Creativity gets treated as a B2C luxury. Something for the brands selling sneakers and soft drinks, while the rest of us produce comparison tables and hope the feature list wins.

That's an expensive assumption. In B2B SaaS, where competition is fierce and genuine product differentiation is often thin, creative work is one of the few levers left that a competitor can't simply copy next quarter.

On a recent episode of the SaaS Stories podcast, I spoke with Keith Tan, Co-Founder of Zeemart, about the creative decisions behind his company's growth in the food and beverage industry. His answers were considerably more practical than the word "creativity" usually suggests.

Listen to the full episode of SaaS Stories with Keith Tan

What creativity means here

Creativity in B2B marketing means innovative approaches to messaging, branding and customer engagement — the things that make a company recognisable. B2C decisions run on emotion and impulse. B2B decisions are more rational and more data-driven, which is exactly why so many marketers conclude creativity doesn't apply.

The opposite is true. Creative work is how you communicate a complicated value proposition without boring your buyer, and how you build a brand experience anyone remembers a week later.

The evidence backs it. LinkedIn found that 75% of B2B buyers consider it critical that a vendor's content speaks directly to their company's needs. The Content Marketing Institute reports that 91% of top-performing B2B content marketers prioritise their audience's informational needs over their own promotional message. And Forrester found that B2B companies excelling at creativity achieve around 10% higher revenue growth than less creative peers.

Where it pays off

Differentiation. In a crowded SaaS market, being distinguishable is worth more than being marginally better. Creative marketing is how you get there when the feature grid says everyone does the same thing. Keith's approach at Zeemart is the clearest example I've heard recently, and it's the opposite of what most SaaS marketers do.

"We had to use less buzzwords in our own pitch, especially to the restaurant industry, because they may not be familiar with a lot of the marketing jargon. We had to really state what does our product do and how does it benefit you."

Stripping the jargon was the creative act. It is considerably harder than adding it, because buzzwords are a way of sounding credible without committing to a claim. Zeemart sells into restaurants and food service, where nobody is impressed by "end-to-end procurement orchestration" and everybody understands "you'll stop losing invoices". Saying the plain thing is a decision, and most companies never make it.

Emotional connection. B2B buying runs on logic and necessity, and emotion still decides between two logical options. Creative work humanises a brand, which makes it easier to trust — and trust is what a buying committee falls back on when the spreadsheets tie.

"We featured one of the chefs that were using our product and gave a backstory of how he started, a day in his life, and then inserted a small message around how Zeemart helped him. That was actually very powerful because he would then share it across his network, creating a word-of-mouth effect."

Note what the content is mostly about. It is a portrait of a chef, and Zeemart appears briefly inside it. That ratio is why it travelled — the chef shared it because it flattered his work, not theirs. A conventional case study, with the vendor at the centre, would have sat on a website being ignored.

User experience. Creative product design matters most in software people open every day. A well-designed, genuinely usable product lifts satisfaction and retention in a way no campaign can compensate for, and in B2B it is often used by several people on a team at once, which multiplies every friction.

"When I think about the UI of Zeemart, the inspiration was almost like Facebook in its early days where you don't even think about the UI. It's invisible, but the actions and the content stand out. Performance and smooth interaction are key."

Three strategies worth running

Storytelling. Narrative lets you explain a complex solution in terms a buyer already recognises, which is the whole difficulty with technical products. HubSpot has built much of its content engine on customer success stories rather than product description, and the approach demonstrates value in a way a feature page never manages — the reader sees someone like themselves with a problem like theirs, and the product arrives as the resolution rather than the subject.

Visual content. Video, infographics and interactive media lift engagement and comprehension on complicated products. The Content Marketing Institute found 70% of B2B marketers use video and 68% use infographics. Keith's experience matches:

"As a startup, participating in a lot of startup conventions and giving talks gave us the biggest mileage. Creating lifestyle-based content and explainer videos that are simple and straightforward worked really well for us."

Personalisation. Tailoring content to specific segments requires real understanding of the customer and creative use of your data — not a merge field. Salesforce does this at scale, using customer data to deliver targeted content and recommendations that lift engagement and conversion. The creativity sits in deciding which differences between segments actually matter, since personalising against the wrong variable is just extra work that nobody notices.

Three companies that got it right

Slack differentiated itself in a crowded market through playful branding and genuinely engaging campaigns, building an emotional connection unusual for a workplace tool. Its onboarding videos are the clearest example — funny and genuinely instructive at once, which got people through setup instead of abandoning it. That combination fed directly into rapid adoption and unusually high satisfaction, in a category where most competitors were selling on integrations and uptime.

Dropbox drove growth through a referral program offering extra storage to users who brought in new customers, tapping word-of-mouth rather than paid acquisition. The creativity was not the incentive itself but the clarity of it. The offer was simple enough to understand instantly and the reward was something users already wanted more of, so participation required no persuasion. That simplicity is what produced the exponential growth, and it is the part most companies copying the mechanic leave out.

Zeemart built on clear messaging and lifestyle-based content, with a mobile app designed around how chefs and restaurant managers actually work.

"Participating in startup conventions and giving talks gave us the biggest mileage. Creating content that resonates with the audience, such as featuring chefs using our product, helped us build credibility and trust."

Worth noting how unfashionable that answer is. Turning up in person and speaking to rooms of people is slow, unscalable and difficult to attribute — and for an early company selling into a tight-knit industry, it was the highest-return channel available.

Where this is heading

The future of B2B SaaS marketing is creative strategy fused with data-driven insight. As AI and machine learning mature, they'll enable more personalised and engaging experiences at scale.

Three trends are worth watching.

AI and automation will let companies deliver relevant content at a volume that was previously impossible, though the constraint moves rather than disappears — when everyone can produce more, the differentiator becomes having something worth saying.

Interactive content such as quizzes, polls and interactive infographics will grow, because it engages the audience and collects useful first-party data in the same motion, which matters increasingly as third-party tracking disappears.

Experiential marketing, online and offline, will keep outperforming a content calendar for depth of relationship. Keith's convention circuit is a version of this, and it works for the same reason it always has: people remember rooms they were in.

Creativity is a genuine differentiator in this market, and Zeemart, Slack and Dropbox all show it driving real growth rather than awards.

Start where Keith did. Take your current pitch and remove every word your customer wouldn't use themselves. What's left is usually the thing worth saying.