Hi there! It’s Matt with MessageUp.
One of the top 5 questions* I get asked by B2B teams is, “How can we make what we do sound interesting?”
What they’re implying, but not saying out loud, is that their business is boring and who’s going to want to read about that?
This is flawed logic on several levels.
First, almost any business begins to look boring to those who spend all their time on the inside. This doesn’t mean it appears the same to those looking in from the outside.
Second, your business is doing great things, otherwise it likely wouldn’t still be in business. Learning about those things can be very interesting to people outside your company.
Third, people love to “talk shop”. In other words, fellow practitioners enjoy reading your insider stories about challenges faced, new ideas tested, successes, failures, and more.
Finally, even mundane ideas can be conveyed in ways that make them seem interesting and memorable. This is why there are dozens of books extolling the virtues of storytelling to B2B marketers.
Your challenge is to publish content that prospects and customers will find relevant, helpful, and engaging.
Sometimes, relevant, helpful information is dry, boring, or even mildly unpleasant. Like medicine, adding a little flavor can make it easier to consume.
It’s easy to make an interesting story seem dull—through poor writing, editing, and formatting—but it’s also possible to make a dull subject seem interesting by getting the same attributes right.
Consider how societal and behavioral norms have been inculcated in young people for generations.
Fairy tales are colorful, easy to read, and often humorous stories that teach basic values. They take a boring concept and illustrate it with caricatures and metaphor.
Whether its the value of hard work and diligence—exhibited by the bricklayer among Three Little Pigs—or the consequences of naivety and trusting strangers too easily—as experienced by Little Red Riding Hood, these are stories that millions of people can recite, long into adulthood.
For this week’s post on the Framework blog, I adapted another such fairy tale for B2B marketing purposes. Goldisocks and the Three Bloggers (A Tale for B2B Marketers), shows how this tried-and-true storyline—neatly employing the Rule of Threes—can be used to convey basic tenets about online article construction.
It’s no work of literature and I wouldn’t expect to find you reading it to your kids at bedtime, but hopefully it works—on two levels. In addition to reiterating some important blog formatting guidelines, the piece shows how a non-technical, light-hearted style can be used to convey dry technical information.
Somewhere between a dense whitepaper and a simplistic fairy tale lies a format that will make what you do sound interesting.
* I’ll share the rest of my “Top 5” in an upcoming blog post. Stay tuned!
The B2B Builders Community
A quick reminder that the priority waitlist is open for the B2B Builders community. If you’re interested in meeting leaders from other B2B companies to exchange ideas and experiences, read this prospectus, then click on the embedded link to complete a quick online application (to help us weed out bots and timewasters).
Those who join from that list will receive Founder Member status conferring discounts and VIP status throughout the life of their membership.
We’re currently running a private beta to test the online experience and collaborate on a content roadmap. If you’d like to join the beta, sight-unseen, drop me a line at b2bbuilders@messageup.com and I’ll share the details.
Reading and Taking Action
This week, our What We’ve Been Reading collection includes articles on:
Understanding demand gen in B2B marketing.
What happens when B2B campaigns become more like B2C.
Why your content is underperforming and how to get back on track.
The impact Google Gemini will have on SEO.
There has been quite a lot written about B2B marketing needing to take a page out of the B2C book in search of greater emotional connection, so it’s helpful to read Forbes Agency Council members’ views on when it works and what can happen when it doesn’t.
We’re also grateful to the folks at Search Engine Journal for keeping up with the fast-paced world of generative AI, and helping us understand how the latest foray by the world’s most popular search engine—Google Gemini—will impact our content marketing practices.
To round out this edition, my One Step actionable tip challenges you to re-cast a piece of dry content in a new format, so that it becomes more accessible and engaging. Have fun with this one!
Wishing you a safe and productive week. See you back here next Wednesday.
Cheers!
~ Matt
Our Latest Posts on The Framework Blog
Mar 20, 2024 - Goldisocks and the Three Bloggers (A Tale for B2B Marketers)
Mar 13, 2024 - 3 Questions B2B Content Should Answer at Each Stage of the Buyer's Journey
What We’ve Been Reading
Here are some articles we’ve been reading this week that we hope you will enjoy and find valuable:
Understanding What Demand Gen Entails in B2B
We run into considerable confusion between the terms brand awareness, lead generation, and demand gen, so we're grateful to the Martech Series team for assembling this overview. They helpfully cover what demand gen entails, who needs to be involved, and their tips on executing it successfully.
14 Expert Insights on B2B Campaigns Becoming More Like B2C
Here's a quick read from Forbes Agency Council summarizing 14 marketing experts' views on what happens when B2B campaigns adopt a more B2C-like approach. Not all of them are positive. If you’re contemplating adopting B2C tactics into your B2B strategy, this is a must read before you get too far down that track.
Five Reasons Your Content is Underperforming and How to Get Back on Track
Lots of nodding going on here as we read Lauren Moss' piece for TechTarget. It hits on several of our hot buttons related to helping B2B businesses deliver effective content marketing, including customer understanding, content for all stages of the buyer's journey, and channel selection.
Google’s Gemini Decoded: Unveiling the Impact on SEO
Things continue moving very swiftly in the AI domain (pardon the under-statement). Google has already superseded its Bard AI tool with Google Gemini, claiming to be the most powerful generative AI tool on the block. Aleh Barysevich, CMO at Link Assistant, explains for Search Engine Journal how he sees Gemini impacting the world of SEO and what we should be doing about it.
Books on B2B Content Marketing
Secure yourself a copy 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, e-book, or audiobook format, by visiting www.messageup.com/books. There you’ll find discount codes as well as details on limited edition boxed sets that include copies signed by the author.
One Step…
This week’s One Step actionable tip circles back to the challenge of making dry, technical content seem more interesting and engaging.
In this week’s post on the Framework blog, I repurposed a popular fairy tale to share three tips on formatting long-form content.
And, while I don’t recommend taking the fairy tale approach to much of your B2B content, it is helpful to think beyond stuffy business formats when trying to make your work more accessible and engaging.
Those will be the pieces that your audience remembers, refers back to, and shares with others.
Try this:
Pick a piece of your company’s content that you find dry, dull, uninspiring, … whichever off-putting adjective you prefer.
Write down three different ways you might convey the same information using an unconventional format.
Hint: Think about different forms of storytelling, poetry, lyrics, and graphic-based communication, such as cartoons, infographics, and animation.
Choose the one that you think might work best for your target audience and write a creative brief, explaining to a content writer/producer how you envision the material being presented in the new format.
Discuss these findings with your team. Even if the example you chose doesn’t end up getting produced, the concept of producing content in a wider-than-normal range of formats should get their creative juices flowing.
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