A discussion on evolving B2B content (Part1)
B2B marketing has evolved leaps and bounds throughout the last decade. With BYOD (bring your own device) revolution that happened in the workplace where consumer sentiments helped influence the adoption of enterprise equipment, we start to see the merging of B2C and B2B marketing principles. Central to this movement is the argument that business decision makers are ultimately consumers. This is more true in today’s climate where more than 50% of the workforce are working remotely or from home.
So the question now is this: if the business leaders are behaving more and more like consumers online, how does this affect the content we create for B2B? This is the exercise we did as a team last week and this article looks at some of the points we discussed.
We should reexamine the B2B personas we are targeting.
Personas dictate the kind of content we create. If we are targeting ITPros, traditionally we are looking at a fairly technical users working in an industry that no one will talk about on Instagram or TikTok. We would assume that they would be interested in technical specs, product comparisons and workflows. But as mentioned in the intro, if we are to assume that everyone is a consumer these days then wouldn’t it be more effective if we expand our content beyond work and look at what ITPros like to do for fun instead? We can then start to build trust through content addressing those topics. This may mean creating more content about gaming, model building, PC modding etc where we can expound certain selling points without overtly mentioning our product.
And this leads us to the next point:
B2B Content doesn’t need to be long and tedious
Modern content should be suited to our ever dwindling attention span. Once again we are taking a page from our B2C colleagues. They are good at creating short bite-sized content because they know consumers are a bunch of caffeinated, click-happy, snappy people with short attention span (typically around 10 seconds; enough time to read an Instagram caption, double tap and move on).
This doesn’t mean that there is no place for long-form articles like this. The point here is to be flexible with length, format and not stick to a set of fixed rules for B2B personas.
Provide value instead of trying to sell
This is an old adage from our B2C brethren. Consumer marketing has the tendency to want to skip straight to the selling without first engaging the audience. The B2B version of this is the constant harping on about The Product. Not every post needs to be about your product and you definitely shouldn’t end every post with “Please contact me if you are interested to test our ABC product”. You can build thought leadership and trust without touting your wares. In fact, the reverse is true; you could get people to trust you more if you mention products that you don’t actually sell.
Make it easy for your customer to decide
Do this even if it means mentioning your competition. Your PR team may disagree and warn you against ever mentioning or acknowledging your competition but this is not very customer centric. As customers, they are inundated with all the options in the marketplace with their various feature sets and price points. Purchase decisions are typically a committee effort and somewhere in that group is an excel spreadsheet floating around that’s trying to distil all the marketing jargons and hype into an easy to understand comparison chart. So help make this process easier. They will thank you with their business.
We will continue to explore this topic in future articles.
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