LinkedIn: 💰 Especially if you haven’t implemented ABM strategy on LinkedIn, audience expansion can bring you insanely cheap clicks during the holiday season. 🤳 Optimise your advertising for mobile devices – that’s what everyone has in their pockets, also on holiday. ❌ Don't front-load the budget. CPM goes up as many are front-loading. People are busy prepping for the holidays, so it is harder to reach them. There is no reason to compete for your audience's attention during the busiest time of the year at an increased cost. #B2Bmarketing #summer #advertising

They say a year in an agency is equivalent to multiple years of in-house work. Diverse clients, projects, and team dynamics accelerate growth and knowledge. Let’s hear from The F Company team as they share their learnings – first up, our Copywriter Hannele. “I have a sticker on my laptop that says Good Enough. And I’ll tell you why. 👇 As a copywriter, you can easily get stuck in the editing phase. That’s why I’ve become a firm believer in time limits and deadlines. I like to say, “If you only have a minute, it will only take a minute.” I’m slowly learning not to edit my texts to death but to use my time and effort more thoughtfully. A big part of a copywriter’s skillset is actually recognising when the copy is “good enough” – finding that sweet spot where it’s time to let go of your text. Done is better than perfect because in creative work there is no such thing as perfection.” Can you relate? What takes you only a minute? #lessonslearned #TFCpeople #copywriting

Not every ad needs a CTR. 🙅 We need to learn the value of a touchpoint without a conversion. Many B2B advertisers mistakenly believe they are in the business of changing behavior. They think that changing the copy, testing different headlines or images, expanding targeting or increasing the budget will drastically improve their CTR. They expect their ads to be so compelling that the audience will leave their preferred social platform to spend 15 minutes reading a blog and converting into a lead. 💡 The reality is that your audience doesn’t want to leave their platform to download a gated ebook from an unfamiliar brand. And ads alone don’t change this. Building trust with the audience requires more than a few ads – people don’t purchase complex B2B solutions based on an ad. The average CTR on LinkedIn is 0.5% (or less). And it isn’t about beating this. It’s about changing the way advertising is seen on social. → It’s not a lead gen tool, but an educational tool. Not every ad is meant to drive traffic, convert or sell. Instead, ads are a great way to educate, engage, entertain and build relationships. As a result of these kinds of ads, when your audience is ready to buy, they will be more likely to choose your brand. 🤝 #B2Bmarketing #advertising #demandgen

Brand awareness doesn't directly lead to sales; it serves as a reminder of your existence. Likewise, creating demand doesn't guarantee immediate sales but puts you in consideration. To effectively boost sales, you require both components. Here's a quick breakdown: 1️⃣ Brand awareness: Builds memories influencing buyer behavior, like sponsoring events or running brand ads. Seeing your logo doesn't prompt an immediate purchase, but it aids recall. 2️⃣ Demand generation: Establishes trust in your problem-solving abilities through educational content. Learning from you doesn't directly translate to a sale, but it fosters trust. 3️⃣ Demand capture: Utilizes existing memories and trust to stimulate buying behavior. Matching solutions to problems makes buyers want to purchase, leveraging established trust. For effective marketing: 💡 Different content: Tailor content for each stage - creative and noticeable for awareness, educational for demand gen, and solution-oriented for demand capture. 💡 Different channels: Identify where your audience consumes content and makes decisions, as these are often distinct places. 💡 Different budgets: Allocate resources based on your sales cycle; for instance, in B2B with longer cycles, focus more on awareness and demand gen initially. 💡 Different metrics: Use a mix of short- and long-term metrics to demonstrate revenue impact. Measure content consumption and pipeline metrics to showcase your influence on sales. To drive B2B revenue effectively, integrate all three marketing types, ensuring they complement each other. Without creating initial demand, there might be nothing to capture. #demandgeneration #demandcapture #b2bmarketing

🔔 Last chance to sign up for our 9.8-rated webinar about the struggles faced by B2B marketers working with long sales cycles (and the solutions to those, naturally). Our Managing Partner David Blinov will host this webinar one last time before the summer on May 15th at 10 (EET). If you still haven't seen this webinar, and especially if you want to make sure you're not missing out on anything important, go to the comments and sign up immediately! See you there! 🤩

It's a great thing if your B2B marketing agency works with multiple clients. Let us explain why 👇 Some companies are afraid of sharing their agency with others. But, there are mutual benefits in a situation where a marketing agency works with multiple clients, and sometimes various industries. Here are some: 🤯 Cross-industry insights: Working across industries provides us with valuable insights that can be applied innovatively in different contexts and for different projects. 💡 Innovative solutions: Insights gained in one industry can often be applied creatively in another. For example, a marketing strategy that is successful in the tech industry might be adapted for the healthcare sector, bringing fresh, innovative approaches. 🔎 Benchmarking and picking up best practices: Exposure to multiple industries enables us to benchmark performance across sectors. We can identify best practices in one industry and adapt them to another, potentially driving significant improvements. 🔮 Predicting trends: Working with clients from different industries exposes us to a variety of market trends, consumer behaviors, and business models. By observing patterns and outcomes across different sectors, we can better predict future trends and prepare more effective marketing strategies. The list is obviously not exhaustive – collaborating with talented professionals who represent companies from various industries teaches us new things every day! What would you add to the list? #b2bmarketing