The Longevity of Fun in B2B Social Media

If there’s one thing that B2B marketers seem to be hesitant about it’s having fun in their marketing efforts. For some reason, even though we know that nobody enjoys reading boring and dry marketing collateral, and absolutely no one will share it with their friends, we still resort back to creating that style of content.

We would all agree that fun content is more shareable, and infinitely more likely to go viral. However, the one factor of fun content that is often overlooked is its longevity. Fun content has a habit of being discovered, and rediscovered many times, and each time can lead to another Tweet, another Facebook post, or another share, continuing the cycle.

As evidence, I want to share data from one of our not-so-recent campaigns, called The Conversation. It’s a fun, interactive exploration of marketing, the challenges we all face, and the odd things we all do to engage our prospects and measure our results. The great thing is how little it was promoted compared to the results we saw.

The campaign was launched over a year ago, and you can see a spike in leads driven by a promotion of it that we did in January. However, the campaign continues from there, generating a steady flow of leads every day since then. The campaign has been picked up numerous times including a recent Forrester Groundswell award, and you can see from the chart that it shows little sign of stopping.

To be clear, the fun and the humour in this campaign is tied directly to the solution it is here to promote, but in an entertaining and non-salesy way. At the end of the campaign, a marketer can choose to connect with us or not, there is no requirement to fill in the form. (this chart measures the actual leads created as someone interacts with the campaign, and at the end decides to connect with our sales team for further discussions)

However, in taking a message from product and solution, to fun and entertainment, an interesting transition happens. Being fun and entertaining forces us as marketers to connect with the actual people and personalities who might buy our products. This is not the idea of taking a “feature” and spinning it into a “benefit”, it’s much deeper than that. It’s about understanding what motivates, frustrates, entertains, inspires, and irks the people we are hoping to engage with. To do that, we end up creating a message that has a longer shelf life than the latest release, or an interesting capability.

Humor and entertainment lasts longer than features and benefits because it is about people, not about products, and people don’t change as quickly.

What makes a person smile, laugh, or think today will likely make them smile, laugh, or think a year from now. Connecting with buyers on a personal level makes your message not just more shareable, but also more long lasting. After seeing David Meerman Scott speak at Eloqua Experience this year about the concept of a World Wide Rave, and seeing this data from an actual campaign, I’ve become more convinced that we as marketers need to revisit how to add humor and entertainment into our B2B marketing campaigns.

Oh, and make sure you watch The Conversation - it's a lot of fun.