Say hello to a new wave of exciting tech-enabled B2B demos

• Check out our B2B focus week

As a result, communicating B2B brand messages to a time-poor audience, particularly as a live experience, has become a tall order. Generalist corporate videos have lost their power as today’s audience demands a more personalized experience to capture their focus.

Arguably, one of the main challenges for B2B content is that the audience is rarely in an immediate position to buy. In fact: “95% of business clients are not in the market for many goods and services at any one time".

Unlike B2C scenarios, customers often can be months or years away from purchasing. Your audience may not even be the end buyer, and the pressure to create a lasting impression is a familiar scenario for anyone creating live B2B experiences.

Connecting meaningfully with a B2B audience is an increasingly crucial part of experience marketing, but it’s a difficult task, and complex product stories often require simplification. It’s vital your message resonates to encourage brand recall when the time of purchase does roll around. Designing an emotive experience that facilitates neural connections is key – but how is that done?

Microsoft sell

In my experience, the best results in B2B marketing often happen when unexpected technologies collide. With such a wide range of tech options available nowadays, there are plenty of ways to combine tools, formats, and stories for maximum impact.

Take generative content, for example, which can supercharge complex subjects by creating stunning digital art that is unique to each viewer through their own input. Microsoft delivered an intuitive example of technology communicating a complicated story on network architecture and speeds through a beautifully crafted interactive installation that emitted light signals across a cluster of life-sized grids in real time.

Different for each user, the impressive installation led to a high level of social sharing and ongoing conversation, something rarely seen with a linear brand film.

IBM security

When IBM needed to communicate how its data security platform, Randori, worked, the brand resisted using the obvious ‘threat map’ digital display and instead took the audience on a far deeper journey with a flagship experiential show. Using gesture control to navigate around a digital globe full of real-life security threats, users could select, interrogate, and avert problems before they became an issue – seeing their company’s networks through the eyes of a hacker,

Users interacted wirelessly via movement and were surrounded by an immersive soundscape to further capture their attention and maintain engagement. The experience achieved a dwell time of over six minutes per visitor, something unheard of within the live experience world.

Vodafone honed

Vodafone aimed to promote its innovative network technology at the mobile communications conference MWC 2024, taking advantage of an opportunity to engage users in a hands-on, interactive way. Avoiding information overload around speeds and efficiencies of the product and its engineering, the demo instead invited users to play and influence a real-time, virtual demo.

Social media content was visualized flowing through a network, and users could respond and react to it by moving 3D-printed objects on an interactive surface. This movement of the 3D-printed objects would adapt the network to be more efficient.

Visualized in a captivating digital format on the vertical canvas, the multi-screen demo combined object recognition, physical tools, and real-time graphics to make a mesmerizing crowd-puller for Vodafone.

Interactive engagement

The B2B sector often has to deal with delayed sales metrics and an unguarded period between initial contact and sales conversion. Creating a personal, memorable, and emotive connection with the target audience is crucial. Fully utilizing available technology to turbocharge complex brand and product stories and tell them in new and unique ways, in tandem with authentic human connections, is often the sweet spot.

Technology engages our senses, involves us in the action, and makes our experience all-encompassing. Whatever our age, we learn through play, so an interactive adventure is a huge driver for delivering memorable stories. Combining complementary technologies to make original, innovative environments is key, as off-the-shelf tech products continue to steadily lose their allure.

For more from our B2B focus week, head over to our dedicated content hub.