B2B Brands Are Working With More Agencies

Some agencies attribute their significant revenue growth to the onslaught of B2B work

Jonathan Balck, managing director of Boston-based creative agency Colossus, didn’t start his business with B2B work in mind.

Founded in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, Colossus worked with consumer brands like Jack Daniel’s and Best Buy before it made a pitch for Athenahealth—a cloud-based network services provider for health care companies.

Marketing in Athenahealth’s category was homogenous, and Colossus wanted to speak to buyers with “hearts that beat and minds that have emotion.”

It won Athenahealth’s business from incumbent MullenLowe with work so compelling that Athenahealth’s then-CMO Simon Mouyal referred Colossus to ZoomInfo CMO Bryan Law.

Of the marketers that participated in Integrate’s April 2023 “State of B2B Marketing” research, 40% said head count cuts posed a challenge. To respond to those staffing changes, 34% of marketers reported they’re relying on agencies, and 36% said they’re tapping into contractors. To meet new demand, agencies that grow B2B clientele are simultaneously developing new B2B-specific service offerings and partnerships. B2B clients are flocking to agencies like Colossus and others that understand that B2B marketing is surging with creativity.

“If you remember that storytelling is a path and distinctiveness is all that matters, then the world can keep changing, but [you’re] going to keep telling compelling stories,” Balck said, adding CMOs need to convince their boards, CFOs and CEOs that marketing is an investment that will pay off.

Where the growth is

Indie agency Colossus eventually worked with Mouyal’s new employer, identity management software company CyberArk, and built a B2B portfolio around distinct, emotional campaigns that diverge from the B2B template. Balck estimates that half the agency’s revenue now comes from B2B work.

Holding company agencies are seeing a shift, too. Stagwell agency Gale is experiencing a similar phenomenon with B2B clients now making up 40% of its business. Its roster includes Dropbox, H&R Block, Aetna, Rocket Software and Harvard Business School. It’s a recent development, given that president and CEO Brad Simms attributes between 50% and 60% of Gale’s 2023 growth to new B2B clients. To broaden its new business strategy, Gale’s business development team is preparing a selection of B2B case studies and strengthening its relationship with B2B pitch consultancies like Tenx4.

Simms sees B2B brands shifting their mentalities away from being sales-first organizations. Sales teams often play a significant role within B2B organizations, sometimes limiting the kinds of marketing initiatives they invest in.

“The sales team just wants to talk about the specs and the speeds and feeds of their products and get it out there … because they’re not marketers,” Simms said. Lately, he’s observed more clients reject that overreliance on sales and instead hire CMOs.

Agencies are B2B companies, too, and the crossover means that some of them explore the same marketing strategies as their clients. Ad-tech firm MNTN marries media activation on connected TV and social with more traditional account-based marketing tactics. “As a result, more than half of our revenue comes from what you can think of as inbound leads,” said Mark Douglas, president and CEO of MNTN, which in 2021 acquired Ryan Reynolds and George Dewey’s creative and production agency, Maximum Effort.

“We need to elevate our marketing. We need to bring more consumer-level talent into what we’re doing in marketing. [Plus, we should be] hiring agencies that think in that way or bring in in-house talent,” Douglas added.

The B2B new business pipeline

In Balck’s experience, Colossus hasn’t had to recruit B2B brands or pitch them heavily—they’ve come to the agency to meet a need. ZoomInfo teamed with Colossus last year for the first brand campaign in the company’s history, but its CMO noted that creative agencies typically struggle to capture the firm’s strategy, culture and tone.

To hit the right notes for B2B clients, agencies must think differently about their data sources. Simms thinks many of his competitors are using the wrong datasets, relying on things like LinkedIn marketing or account mapping. To give Gale an edge, Simms inked a deal with Dun & Bradstreet, a data and analytics firm focused on B2B clients.

Skills are another key investment for agencies to do B2B work. Gale, which has hired about 30 individuals to work on its B2B clients, has a leg up as an agency focused on CRM. That’s because Simms sees many similarities between the fundamentals of B2C CRM and B2B marketing.

Teaching those fundamentals to existing talent hasn’t posed a challenge for the Gale team yet.

Now the leader’s working on making B2B work exciting. “It’s really hard to hire great talent that knows B2B, frankly. I think it’s very niche-y. [But] we’ve been able to ramp that up very quickly,” he said.