Jess Johnson, Partner at Activate Health and tenured marketing strategy leader, sat down with Rachel Kline to share her expertise on what makes B2B marketing effective today. Drawing from years of experience helping healthcare and technology organizations clarify their messaging and reach the right audiences, Jess offers her perspective on how to balance research, storytelling, and communication in a field that often leans too heavily on jargon and technical language.
In this Medium article, she breaks down the core principles that guide Activate Health’s work and outlines five practical tips any B2B marketer can apply to strengthen their strategy:
1. Understand the hot-button issues. Consider the needs, preferences, and above all, the knowledge of your influencers when developing your marketing approach. Marketing connects real people with real solutions. That starts with knowing who you’re speaking to and what they’re up against. At my agency, this means we allocate significant resources to discovery research.
2. Think “person to person.” For years, B2B marketing was overly corporate, jam-packed with jargon and technical language. The specialization has finally started to move away from that approach, but Activate Health was founded 15 years ago as the antithesis, helping clients adopt human-centered communication.
3. Show and tell well. Let data and storytelling do the heavy lifting. Data is the foundation, and building a clear story around it is important to keep someone’s attention. Simple frameworks make it easy on the audience: “problem to solution,” “failure to success,” or “old way, new way, and why it’s better.”
4. Walk in the shoes of the C-suite. We often hear from clients who are marketing to health plans, for example, that they want to reach the top levels of the organization. It’s easier said than done — these folks are incredibly busy and are responsible for many different aspects of their company’s operations. In practice, that means zeroing in on the highest level, most strategic benefits and messaging them in a way that is simple to understand.
5. But remember to target the actual decision maker(s). In other words, don’t get executive tunnel vision. Depending on the size of an organization, while the C-suite might have final sign-off responsibility, they are not first in line to vet a technology vendor. Instead, consider who among your target audience has intimate knowledge of the specific workflow or problem your offering can solve.
Read the full interview for more on effective B2B marketing.