What Does Innovative Marketing Look Like at Bliss? 3 Ways We’re Breaking Boundaries
By nature of the industry, marketing is never static. Whether it’s a new social platform reaching target audiences or a new way to craft paid advertisements with maximum reach, B2B marketing and communications is constantly shifting and changing. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), the past few years have pushed the industry’s evolution into warp speed. AI allows us to move past the boundaries of traditional marketing to write, research, and analyze at a level that surpasses anything we’ve known. Social media metrics can now be run through an AI platform for quicker analysis. Automated focus groups help test key messaging while making the most of a client’s time and budget. Even media pitches can be tailored and optimized based on the reporter’s outlet and coverage.
At The Bliss Group, we embrace these new technologies not just to keep up, but to lead. Here are some of the ways we employ innovative marketing tactics to stay ahead of the curve and deliver top value to clients across financial services, professional services, healthcare, and impact.
Reimagining Client Intelligence Through Innovative Marketing
The B2B marketing landscape has shifted dramatically from reactive to predictive intelligence gathering. Marketing professionals, particularly those in an agency setting, often find themselves being asked by clients, “What’s the next big thing? What’s around the corner that will impact me, my business, and my target audience?” In the past, we may have looked to more traditional tactics, like surveys and focus groups, to understand what’s top of mind on a particular topic and where target audiences consume content. While those tools can still serve as key vehicles for thought leadership, they require more time (and often budget) to provide fruitful results. In some cases, they are luxuries that cannot always be afforded when trying to stay one step ahead. Those tactics no longer provide the real-time insights that marketing pros need to better understand executive decision-making in today’s fast-paced environment.
One example of this is executive visibility. Accessing the minds of C-suite decision-makers remains an ongoing challenge for B2B marketers. While the traditional methods mentioned above can help us gather data on what executives say they think, they don’t give us much insight into what actually drives their decisions. So, what’s the solution? Our Executive Signals Platform.
Bliss has spent years developing our proprietary Executive Signals Platform (ESP), an innovative marketing tool that continuously monitors and analyzes the online behavior of senior business leaders. Core capabilities of the platform include the ability to understand the trends and topics that are top of mind for key decision-makers and identify the publications that receive the most engagement. It also benchmarks executive visibility programs against industry peers, reveals what content is resonating most, and understands where the white space exists (and doesn’t). With access to this data, Bliss is better able to advise clients in real-time with real insights directly from C-suite leaders to help ensure our clients’ content is not just reaching their target audience, but actually resonating.
Without access to ESP, our teams would have to dedicate hours of time manually scraping LinkedIn for the same insights. This innovative marketing tool helps us save our clients both time and money while empowering them with the real-time information they need to run a successful campaign.
AI-Powered Media Relations: Pitch PRfect
Today’s newsrooms look far different from those of the past. Industry layoffs and tightening budgets have led to fewer journalists receiving even more pitches. This in turn means that PR pros must be even more targeted in outreach to achieve the desired outcome: coverage of their client. With 46% of journalists receiving six or more pitches every workday, it’s no wonder that 49% seldom or never respond. The traditional approach of building a media list, drafting a pitch, and pasting it into an email over and over isn’t just missing the mark – it’s risking the relationships marketers should be focused on building with reporters. While faster for the marketing professional sitting behind a computer, this method can inundate a reporter with too much information, which may deter them from reading the full pitch and often lacks personalization that indicates a marketer’s understanding of a reporter’s coverage.
Bliss’s Pitch PRfect tool, created by our Research & Analytics team, analyzes various elements of a pitch, from the character count of the subject line to the time of day it was sent, to the number of bullet points within the pitch. As a result, we’re able to gather key insights that help us better understand what types of content reporters are most likely to be drawn to, when is best to conduct outreach, and the types of words or technical aspects of a pitch may or may not deter a reporter from being interested in the story. Armed with that data, our teams can counsel clients on future outreach efforts to ensure that we’re optimizing media relations strategies based on the first-party data, which is updated on a monthly basis. In MuckRack’s 2024 State of Journalism report, journalists reported that bad timing, lengthiness, and confusing subject lines were a few of the reasons that they rejected a PR pitch. Pitch PRfect helps us to navigate some of the most pressing pain points reporters face so that our pitches make their lives easier, not harder, and are more likely to generate results for our clients.
Fostering Next-Generation Marketing Innovation
As the marketing industry evolves, so to do the needs of future generations of talent. Job candidates will need to not only demonstrate proficiency in using AI platforms, but also prove they have the critical thinking chops required to generate successful prompts, obtain the insights needed, and analyze those insights into action. As for current marketing professionals, employers should offer regular opportunities for continuing education to provide input on how innovations and tools are actually being used in day-to-day scenarios marketers face. B2B marketing agencies have to make these investments in themselves and their teams to stay competitive as employers and client counselors.
Innovation sabbaticals are a great tactic for empowering employees to focus on emerging technologies. They give employees the opportunity to take a short reprieve from day-to-day obligations so that they have dedicated time to focus their attention on the pursuit of development of an innovative marketing product or idea that will make a valuable contribution to the overall success of the firm. The result of that time could be the development of a new tool or the creation of a piece of thought leadership that informs how we use existing tools and innovations.
Another option is to leverage strategic partnerships with academic institutions or technology innovators. For example, Bliss co-hosted a Generative AI in Marketing & PR Innovation Challenge with New York University’s (NYU) School of Professional Studies. The challenge gave students the opportunity to create cutting-edge technologies that leverage AI for various marketing purposes, ranging from content creation to brand management. Students submitted proposals, pitched their ideas, and finalists were chosen to build prototypes of their ideas to be presented to a panel of judges. The winners were matched with 1:1 mentors from Bliss and given access to industry and agency events. The challenge created an environment that encouraged innovative marketing ideas that could actually be put into practice for B2B agencies.
Where Do We Go from Here?
When thinking about the future of the marketing industry, one thing is clear: innovation will continue to drive the conversation. Marketers will need to continue adapting to incorporate these new technologies into their day-to-day roles and responsibilities and ensure that they put them to the test to deliver maximum value to clients.
So, what does that look like and how will it shape the industry?
Marketers at all levels, particularly those new to the workforce, must be adept at navigating these tools both from a technical standpoint and from an analytical perspective. Now that we have access to these powerful technologies, data and analytics are no longer the full equation. Employees will have to be able to interpret the outputs of AI platforms and turn them into something actionable that actually drives client results. For example, we can use platforms like Suits to review the data from the latest industry survey, but it’ll be up to us as marketers to figure out how to shape that data to craft a compelling story that will reach the right target audience.
As the marketing industry continues its rapid evolution, Bliss remains committed to being more than just participants in the transformation. We’re determined to be the architects of what comes next. Through proprietary technology development, strategic talent investment, and unwavering focus on client success, we’re not just adapting to the future of marketing, we’re creating it.
Learn more about how Bliss can support your innovation transformation at https://www.theblissgrp.com/capabilities/research-analytics/.
