Understand your audience? Check.

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Nailing your messaging? Check.

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Predictably attracting high-quality leads? Check.

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Congratulations, you’ve built a functional marketing funnel!

Now you know how your funnel works, you can launch ambitious, off-the-wall campaigns with the confidence that they will attract new customers.

There’s a strong logic that underpins going unconventional. You can’t expect your audience to care that much about your new podcast, your promotional offer, or your founder’s inspirational morning routine. They’ve seen it all before.

You can expect them to care about content that surprises them, makes them laugh, and fights for their interests.

The best example I can think of came from Wise (then TransferWise), whose employees stripped down to their underwear in front of the Bank of England, to show that, unlike traditional banks, their transfer fees have nothing to hide. I struggle to remember most of the campaigns I’ve worked on over the years, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren about that Wise campaign when they insist, “Tell us again what marketing was like in 2014!”

Doing something radically different gives you the ‘right to exist’ in places standard marketing wouldn’t belong. That includes the national press, other people’s retweets and mentions, and the long-term memory of your audience. Regular ol’ B2B marketing doesn’t usually touch these hallowed grounds, so your campaign is in a competition-free zone, which makes it so much more effective.

Why then do so few early-stage B2B teams run unexpected, creative campaigns? It’s because they don’t have the confidence you have now. Without a clear definition of what their audience would respond to, and without a clear idea of the messages they should share, any creative campaign would come across confused, and out-of-step with their struggle for an identity.

Wise’s ‘no more transfer fees’ message, combined with a clear common enemy (those greedy, slippery bankers), gave Wise founder Taavet Hinrikus the confidence to stand up in front of a UK-based team and say, “Today we’re all going to get naked in front of the Bank of England.”

But what if a bout of overconfidence led you to launch a wildly creative campaign without setting up your audience definition, messaging, and customer funnel first? In this case, your campaign is either likely to fizzle out quickly because you misunderstood how your audience will respond or you’ll generate a lot of attention but struggle to convert those impressions to leads and customers.

Either way, I don’t see this happen much. Marketers that are unsure of the fundamentals are more likely to play it safe and copy their more successful competitors.

However, I did see a mixed bag of results when I created an old-school video game-type site to win new customers for my freelance business. Curious to understand what happened, I wrote a teardown of the experience.

Tearing down my Marmitey site

I turned on the PS One I salvaged from my mum’s house before she moved up north. I had just lost a client, so I felt a little low and a bit distracted.

Revisiting the awkward, blocky graphics of Tomb Raider and Crash Bandicoot gave me some comfort, but unable to totally switch off, I started to think of all the tech founders with ridiculously busy lives who spent a good portion of the 90s idly playing these video games.

I remembered the nostalgia-laced conversationsI’d had with tech folk about staying indoors, hooked to video games when the sun shone brightly outside.

Wouldn’t these founders find it fun to land on a site and get sucked into playing a video game for ten minutes instead of building a deck, reviewing budgets, or worrying about company goals? Wouldn’t this help me stand out as a content marketer that cared about my audience’s experience?

Saying ‘I do content marketing differently’ would make me the same as everyone else. Showing it would be difficult to argue with.

I listed out what I wanted to achieve from the project:

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I wanted to do something new

You can do anything on the internet, and a templated marketing site would have felt like a missed opportunity. I’m a content marketer so I wanted to create something different. If they liked it, they might want to work with me.

I wanted to show my strategy

Marketing got much easier the day I learned campaign ideas were going to come from my customer’s head, not mine. I knew my target audience of London-based tech founders liked computer video games, so I built one.

I wanted to waste people’s time

B2B marketing’s focus on info sharing means that most campaigns are a touch boring. You can’t show a white paper to your son and say, “Isn’t this cool”? I wanted my audience to switch from ‘I am being told something’ mode to ‘I am being entertained’ mode, and enjoy themselves.

I wanted to win a client

Most importantly, with a slot for a new client available, it was time to put myself out there.

This was the result.

What worked

The project was pretty quick to build. I wrote the story, mapped it against some user flows to make it ‘choose-your-own-adventure’, then finalized the copy. For the imagery, I ran scenes of office life in London through an image-to-text converter, to give it an 8-bit video game feel. The font and simple animations are based on the original Pokémon games for Gameboy. I sent the complete wireframes to a developer who built the site quickly for less than $500. All good so far.

I only sent six emails to promote the site. Marketing messiah Seth Godin said something nice about it, Louis Grenier posted it on Linkedin, which created the most buzz and drove 500 visitors to visit the site within five days. Of these folk, 12 got in touch, 3 were qualified leads, and one became a client I’m still working with today. So mission accomplished, I guess.

What didn’t work

My mobile site was a joke. I wasn’t convinced the format would work on mobile, so I thought it would be funny to flag a message telling people to boot up their PCs instead.

The issue was that most people visited the site for the first time via mobile, and most of those people never came back. It was a missed opportunity. The site could have worked fabulously on mobile, I just didn’t do my research, and I didn’t fully commit.

The site was also bad at converting people. I mean, the choose-your-own-adventure narrative meant it took a minimum of 22 clicks to get to the contact form, but I hoped more folk would be engaged enough to get in touch!

The Marmite

My site split opinions. My brother said, “The way it’s done is strange, the language is weird. It’s Marmite. People will either love it or hate it.” My ex-boss agreed: “It’s like Marmite, people will either love it or hate it. It’s just not for me.”

Is a Marmite response a good thing or a bad thing? My first reaction was that it’s a good thing, because the audience I had in mind would like it, and the audience I didn’t have in mind didn’t matter.

But Marmite doesn’t work like that. Marmite harnesses the negative reaction of the people who don’t like it to further cement the positive reaction of those that do. Marmite motivates you to crawl out of your hole, pick a side, and share your opinion. Marmite does this in a light-hearted, apolitical way. For early-stage marketers looking for a low-cost way to get their brand in front of their target audience, a Marmite reaction is a very good thing indeed.

The Takeaway

If your audience definition, messaging, and acquisition funnel are in a good place, is there anything unusual that your audience cherishes that you can tribute as part of your content?

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Your target buyers are tired of being understood by their job titles. What was going on when they were teenagers? What non-work stuff are they into? The more specific you can be, the more enthusiastic they’ll be about your content, and the easier it’ll be to make them remember you.

As ever, your audience is a trove of content ideas. Having a conversation about how bored they are with what your competitors are putting together is your impetus to produce something extraordinary instead.