The Power of Play: Elevating B2B marketing with gaming ad techniques?

Having done B2B marketing for more than 2 decades, I had many opportunities to work on multiple paid campaigns. There were a few commonalities I found in the approach adopted for targeting and messaging that made them effective, but not memorable. While the reasons for this are practical if you look at it from a business perspective, they prove to be very limiting when you look at marketing and customer engagement. Usually, people compare B2B ads to B2C ads in these situations. So let's check out what those commonalities are, and take inspiration from an unlikely source - the world of game ads. Make sure you listen all the way through.

Targeting & messaging approach in B2B paid campaigns

Traditionally, B2B campaigns are formal and less dynamic. SEM has mostly stayed the same. It's still text. B2B digital ads have evolved with programmatic ads. They have also started using GIFs and videos in re-targeting ads. A similar change has been observed with B2B paid campaigns on social media using images, carousels, and videos. In SEM, these campaigns target domain and industry-specific money keywords. For social media marketing, location, industry, company, or designation are used to target clients. There's a lot of focus on features and functionality from a messaging perspective.

These are all proven, practical tactics for paid advertising that have delivered excellent ROI for B2B marketers. Still, there is so much more to digital paid advertising when we look at, you guessed it right, the B2C market.

Current approach does not fully address the challenges

Before we talk about paid advertising, let's look at a few of the challenges B2B marketers face. Most importantly, the self-serving behavior of customers, who do all their research before they talk to service providers. Furthermore, social proof is playing a bigger role in their buying decisions. 71% of people surveyed by Edelman said it was more important to trust the brands they buy or use than in the past. This means focusing on the top-of-the-funnel is more important.

Reaching customers through the right channel is another challenge. LinkedIn's still the go-to platform for B2B. That's a logical choice, but it's not the only one. B2B brands have found audiences with social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok. Community-based platforms like Reddit and Medium have done the same. Furthermore, I've talked about how generative AI has accelerated the fragmentation of user journeys in the digital landscape.

There are also lots of other factors, like not differentiating from your competitors, not creating high-quality content, and using ABM without buyer personas. Ultimately, these challenges lead to a situation where all the focus is on generating leads, even if they're low quality. That makes this approach sub-optimal. It prioritizes bottom-of-the-funnel activities at the cost of losing top-of-the-funnel customers. Adopting an inside-out approach to the market by pushing features and functionalities instead of focusing on the value a customer can get. It dehumanizes customer interactions and encourages a transactional mentality.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn't connect with buyers emotionally and ignores the fact that people make decisions based on logic and emotion. So it's no wonder so many B2B companies have lower e-mail open and response rates, lower conversion rates, ghosted prospects, and longer sales cycles.

How to improve B2B marketing with gaming ad techniques? And what B2B marketers can learn..

B2B ads often don't resonate emotionally or capture attention. They're informative, but forgettable. B2B marketers can learn a lot from B2C ads, and have. Like I said, this episode isn't about B2C ads in general. I'd like to segway into gaming ads, which are of course part of the broader B2C category. Platforms like Roblox and Discord are growing in popularity. There's also the rapid growth of mobile gaming, e-sports, and Web 3.0 driving the gaming industry. Seeing how gaming industry gamified ads pull users, and what B2B marketers can learn from them, would be interesting.

Gaming companies know their audience isn't defined by age and gender, but by interests and behaviors. A whopping 70% of mobile gamers are women, according to the Mobile Marketing Association. Creating targeted campaigns based on psychographic aspects of the customers like pain points in the industry and professional goals can work for B2B marketers too.

Mobile game ads are masters of mini-challenges, quick puzzles, and enticing glimpses into captivating worlds. They understand that engagement is key to piqueing user interest. By creating interactive content like quizzes, polls, or short explainer videos, B2B marketers can integrate similar tactics.

The people who make mobile games are data analysis ninjas. They track everything from user acquisition to in-app purchases, constantly refining their strategy. For B2B marketers, tracking website analytics, lead generation sources, and campaign performance is key to optimizing their campaigns. The most important thing is to break down data silos, combine relevant data, and analyze to get better insights.

You may be wondering, "All this sounds great, but what kind of shape or form could such ads have?" Here are some ideas:

Make your infographics interactive. Engage your audience with clickable elements that reveal more info.

Gamify your lead generation forms. Incentivize completion with a progress bar or points system.

If we're taking inspiration from gaming ads, why not create your own mobile game? Even though it's a substantial investment, a well-designed game can generate a lot of brand recognition and engagement. You could make an entire game with levels for every stage of the sales funnel, each rewarding your clients as they progress. This can also help you understand their behavior at each level. What keeps them going? Why are they dropping out? That ties in nicely with the data analysis point I made earlier.

Fragmented user journeys, self-serving customer behavior, generative AI, and constantly evolving platform algorithms reflect constant shifts in customer preferences. In many ways, customers are looking for experiences that captivate their imagination and keep them interested. Taking a page from the gaming ads playbook can help B2B marketers create memorable ads. B2B marketers need to try B2B marketing with gaming ad techniques to look beyond demographics to embrace psychographics; prioritize engagement over conversion; and act on data-driven insights.

Through creative and customer-centric gaming ads, brands can captivate their audiences and build trust. You might think that this is too far-fetched if you're a B2B marketer or business leader, but everything is possible, even integrating Google's Gemini into Apple products.