Why the Best B2B Campaigns in Complex Industries are Built From the Inside Out

By Daniella Russon, Senior Account Manager at Move

Campaign recommendations often focus on the ‘visible side of the process’ – these are things like creative concepts and that killer line you wish you’d thought of.

Over years of working with industrial, science, and technology companies running their campaigns, I’ve learned that the visible aspects usually aren’t what makes or breaks a campaign. What differentiates winning campaigns are elements that are far less visible – alignment among stakeholders, insight generation, and the development of the strategic architecture – all done long before creating a creative campaign concept.

Don’t get me wrong, a powerful, visually striking concept – tied together with the right messaging – is crucial, but there are some ingredients in a campaign that people forget, or pay less attention to. These elements are the first ones people skip, and they are also the primary reason many B2B campaigns across complex industries flop.

In addition, the buyer model most campaign advice is built for does not exist in our world. A lot of marketing advice still assumes a fairly seamless buyer journey where there might only be one or two people involved – and that those might only have one decision and one sole path from awareness to conversion. The reality is that – in complex B2B marketing – the buyer journey picture is much more complex.

Forrester’s State of Business Buying 2024 report found that the average B2B purchase now involves 13 stakeholders, and 89% of buying decisions span multiple departments.

In technical sectors, that complexity goes deeper still. A single campaign might need to land with procurement, technical specifiers, commercial buyers, finance and the executive team all at once. Each group has different priorities.

That changes what a campaign is actually for; it is no longer about persuading one buyer. It is about helping a group of stakeholders reach alignment internally, often over months, sometimes over years. That is a different brief from the one most campaign templates are built around, and it is the brief we are working to whether anyone has written it down or not.

Where Campaigns Go Generic

When a campaign in a complex industry feels generic, the reason is almost always traceable to the foundations. And the importance of laying the right strategic foundations is paramount.

So, when a briefing document is written up, a strategy is often proposed by the agency. Following that, assets are produced and then the campaign will go live. Somewhere along the way, the depth of insight needed to make the work resonate with technical buyers may never make it in. That’s because the agency team is working from a brief, and the client marketing team is working from what they know. What’s more, the sales team is having a different set of conversations entirely while the technical team is rarely consulted at all.

The result is work that looks fine on the surface and feels hollow in the market. It speaks to no one in particular because it was built without enough exposure to anyone specific.

If your campaign is not building preference in buyers’ minds before they enter the market, you can be sure a competitor’s campaign is doing exactly that.

Work That Matters… it Happens Before the Work Begins

Strong campaigns in complex industries start with proper discovery. I’m talking about proper immersion – where you really get under the skin of a client and what makes their stakeholders (and audience) tick. Typically, this discovery process will include in-depth workshops – usually in-person – and will include conversations with a mixture of people from marketing, sales and technical teams.

In my experience, three internal perspectives need to be in the room from day one.

1. The marketing team in particular will often bring a solid working memory of what has been tried before, what has worked, what has not, where the brand currently sits and where the team wants it to go.
2. The sales team will bring the customer insights and data from the market, including the objections that keep stalling deals, the language that resonates on calls, as well as any gaps that the business should approach with caution.
3. The technical team brings the substance, including the product-level differentiation, the specifications that matter to engineers and the level of detail technical buyers will expect further down the funnel.

In complex industries, no one of these perspectives is enough on its own. It goes back to my point about so many stakeholders being involved in the purchasing process; without these unique three perspectives, how will you meet the needs of so many different stakeholders in complex B2B?

External insight matters too. Customer interviews and persona research bring something the internal teams cannot, which is the buyer’s own language, in their own words, describing the problems they have. That first-hand input is often what separates a campaign that assumes relevance from one that earns it.

In short, the goal of immersion is alignment. This is the agency, marketing, sales and technical all working from the same understanding of the buyer, the same picture of where deals are won and lost, and the same view of what the campaign is for. And if you can get external insights (which we’d encourage), you’re well on your way to creating an awareness-driving and/or lead-driving campaign.

Once that internal alignment is in place, the next question is what the campaign is actually trying to do – and this is where a lot of complex B2B marketing gets stuck. Teams are often pushed to choose between building the brand and driving leads, as if the two pull in opposite directions. In complex industries especially, that framing causes more problems than it solves.

Brand and Demand are One Conversation, Not Two

One of the most stubborn misunderstandings in B2B marketing is the idea that brand work and demand generation are separate strategies competing for the same budget. They are not. They are two layers of the same system.

Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (together with LinkedIn B2B Institute) found that at any given moment, only around 5% of business buyers are actively in-market.

The other 95% will not buy for months, sometimes years. You cannot force the 95% into a purchase decision.

So what can you do? Make sure your brand is the one they remember when they are finally ready to buy. You want your brand in a prospect’s mind all of the time.

If your campaign focuses only on the 5%, then you are only competing in the most expensive, most saturated part of the market, while ignoring the much larger group that will determine your pipeline 18 months from now. In short, brand creates the future demand. Activation – on the other hand – captures the demand that already exists. One does not work properly without the other.

What does this look like in practice? You’d be running an always-on brand layer alongside more targeted campaign activity – such as sector-specific lead generation or new product launches. The brand layer keeps you visible and credible to the 95% while the activation layer converts the 5% who are ready to buy now.

When clients ask whether they should invest in brand or in lead generation, my honest answer is that the question itself is the problem. The brands winning in complex B2B are doing both, deliberately, with content and messaging that reinforces across both layers.

Building a Strong Campaign – From the Inside Out

So you’ve gone through the structured immersion process – and you more or less know everything there is to know about the client. From there, the campaign needs a content architecture that speaks to different roles within the buying group, from technical detail for specifiers through to commercial and risk-related content for finance and executives.

Brand and activation should be supported by a live feedback loop between sales and marketing so that what gets said on calls shapes what the campaign says back to the market.

Alongside the brand layer, sector-specific activity has a role to play, whether that is vertical lead generation, product launches or account-based campaigns. On top of that, the measurement framework needs to reflect how complex B2B actually buys, with longer attribution windows and success tied to pipeline contribution, not short-term lead volume.

None of this is revolutionary, but what makes it work is the discipline of doing all of it together, rather than picking the parts that feel most comfortable.

Campaigns built this way may take a little more effort in the beginning, but trust me, it’s worth it. Because I can almost guarantee that they will outperform the ones that skip straight to creative or whatever step someone might want to jump into without proper immersion.

In a market where buyers are doing more of their research independently, in committees, before sales is ever involved, the campaigns that earn attention are the ones built with that reality in mind from the start.

That is the work we focus on at Move, and it is the thinking behind our approach to complex B2B marketing campaigns.

If you would like to talk about how this applies to your own campaigns, our B2B marketing campaigns page is a good place to start. Take a look.