The critical middle
– what’s the story?

A well-crafted and strategically executed brand and campaign narrative holds the power to transform B2B marketing from mere transactions to meaningful relationships, fostering deeper and genuine audience connections. To me, it seems brands typically focus their day-to-day efforts and activity on the top and bottom of their brand and campaign narrative. It’s the middle that seems to be a challenge for most brands and it’s where they turn to Revere for support. Sometimes they don’t even realise it’s missing.

But, for a connected strategy that is customer obsessed, there needs to be depth to the story, with a narrative that truly gets to the heart of what they care about – a narrative that can open value-driven dialogue between a brand and their ideal business customers.

In this article, I delve into the importance of a multi-layer customer value story and explore how it can contribute to a brand’s success in today’s complex business landscape.

The top layer is brand.
It’s your distinctive face, voice, values, and vision. Brand shapes perception and it will feel shallow if it’s not underpinned by what audiences care about. Typically, B2B brands do a good job at this and it’s where the investment sits. It’s evolving and becoming more creative as brands take their cues from the success of B2C brand strategy. 

The bottom is solutions.
Again, we see plenty of investment and time within marketing teams dedicated to this part of the marketing strategy. This provides delivery against the brand value promise. It’s the marketing activity that demonstrates your technology, products, services, and support models that meet the buyer's needs. But, it can be too ‘salesy’ and impersonal if not driven by what audiences care about or isn’t served at the optimum time in the buyer journey. Ultimately, it is when brands start to talk about themselves. It’s no surprise that day-to-day we see lots of investment from marketing teams in this, it’s the part sales most understand and want to see – as it’s closely aligned to the conversations they have with customers and prospects and supports sales enablement.

Enter the critical middle.
It’s the part of your marketing framework that takes your customer value story to a new level of engagement. It keeps audiences coming back and wanting more.

To be successful, it should:

• Address what audiences really care about
• Meet prospects where they are now
• Take them on their own value journey
• Never be sales-focused, always market-led

And because audiences are different, this part of the marketing strategy calls for personalisation to address different challenges and motivations. Where you can map individual priorities back to the business solutions. Where ABM plays a crucial role.

This is the area that B2B brands struggle with the most, in my experience. Knowing how to unlock their value story to achieve a fluid approach that tailors value to each audience. And how to make intelligent storytelling a reality to deliver consistent, connected, and context-driven customer experiences for increased loyalty and sustained growth.

So, what can help you achieve a truly customer-centric value story and create a marketing framework with a robust critical middle? Here are my top five tips…

1) Audience and market intelligence at the core – It can be easy in campaign development to get wrapped up in the internal proposition, but the foundation of any living marketing framework should be audience insights and data. Watch the market, listen to audiences, and build living personas. Leave room for live insights and trends on a programme or campaign level.

2) Ongoing education of the strategy – The CMO will always take the time to educate and rationalise the marketing framework and investment plan to the C-Suite, but it’s the wider team that need to use this framework day-to-day to drive awareness with stakeholders and showcase the importance of the ‘critical middle’ – preventing distraction or displacement of this activity for more solution focused tactics. By grounding decision-making in customer insights, marketing leaders can strike a balance between internal requirements and external demands, ultimately driving more customer-obsessed meaningful and impactful campaigns.

3) Storytelling across the buyer journey – Test your brand and campaign narratives across the buyer journey to ensure they have the depth needed to nurture and engage audiences across multiple content formats and touchpoints. Prioritise development of content monthly, make sure content is aligned to where the buyer is in their journey and avoid message overload in single content pieces.

4) A consistent inspiring experience – To satisfy wants and needs, create personalised, original, and highly relevant content and context. Be bold with creativity, experiment with content formats, and build on what works. Be ready to showcase and champion this internally to make sure the ‘critical middle’ activity is seen to be engaging the audience in the right way. Review and align success measures and KPIs that promote activity to drive long-term value. Engagement in top or mid-funnel content lays the foundations for a long-term connected strategy that lets the audience self-serve throughout the journey – exchange value to build brand credibility.

5) And my top tip…simplify and reset – Your value story should be simplified to a plan on a page. At a minimum, a three-layer approach to segment the narratives and hot topics for your brand, solution, and critical middle activities. If you have gaps, this is where you know you need to focus efforts. Aligning your team’s resource and budgets across this framework can also highlight areas for improvement and support the team's (and wider business’) understanding of the marketing plan.

It’s not as simple as it sounds, customer journeys aren’t linear, and the messy middle of decision-making has become even more cluttered. Add in the complexity of purpose-led, needle-moving, ROI-boosting marketing – and the path ahead is anything but direct. But, to open value-driven dialogue between a brand and its ideal business customers, you need a narrative, so, does your story have a middle? Like a good book, a middle that drives you to keep turning the page and not put it down. A middle with multiple chapters and plot twists?