Every year, Spotify Wrapped takes over the internet. Images flood social media with the brand providing downloadable, ready-to-share visuals to encourage a torrent of visibility and interaction. Wrapped has become one of the most successful recurring marketing moments in the world and is a reminder that data, when used creatively, can speak to customers’ individual identities, the way they see themselves and present themselves to others.
Wrapped is a bit of a phenomenon, but also a masterclass in data-driven marketing. This clever utilisation of data can carry interesting lessons for B2B brands, especially those operating in complex sectors where audience insight is rich but often underused.
This isn’t a call for B2B brands to create their own Wrapped, but it is a reminder that for brands in even the driest, most technical industries, people respond to content that feels human and meaningful. It also shows that data can be effectively leveraged to fuel storytelling, just as much as for reporting.
Personalisation at scale creates unmatched engagement
There is an untapped opportunity for B2B brands to turn recipients’ data into a tailored, personalised narrative, delivered at scale. B2B brands often sit on huge caches of information on their customers’ behaviour, usage patterns, lifecycle journeys, environmental data, service-level metrics, and segmentation research. This level of personalisation and relevance makes people stop, engage and share. These rich insights often stay buried in internal reports or dashboards, generally used for reporting, and not to inform strategy or campaigns.
Some examples of how to innovatively use this data include telling the following stories:
“Here’s how organisations like yours adapted this year.”
“Here’s how your peers are innovating.”
“Here’s what your sector values most right now.”
This is a way of using data which reveals something meaningful about your audience and reflects it back to them. It may confirm or challenge your audience’s perception of themselves or their organisation, but either way, it is a very engaging way of using information. Audiences connect most deeply with brands that understand their world and reflect it back authentically.
Other ways that B2B brands can innovatively utilise their data can include segmenting audiences with clarity, tailoring messaging to distinct needs and creating experiences that feel designed for specific roles or challenges. Using data creatively allows B2B brands to craft insight-led narratives that resonate far more effectively.
Essentially, B2B marketers could be sitting on plenty of audience data and unused insights, but perhaps aren’t using them in the right way. When brands use data strategically and intelligently, it creates content people actually want to share and talk about.
People respond better to stories than to statistics
In technical or highly regulated sectors, it's easy for data-led content to become functional, for example, audiences rarely connect with reports, charts and KPI summaries. Instead, data coupled with interpretation, narrative, emotional meaning and relevance to their lived experience is much more likely to connect.
Spotify Wrapped goes beyond presenting the raw numbers, and instead, it presents a journey: your year in music. It is data built around a strong, emotive narrative, which makes it even more interesting. When dealing with B2B data, it is important to ascribe meaning, identify patterns and utilise tools like hierarchy, grouping and comparison in order to situate your customer within their industry.
For example, instead of being a top 1% listener of an artist, an organisation may be in the top 1% of users of a particular service you provide.
This mirrors insights from MTM’s Think Tank Series, where Richard Broughton explores how brand meaning is created not by what you sell, but by how people perceive and experience your brand, a theme we examine further in our blog on how to use data to create deeper, authentic connections with your brand’s audience.
B2B brands, therefore, have an opportunity to frame their insight through stories, and not just statistics.
In business contexts, emotion will still drive shareability
Wrapped works because it's fun, nostalgic and personal. Spotify’s audience is left feeling intrigued, joyful, proud of their results…or, sometimes, deeply embarrassed that their ten-year-old daughter ruined everything with her incessant need to listen to Taylor Swift. These emotions, whatever they are, turn a dataset into a social moment.
However, many B2B brands avoid emotional resonance out of fear of seeming unprofessional. It is easy to feel that the B2C marketing landscape offers more freedom compared to the fairly conservative B2B marketing trends. Yet this doesn't have to be the case.
Emotion is what builds memory, trust and advocacy, which are core principles in modern brand strategy. Take a look at our blog, The psychology behind brand, where we explore how memory, schemas and emotional cues shape brand perception, and why emotion is essential for creating brands that truly stick.
Through sentiment analysis, audience insight and social listening, brands can identify the emotions most associated with their audience’s priorities: confidence in choosing the right provider, frustration with inefficiency, pride in professional outcomes, and optimism about new innovations. Data can be used to speak to these emotions, even in the most formal of B2B contexts.
Format and presentation can transform the data’s value
So much B2B content is delivered as dense, static documents designed for internal governance rather than external engagement. But modern B2B marketing trends show a clear demand for insight delivered in ways that are visual and digestible, mobile-first, and easy to share.
While there is always a place for PDFs, reports and presentations in the B2B world, concise, visual, instantly downloadable and shareable resources are no less ‘professional’.
For the purpose of audience engagement and fostering brand loyalty, the format matters. In fact, the perceived value of the data itself often improves. By rethinking the way they present data, B2B brands can dramatically increase the understanding and use of their insight.
Why this matters to B2B brands today
Wrapped’s success highlights a shift already shaping modern B2B marketing, which is that insight alone doesn’t do enough to differentiate your brand from the market. It is instead the interpretation, experience and storytelling around that information which maximises its capability.
For organisations in high-value, complex or regulated sectors, this is a huge opportunity. You don’t need Spotify’s scale or consumer audience in order to use your existing insight more creatively and spark recognition, conversation and connection.
In a world where many brands produce similar capabilities, reports or white papers, data-led storytelling becomes one of the most effective ways to set your brand apart.
Data-driven marketing strategies with MTM
At MTM, we are in the business of improving B2B brand storytelling. We help B2B brands unlock the value of their data, translating insight into clear, human and distinctive stories that audiences actually want to engage with.
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FAQs
How to do B2B brand storytelling?
Effective B2B brand storytelling is about using data and audience understanding to shape a narrative that reflects your audience’s real challenges, priorities, and context.
Rather than listing products or capabilities, strong B2B storytelling involves framing insight around a clear narrative or journey and interpreting data so it means something to the audience. In complex sectors, meaningful and emotional communication can still be professional, and if anything, easier to understand, remember and act on.
What is the power of personalised content marketing?
Personalised content marketing uses data and insight to deliver messages that feel relevant to specific audiences at the right time. This involves segmenting audiences intelligently and tailoring content so that it feels designed for them, rather than being broadcast at them.
When content reflects an audience’s needs at that moment in time, it increases engagement and attention, builds trust and credibility, improves recall and shareability, and boosts conversion.
What is modern marketing?
Modern marketing is insight-driven and audience-first. It goes beyond channels and campaigns to focus on how brands build relevance, trust and connection over time. Some examples of modern marketing approaches include:
using data to inform decisions rather than just in reporting performance
prioritising audience understanding over output volume
blending creativity with analytics and insight
recognising the role of emotion alongside logic
delivering consistent experiences across touchpoints
For a deeper look, our blog on the future of marketing campaigns explores how the siloed campaigns approach is giving way to ecosystems of content made up of multiple interwoven touchpoints.