Historically, B2B marketing has lacked the emotional edge that consumer products have. There are few people who get teary eyed from a photocopier, unless it’s slow or has stopped working altogether at a crucial time in the day. On the surface, B2B products and services exist to merely facilitate business functionality, so how do these brands challenge their “dry” subject matter and get people to love and talk about them?
Think beyond the franking machine
A crucial part of generating ideas for your marketing campaign is thinking beyond your brand’s immediate product offering. Whilst product-focused content is important for the final business buying decision, it’s not going to be the sole driver in getting customers to hear about your brand. Consider the wider sector in which your company operates in and identify the functions that have a human element.
A common assumption is that brand connection plays a limited role in B2B purchases because the nature of the product is impersonal and predominantly practical. However, research shows that emotions are more important in B2B buying than for consumer products because the professional reputation of the employee making the final purchase is on the line. Therefore, it is important for B2B brands to forge trust with their customers, and one way to do that is to create content and provide information about topics associated with your discipline but that are not necessarily directly associated with your product.
Creating content that has high personal value for your target users is a great way to develop trust and loyalty for your brand. If customers and prospects can learn or get advice on issues within your industry they will build a positive familiarity with your brand and are therefore more likely to choose you for their purchase.
B2B has feelings too
With any outreach the aim should be moving your brand’s conversation from promoting what you do or sell, to defining what you stand for. Ensure your content tells stories that have human interest; emotional issues are what capture the hearts of mass audiences and can start big conversations. If your content campaign reveals some contentious and undiscovered findings that affect real people, national and trade press will want to hear about it. High quality coverage is vital to profiling your brand and can expose you to new customer prospects. One example of this is with Expert Market, who, despite specialising in office equipment, hit the headlines for research into gender equality in the workplace.
Though this content wasn’t immediately linked to the brand, the content related to businesses and would appeal to the right audience as well as positioning them as positive about gender equality. Content that communicates your higher purpose gives your brand a distinct persona which is crucial in the new age of marketing. We no longer categorise our communications efforts as B2B or B2C but H2H (human-to-human).
Beautiful, scannable and shareable
Whether you have interesting data about customer behaviour or decided to run a survey on your site, people love learning new things. However the data alone is not enough. Processing complicated stats is a laborious process which no one has time for. Convert the data so it is visual and beautiful i.e. something you would want to pin on your Pinterest board. If you would want to pin it, it’s highly likely hundreds of others will want to share it as well.
Visualising information helps communicate complicated data from the world around by turning it into meaningful, easily digestible pictures. Visual techniques allow you to present thousands of datasets at any one time meaning your audience understand the story being presented at a quick glance.
There are an abundance of visual tools out there which make it easy to draw inspiration for your own content campaign. Sites like Information is Beautiful boast an array of infographic examples; from the effects of meditation to the destinations of fatal plane crashes in the last 50 years. This site can help give you an idea of how you want your metrics presented whilst picture based social media platforms like Pinterest can aid in deciding the colour and form of your content.
By Jessica Laporte, writer for Expert Market.
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