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B2B Marketing doesn’t have to be boring: HLabs meets Dan Knowlton
HLabs was excited to welcome agency owner Dan Knowlton to chat with our team about his journey co-founding ‘Knowlton’ with his brother Lloyd and their experiences creating fun, targeted, and engaging content for their clients.
Dan and Lloyd founded the creative video and social media marketing agency in 2015 and started working with local businesses in Kent to help them develop their content output and social media presence.
A couple of years into their journey they came up with an aggressive and ultra-creative solution to acquiring new business – and it involved fancy dress! They created a video combining genuine customer reviews mixed with clips of them sporting fake moustaches and wigs, posing as satisfied fictional clients with hilarious job titles like “dolphin trainer”, “butcher”, and “beauty blogger.”
Dan Knowlton: Behind the scenes on recording 'Business Anchors' podcast
Showcasing their creative talent and fun personalities in this way not only helped the videos get an avalanche of views and positive feedback, but it also laid the foundation of their business ethos: A self-serving objective of boosting sales can be achieved through a selfless aim of fulfilling consumer desires.
Dan said: “You can create this win-win situation where your ideal clients enjoy consuming the content and it convinces them to convert. Not only did it get thousands of views and comments for the client, but it drove more new business for our agency as well.”
Since then, Knowlton has worked for multiple global brands while always continuing their mantra of being bold and entertaining while also cleverly tying in sales messages to a target audience.
As Dan shared his experiences with the HLabs team, we couldn't help but be intrigued by what he thinks is essential to a marketing campaign. Here’s three tips:
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1. Understand the who
Dan shares, “Knowing your target market doesn’t stop with knowing, “Oh, it's a 40-year-old Male from London who's got two children.” It needs to go deeper than that. What we really try to understand is, what does that 40-year-old male from London is sharing in his mates’ WhatsApp groups or what are they thinking and talking about right now? To create a marketing campaign that resonates with a human being, they need to feel like you understand their feelings, their cultural references and the things they're thinking.
2. Flip every marketing campaign on its head
Rather than focusing on the brands' objectives such as driving sales, building awareness, or engagement, Dan shares that they rather focus on fostering positive associations before attempting to sell anything. They make it their primary goal to make consumers enjoy what they're consuming. “This is why this whole ‘advertainment’ works because it's primarily focused on getting people to like what they're consuming. You're not going to have an opportunity to sell them stuff before you've actually made them feel positive about something you're serving.”
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