3 Reasons to Consider TV for Your B2B Brand

TV advertising isn’t just for cereal and car brands. In fact, for business-to-business companies, TV is a highly underutilized tool for accelerating growth.  

While B2B brands have historically leaned on trade shows, white papers, and sales teams, those tactics are no longer enough. Buyer behavior has changed. Decision-making is decentralized. And in a saturated market, brand recognition is now a must-have. Not just a nice-to-have. 

But TV advertising faces its share of B2B naysayers. Thought to be expensive, broad, and impractical for a brand appealing to narrow, specialized groups of business decision-makers, B2B marketers don't always give TV serious consideration. 

There's truth to these concerns. Not every B2B brand is built for TV. A startup targeting niche software developers differs vastly from a catalog company serving businesses across industries. But B2B brands with broad appeal can absolutely benefit from TV's reach. Plus, new technology and forms of TV, like Connected TV, make TV more targetable and attributable than ever. 

Here are three reasons why TV solves critical B2B marketing challenges. 

 

1. Digital advertising has limits. TV solves them. 

Digital marketing captures demand. But for B2B brands to grow, they need to create demand, too.  

Here’s a typical scenario. An office administrator searches online for your brand’s category. Your site pops up at the top of the search results. That’s great. You fought tooth-and-nail for those keywords, investing time and money into gaining and keeping them. 

But administrator’s CFO recommended a different supplier, so they navigate away and buy from the competition. It didn’t matter that the person making the purchase saw your website first. A lack of brand awareness lost you even a bottom-of-funnel sale that should have been an easy win with paid search ads. 

This is how brand familiarity shapes buying outcomes. Today, you don’t just need to show up. You need to be known. Especially as digital accessibility makes competitive gaps smaller and more brands available. According to dentsu’s Superpowers Index, 62% more brands are considered in a B2B purchase decision-making process compared to 2021. 

Plus, according to LinkedIn’s The B2B Institute, 95% of potential B2B buyers are out-of-market at any given time. Once you’ve captured the 5% rushing online for their business needs, growth is difficult without additional advertising channels. 

  

2. Business purchase decisions involve entire chains of influence. 

Business purchases now involve entire chains of people at all levels of a company. In fact, Gartner reports that the average B2B purchase involves 6 to 10 people. Yet digital ads often target just one persona, usually the end user, even if they’re not the primary decision-maker. 

Let’s return to our previous illustration. Imagine your TV ad aired in the weeks before the online search for your brand’s solution. The CFO notices the ad while watching the evening news and recommends it to the office administrator. 

The beauty of TV for B2B, however, is that you can see results even if neither the CFO nor the administrator ever see your commercial. Suppose the CFO’s partner, neighbor, or friend views the ad and remembers discussing the CFO’s business problem. There’s a strong chance the CFO will still hear about your brand. 

Business decisions are complex and varied, a fact your advertising channels should embrace. The countless behind-the-scenes influencers are impossible to target individually, making mass media a fitting solution. 

 

3. TV builds brand equity now to generate sales later. 

Opponents of TV advertising for B2B commonly point to B2B’s history of achieving sales through personal relationships and long-established trust. TV, they say, is simply not how B2B deals are made. 

Such claims are shortsighted. TV creates awareness and credibility for buyers with whom other marketing channels fail to connect. 

1. First, TV is widely accepted as the top brand-building channel, known for establishing trustworthiness. B2B purchase decisions are still highly dependent upon trust, far more than concerns about pricing. After all, “nobody gets fired for buying IBM.” TV is one of the best ways to build this trust at scale. 
    
2. Second, TV generates energy within your own company walls. With ads airing, stakeholders develop an increased sense of value, and employees are excited to see evidence of their hard work on-screen. 
    
3. Finally, let’s stop pretending B2B decisions are purely rational. The best B2B marketing connects emotionally. It inspires. Reassures. Entertains. B2B marketers know this. 87% believe their products can be inspirational. And the brands bold enough to embrace emotion on TV stand out. Think Zendesk’s “I like it when he gives me the business” spot, a quirky, creative risk that landed hard with viewers and made a B2B service memorable. TV is a medium built for storytelling. If your competitors are still playing it safe with spreadsheets and spec sheets, TV gives you space to be bold. 

As your brand becomes more familiar, valued, and loved, demand increases. Then sales follow. It’s that simple. TV’s mass reach lets you forge connections with businesses just now realizing how much they really do need more office storage. 

If you’re still dubious, there’s also evidence that other channels experience lift when TV enters the picture. As your brand becomes increasingly familiar, the effectiveness of your digital campaigns improves. Prospects who recognize your brand from TV are more likely to click on your search ads, engage with your content, and respond positively to sales outreach. 

Marketing Architects' own B2B client results validate this belief. B2B clients achieve an average 90% increase in brand awareness, with a 29% average increase in direct traffic after a year on TV. Campaigns create and capture demand, generating a 7.25 average ROAS and leading to a 17.5% average revenue increase for B2B brands’ first year on TV with Marketing Architects. 

TV and B2B. The two are basically salt and pepper. Peanut butter and chocolate. They complement each other in wonderful ways. Sure, the duo’s not for everyone. But it’s hard to deny it’s underrated.  
 

It’s time for B2B marketers to think bigger. 

Listen to Matt Maynard, VP of Global Brand at B2B software company Asana, join The Marketing Architects Podcast to explore why brand-building matters more than ever for B2B.