With the difference between B2B and B2C marketing blurring, B2B marketers must embrace new trends in their field, mostly increasing role of emotions and subjectivity. Says Beth Comstock: „Whether B2B or B2C, I believe passionately that good marketing essentials are the same. We all are emotional beings looking for relevance, context and connection”.
We tell how to create engaging content, build emotional relationships and … bust the myth of boring B2B marketing.
1. Stop Being Boring. Become Relevant
If your campaigns or content seem dull or uninteresting to you, how can they captivate your user? We tend to mistake overblown, boring and serious with professional. So be relevant! Firstly, remove all that is not necessary: from pointless mailing to avoidable words as “actually” in your materials.
People care about things that concern them personally, so invest not only in creating good content, but also in research on your customers’ interests and personalized distribution, so each user gets materials relevant to her particular situation.
Learn that content cannot be universally attractive – it’s enticing to certain people in given context.
2. Be precise
We all were taught in school to waffle and overuse words. It’s much easier to write with sentences so complex that meaning is easily lost; sentences that sound smart, but say nothing, than to research, analyze critically and produce an original piece based on carefully collected data.
Your customers want solid information given in palatable way, so use numbers, charts, data and statistics when possible (instead of general terms, like “Some people”, “It’s said”) and write in a conversational way.
Also know that content marketing of highest quality requires hiring a devoted team: 69% of most effective B2B companies have content specialists.
3. Repurpose your content
If you have a valuable content (e.g. because you’ve conducted a massive survey), use it more than once. Prepare a report, but use include the data also in blog posts and infographic.
The point of repurposing is simple and sensible: create good, rich content, and distribute it in many channels in various forms, instead of developing a lot of rubbish, disposable materials. Invest time in creation, and then redistribute.
It will improve both the quality of your materials and your resource management.
4. Look for new media
Go beyond blog post (blog updated regularly is nothing exceptional today)! Try case studies (great tool for showing your customers a concrete example of implementation of a solution), eBooks and whitepapers, combining skillfully gated and not-gated content.
But remember that you can do more than just text. Think of:
- Video (as much as 70% of B2B marketers use that channel),
- Podcasts,
- Webinars,
- Infographics,
- Interactive forms (games, quizzes).
Text market is crowded right now, as writing is relatively low-cost and easy to produce. But it also means that using other forms will help you stand out.
5. Talk about a problem, not about yourself
In your content marketing brand shouldn’t be a leading subject. As it aims at letting customers know what problems do you help solve, it must focus on, well, problems and problem solving.
Marketers too terrified with “Content is the king” mantra, write blogs without a vision, out of duty (one should have a blog, right?), stuffing posts with keywords, while the point was just the opposite – to bring marketing closer of users.
Change your content mindset and start with listing challenges your user faces. These are your blog subjects!
It’s like with establishing any other relationship: you must listen to the other person, not just babble about yourself.
6. Build Buyer Persona
To know your recipient better, build a Buyer Persona: precise and based on solid data picture of your customers, which will become a base for your communication.
Adapt a minimalist and functional approach: get an image of how your customer shops, but don’t get overwhelmed by trivia. Focus on obtaining relevant knowledge from:
- Demographic and behavioral data,
- Surveys, interviews,
- Research.
Detailed instructions on creating Buyer Persona can be found in our eBook on the topic: download it for free.
7. Measure
Conducting marketing actions without a plan and clear criteria of success/ failure is pointless, but still even 20% of marketers declare lack of KPIs for inbound.
Measure:
- Sessions,
- Unique Users,
- Leads generated,
- Bounces,
- Leads qualified,
- Cost per acquisition,
When you start your adventure with KPIs, keep it simple: start with 5 basic indicators and gradually add new ones when you grow comfortable. Remember not to overload your evaluation system with too many indicators, what will make it unfriendly in regular use. Also know their hierarchy: which ones are crucial for you?
8. Teach (with Lead Nurturing)
B2B companies often offer products that require customers to learn. But how to educate them? The answer of course is Lead Nurturing, accompanied with appropriate Marketing Automation Platform.
What crucial and often overlooked factors should you take into consideration?
- Value for user: but how to deliver it? We recommend Alan Weiss persuasion theory, which we adopted to Lead Nurturing,
- Right pace: don’t move leads to fast to sales department,
- Lead Recycling: remember that your funnel is a two way street.
And what is crucial in B2B marketing to you?
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