Hi there! It’s Matt with MessageUp.
Do you recognize the phrase in this week’s newsletter title?
It’s a line spoken by the announcer, played by John Cleese, in the iconic British comedy show, Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Having grown up with Python—and other classics like Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson), Mr. Bean (ditto), and Only Fools and Horses (David Jason)—I’m prone to including some of their classic one-liners in my writing. Like a quirky sort of insider jargon, it takes diligence and a second set of eyes to spot and remove them, in the interest of appealing to a wider audience.
Lesson for the day: watch out for insider jargon and try to replace it with more commonly used phrases, unless a majority of your target audience will understand and appreciate it.
In the case of this newsletter, however, I chose the title deliberately.
One of the paradoxical challenges faced by B2B marketers stems from trying to persuade buyers to choose your solution because it is different, while simultaneously assuaging their fear of change by persuading them that it’s not so different from other solutions with which they’re familiar.
This is a matter of positioning—a subject on which I’ve yet to find a better treatise than Al Ries and Jack Trout’s 1981 classic, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.
Your goal is to establish a modified category for your solution; similar enough to a category with which the buyer is familiar, but different enough to stand out.
Unfortunately, even if you succeed in positioning your solution effectively in the buyer’s mind, you will still have to overcome their propensity for adhering belligerently to the status quo.
In this week’s post on the Framework blog, The Hard Part About Starting Something New (or Why New Year’s Resolutions Usually Fail), I examine why getting prospects to try something new requires more than just showcasing the features and benefits of your solution. (And as the subtitle suggests, we also explore how this is curiously similar to why most people's New Year's resolutions fail.)
In short, prospects first need to become enrolled in the idea of change before they will pay any attention to salesy messaging. To promote enrollment, B2B content marketers must focus some of their time and effort on the awareness stage, where unidentified prospects are trying to understand and quantify the challenge they're facing—the first step along their buyer's journey toward making a purchase.
What better way to start the New Year than by resolving to focus more effectively on enrolling prospects in the possibility of change?
Once you’ve exhausted a few braincells on that challenge, scroll down to What We’ve Been Reading, where you can find some light relief in this week’s collection of helpful B2B content marketing articles. We’ve chosen pieces that cover boosting reach with content atomization, writing headlines that hook readers, the importance of PR to B2B marketing, and solving B2B’s C-suite conundrum.
That last piece, written by Ian Darby for The Drum, discusses how B2B marketers can convince members of their C-suite to invest more in developing a strong brand. It resonated with me because I strongly believe that having your CEO (and preferably the rest of the C-suite) champion your company’s content marketing effort is crucial to its success.
To wrap up this week’s edition, my One Step actionable tip brings you back to the idea of positioning, challenging you to define a modified category in which your solution stands out.
Let me know how you get on with all this positioning, differentiating, enrolling, and persuading, and I’ll see you back here next Wednesday.
Cheers!
~ Matt
Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Jan 10, 2024 - The Hard Part About Starting Something New (or Why New Year’s Resolutions Usually Fail)
Dec 20, 2023 - The Framework Blog: A Year of Posts About B2B Content Marketing
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that we hope you will enjoy and find valuable:
Boost Reach and Engagement with Content Atomization: 6 Brand Examples to Inspire Your Content Strategy
Content atomization is a way of working smarter, rather than harder, by taking core content and adapting it into different formats for different contexts and consumption preferences. Chris Boyles explores the topic for Skyword, giving specific examples of both B2B and B2C atomization strategies.
How to Write Headlines that Hook: 8 Questions to Ask
A great headline can make the difference between getting lost in the digital noise and grabbing lots of attention. Olesia Filipenko at the Content Marketing Institute offers up eight questions to help you create high-quality, catchy headlines that attract readers, viewers, and listeners.
PR and Its Importance in B2B Marketing: A Brief History
Whether PR is a core element of your current B2B marketing strategy or not, this potted history of the practice written by Mike Maynard for Marketing Profs offers a fascinating look at how and where PR originated and the ways in which it has changed. He also discusses the renewed importance of PR in a world where brand credibility and trust must be protected through proactive communication.
Solving B2B Creativity’s C-suite Conundrum
In this article, Ian Darby reports on a panel session at The Drum's B2B World Fest that discussed how B2B marketers can convince their C-suite to invest more in creativity and developing a strong brand. Fortunately, recent studies have found an increasing number of CEOs and CFOs understand marketing's ability to drive growth, but there's still work to be done amid what is usually a risk-averse group.
Books on B2B Content Marketing
If you haven’t done so already, secure your copies of Content Marketing: Mission Critical, a guide for B2B CEOs, and Content Marketing: Making the Magic Happen, a guide for B2B marketing leaders, in paperback or e-book format, by visiting www.messageup.com/books. There you’ll find discount codes as well as details on limited edition boxed sets that include a copy of each book signed by the author.
One Step…
Today’s One Step actionable tip challenges you to get really clear about the modified category your solution occupies.
What am I talking about?
When a buyer encounters something that they haven’t seen before, their brain tries to categorize it by comparing it to similar things with which the buyer is familiar.
If the new thing fits neatly into an established category, it is judged to be familiar and can be trusted.
If the new thing fails to fit into any established category, it is judged to be unfamiliar and cannot be trusted.
Obviously, you want your solution to seem sufficiently familiar, so that the buyer feels able to trust it and make a purchase.
However, you also want your solution to seem sufficiently different from competing solutions, so that it stands out from the crowd.
This can be achieved by creating a modified category in the buyer’s brain—one that inherits most of the characteristics of a familiar, established category, but with a new twist.
A great example is the Nest learning thermostat (now owned by Google). Rather than positioning their solution as a digitally-enabled temperature control device (or some other fanciful name), Nest created a modified category by taking a category with which homeowners were familiar—“thermostats”—and modifying it by adding the word “learning”. This meant that buyers who had never encountered a learning thermostat before could trust the new device because of its close association with the familiar thermostats they had seen before—while simultaneously being attracted to the new “learning” capabilities that it offered.
Another classic example was the introduction of the first automobiles as “horseless carriages”.
So, what modified category does your differentiated solution occupy?
Start by identifying the established category that most closely fits your solution.
Then, brainstorm a few modified categories by adding descriptors to the established category to represent the novel features or benefits that distinguish your solution from the pack.
Choose your favorite and discuss it with your team.
This exercise is intended to be a starting point and won’t necessarily get you to the final answer. In any case, you should test your modified category with buyers to see how they react.
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