You drew a mustache on my baby!

When I began my career with BTB Integrated Marketing I was working on a campaign for a global electronics component manufacturer, AVX (now Kyocera/AVX.) We were excited about the creative we delivered, and the client was too. No image changes. No copy changes! Sweet!

But the next day we get a call asking us to add this rough-looking Excel-generated graph into the ad. I was crushed (quite the sensitive artist in my youth). They’ve just added a Sharpie mustache to my beautiful baby.

I didn’t want to make the change, but the client told us this would really resonate with the prospective customers. So I cleaned up the graph and worked it into layout. Later on, we reviewed the campaign metrics and the ad performed exceptionally well. I learned two foundational lessons as a B2B marketer from this.

ONE: No matter how much time you’ve invested learning about your client’s business and their customers, there will always be people in their organization that have deeper knowledge. Make sure that institutional knowledge is represented in the creative brief, respect it, and heed it. At BTB, we always make sure we’re hearing from marketing, sales, and most importantly, the product manager.

TWO: Remember who the audience is. It’s not the agency portfolio. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes a graph is worth more than that to an audience of EEs.

When a B2B agency keeps these principles in mind while developing creative campaigns, the opportunity for success increases.