Invisible technology and the creative opportunity

Invisible technology is set to transform creative marketing. But what is it, and how can B2B marketers harness the creative opportunity it offers?    

B2BNXT caught up with MOI Global Strategy Directors Maurice Quek, (APAC) and Stuart Harrison (EMEA) to learn what invisible tech is, and what it means to B2B marketers. 

Stuart Harrison: Invisible tech isn’t a specific program, platform or application; it’s technology that you use without realising. It’s what turns your home heating and hot water system on before you get home, or what operates security lights and automatic doors.  

Maurice Quek: In B2B marketing terms, it’s any rule-driven sales and marketing technology which enables the delivery of consistent, relevant and valuable brand experiences.   

B2BNXT: How will invisible tech enhance brand experiences in the future? 

SH: In a nutshell, consistency. Brand experiences are designed to influence the feelings a customer gets when engaging with an organisation—across every touchpoint and throughout the whole buyer lifecycle. To make brand experiences consistent, organisations must align their marketing messages, sales materials, and customer interactions to a set of desired emotional and rational responses from the customer. But many fail to translate their visions and values into core areas, such as customer service operations or client relationship management. The larger the organisation, the more elusive a consistent brand experience often proves to be. 

Today, brands MUST hit customers at every touchpoint and proactively manage every interaction to create a consistent brand feel. 

MQ: Organisations need to be more consistent and design each customer touchpoint—physical or digital—to deliver the same impression of the brand every time they engage with customers. 

Invisible tech allows them to do this in more creative ways that are unique to their brand values.  

B2BNXT: So, invisible tech will help brands make these customer experiences more personal? 

MQ: Sure. Most organisations are already using invisible tech to create experiences within their own environment, on their websites, within their domains, and so on. And many use what they know about a customer—like what they’ve bought before—to promote relevant offers. Today, an increasing number of B2B brands are personalising experiences at every touchpoint, based on what they know about a customer’s business, to focus their marketing on the biggest challenges and opportunities. 

What many B2B brands don’t yet do, is understand their target audiences’ organisations as a whole, and what goes into business-wide purchasing decisions. 

B2BNXT: B2B marketing is about more than presenting relevant offers to individuals; how do you think brands will deliver broader digital experiences in the future? 

SH: Delivering personalised and relevant experiences in B2B requires more than the information that sits in an organisation’s CRM. That’s why a growing number of B2B brands are applying behavioural science, so they can get a deeper understanding of why their business customers buy certain products and services at certain times. 

Because the B2B buying journey isn’t linear, brands are increasingly exploring behavioural science’s potential for influencing the whole business decision-making process.  

MQ: This will open the door to creativity that is driven by knowledge. When brands fully understand how organisations make buying decisions, it fuels the creativity behind brand experiences that drive the customer journey. And invisible technology is the algorithm built on this understanding that serves up the relevant content that influences buying decisions.  

The creative opportunity of invisible tech lies in gathering relevant data on customers and decision makers, understanding how people think and organisations make decisions, to inform creative experiences.  

As a result, brands have an opportunity to be more creative and reach wider audiences in places and at times that suit not only them, but also the individual buyers and decision-making units. 

B2BNXT: This sounds like an exciting opportunity for account-based experiences (ABX). Are you seeing brands adopting this approach? 

MQ: Traditionally, tech businesses struggled to reconcile exactly how their products and services enhance customers’ lives. Now, instead of simply listing features and functions, they can reach their target audience with tailored content that relates specifically to their roles, challenges, and ambitions.  

SH: The creative opportunity that invisible tech gives brands—and the agencies they partner with—is to make people feel they are an audience of one. And to do this in a way that uses automation to create value at scale for both the brand and the people it talks to. It’s individual contextualisation en-masse.  

In terms of ABX, invisible tech will enable brands to identify buyers and influencers at all levels, by name, establish the channels where they can be found, and get them thinking and acting as a single unit. This amplifies the relevance and influence brands have on buying decisions and the speed at which they’re made.   

B2BNXT: Do you think this will simplify content journeys in the future? 

MQ: Of course. And it will make the buyer journey faster too. According to Gartner, there are six steps in the typical B2B decision-making process: from researching the organisation’s needs and exploring possible solutions, establishing exactly what the solution will deliver and choosing potential suppliers, and validating the chosen solution before getting everyone to agree to final sign off. And for creative content marketing to succeed, it needs to fulfil all six simultaneously.  

Six roles in the buyer journey 

• Problem identification. “We need to do something.” 
• Solution exploration. “What’s out there to solve our problem?” 

• Requirements building. “What exactly do we need the purchase to do?” 
• Supplier selection. “Does this do what we want it to do?” 
• Validation. “We think we know the right answer, but we need to be sure.” 
• Consensus creation. “We need to get everyone on board.” 

Source: Gartner 

SH: In a pre-digital world, it would have been impossible to serve up content experiences to reach audiences as they shifted across these six steps. Invisible tech makes it possible for brands and agencies to help individuals map their own buying journey through them all, in more creative ways.   

Only a few years ago, it fell to sales teams to identify who inside the prospect organisation fulfilled these steps. Invisible tech is changing this and bringing sales and marketing together into a single unit.  

MQ: And while content marketing remains the backbone of most campaign activity and is broadly used in ABX, Invisible tech takes it to another level and delivers more effective, targeted programs into higher-value accounts at speed and scale.