ZoomInfo Is Using B-to-C Simplicity to Broaden Its B-to-B Reach

Business-to-business customers are people, too.

ZoomInfo provides the data and technology that helps b-to-b clients enter the market, find customers and expand their business. On its surface, it’s a technical and impersonal service with little emotional appeal. From a marketing perspective, however, ZoomInfo sees value in speaking to individuals and taking a more consumer-based approach.

“There’s a lot for b-to-b to learn from b-to-c,” ZoomInfo CMO Bryan Law told Adweek back in May. “At the end of the day, you’re still marketing to people.”

Earlier this month, the company put that ethos to the test by launching its first large-scale ad campaign with help from Boston-based creative agency Colossus. The campaign’s three 30-second spots each open with ZoomInfo’s sonic signature—a hybrid chant/yodel—and a pink-to-deep-red ombre backdrop emulating the company’s logo color.

With its relatively new identity established, ZoomInfo launches into a quick-cut “Brand” video that visualizes the company’s data offerings in fluctuating charts, cascading digits and stacks of files, while illustrating growth in office-tower comparisons and animated ZoomInfo site charts.

“It’s not enough to be differentiated anymore: You have to be distinct, you have to stand out and you have to actually look and act and feel different,”said Jonathan Balck, founder and managing director of Colossus. “That’s been true in consumer marketing for so long, and now the smart b-to-b guys like Bryan are seeing that.”

Where b-to-b marketing would typically explain a company’s product, its applications and effects in painstaking detail, ZoomInfo’s “Engage” spot simply compares old-school business dinners, golf outings and phone calls to the platform’s one-stop suite of contacts (and the accompanying growth charts). You could tell people exactly how long it take your product to get them from first contact to sale and how that compares to the industry average, or you can simply imply “Win Faster” with monster trucks and open-wheel race cars.

For a b-to-b company like ZoomInfo, it means leaving some of its precious data and findings on the table in favor of concise storytelling. It also requires occasionally building relationships with and fostering trust in the same creatives you once may have avoided.

“We are all marketing to people,” Law told Adweek during a more recent interview in Seattle.” People all have brains that work in fairly similar ways, so you need to stand out or be distinctive.”

Knowing your people

When ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck founded the company in 2007, it was a deeply personal matter. He saw salespeople and marketers out in the field trying to hit their numbers and witnessed the “emotional, professionally defining and/or debilitating” toll it regularly took on them. 

“Promotions, bonuses and feelings of accomplishment are linked to that number—you either hit it or you miss it. There is nothing in between,” Schuck stated as part of ZoomInfo’s reason for existence in his Founder’s Letter.

Law wanted ZoomInfo’s campaign to capture that spirit and break down complex issues into more relatable terms. But ZoomInfo’s experience with agencies had not always been productive—with Law comparing it to criticism he heard about consultants during his 12 years in that field: “They come in and tell you what time it is by looking at your watch.” 

Colossus addressed the company’s skepticism by using a one-month trial to put together some initial thoughts before pitching a brand campaign to ZoomInfo’s leadership. At the end of that month, Law was convinced.

“They came with just an amazing understanding of our space, our competitors, of us, how we should position ourselves, where the opportunities were,” he said. “It definitely convinced our leadership team that we could get value.”

Founded in 2020 by veterans of Arnold, CPB, Digitas and The Martin Agency, Colossus has worked with consumer brands like Madison Square Garden, Zipcar and the Boston Bruins, but has done “really emotive, really human work” for b-to-b companies including Toast, Epocrates and Athenahealth. As Law and the Colossus team went through multiple rounds of planning before the pitch to ZoomInfo executives, Law would present research from LinkedIn, Bain and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science to make the case for a more human approach. Colossus, meanwhile, made the case that both b-to-c and b-to-b customers have limited time to absorb the myriad messages thrown at them, so keeping it short and simple helps.

“What we always would say is that the best thing about a brand is that when your salespeople make a call, all the people they are calling already know what you’re calling about,” Colossus’ Balck said. “They don’t have to spend the first 10 minutes of the meeting explaining what ZoomInfo is.”

Short-form success

When the brand campaign was finally approved, Balck said ZoomInfo and Colossus created three “very left-brained spots in a right-brained wrapper.” They distill ZoomInfo’s message down to one word: Success. As Schuck intended when founding the company, the spots tout ZoomInfo’s intent to give salespeople more successful careers and, by extension, better lives.

Media agency Norbella has placed those videos—as well as audio, digital, custom content and social assets—across streaming television (including YouTube, Hulu and ESPN), audio networks, podcasts and specialized placements in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, LinkedIn and elsewhere. Balck said he sees potential for even broader usage in the future.

“You could put them on primetime TV, and they would be successful,” Balck said. “Even if you don’t have any idea what a salesperson does all day or know what data or information is, they’re that compelling—you can put them really anywhere.”

At the end of the process, ZoomInfo emerged with both a campaign and an identity. It had a sound, a color, a voice and a look and feel all its own. With Colossus’ help, ZoomInfo revised its story to focus less on the product it provides and more on the people it helps.

“The way that they tried to paint the picture for us is ‘you need to go from being really logical to potentially sort of emotional and emotive to, ideally, helping inspire people toward what’s possible,’” Law said. “To make those steps, you have to take incremental departures from a very specific understanding of what your company is and what it does.”