Bradley Johnson Productions Posts

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B2B marketing can sometimes seem to play second fiddle to its more glamorous sister, B2C marketing. When it comes to content marketing, campaigns built for consumer audiences are often more intuitive, more fun, or more colorful for the audiences and the marketers who implement them alike. However, as I like to tell my graduate students, marketers get tired of our own marketing way faster than our audiences do.

When it comes to B2B marketing, your content marketing campaigns can be highly valuable, highly sought after, and highly relevant to your audiences. These campaigns resonate most strongly when you are focused on your audiences’ goals, challenges, and mindsets.

Here are five B2B content marketing examples from companies that understand their audiences well and use their content marketing to provide Youtility.

CES Tech Talk Podcast Distills Key Takeaways

B2B Content Lesson: Leverage Your Experts and Break Down the Facts Through a Podcast

CES is such a huge trade show that there is no way that attendees can absorb even a tenth of the content, information, and demos that are presented at the event. How can the Consumer Technology Association, which puts on this massive annual event, create more value for its audiences, reinforce its reputation year-round, and extend its reach?

It produces robust content as part of its marketing approach, such as its Tech Talk Podcast. Each episode of the podcast features industry experts going deep on one specific topic area, such as tech in healthcare, self-driving cars, or the future of innovation.

This series leverages the experts that the organization is already working with and builds upon the brand recognition of its marquee event to build an audience of loyal listeners. This series works particularly well, because it synthesizes the information around each topic area into what you need to know today, as Michael Barbaro of The New York Times says in his podcast, “The Daily.”

The CES Tech Talk Podcast is a great example of B2B content marketing.

Athena Health Teaches Business Skills Through Webinars

B2B Content Lesson: Help Solve Their Other Problems

I was recently asked by a client what kind of content they should be publishing for their audience that doesn’t give away the types of frameworks that they offer as part of their services.

While I actually believe you CAN give away some of your frameworks (see the next example), an effective type of content for B2B brands is acknowledging the kind that acknowledges that problem that your product or service solves isn’t the (only) one that’s keeping your client up at night.

For instance, Athena Health is a provider of a suite of services such as electronic health records (EHR) and medical billing. But they offer webinars that help their clients deal with their most critical business challenges: to improve the ways in which they run their practices, recognizing that doctors don’t necessarily have MBAs and don’t always know how to grow their businesses effectively.

Webinars from AthenaHealth help their clients deal with their most critical business challenges — excellent example of B2B content marketing.

Convince & Convert (This Very Blog) Gives Away Tools & Frameworks

B2B Content Lesson: Provide Your Recipe to Build Trust and Authority

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that we actually give you quite a lot of tools and frameworks that we use with our clients. That’s because we recognize that for B2B businesses like ours, there is a difference between the DIY segments and the segments that want you to help them take those frameworks and put them to good use for their organizations.

Therefore, we give away templates, like the one in this example, along with a video and blog post to explain to visitors how to use it. It builds trust, and when those visitors (maybe like you!) are ready to take their digital marketing practices to the next step, we are already at the top of their list in terms of trust and authority. Not only does it build trust, it also helps us to build an audience—content like this has great value in search. 

In this B2B content marketing example, we offer a downloadable template, along with a vide introduction.

Mailchimp Profiles Its Customers on Instagram

B2B Content Lesson: Showcase Your Community of Users

For many B2B companies, social proof takes the form of reviews or testimonials; however, as more and more B2B decision makers turn to social media, creating content that reflects your community is vital. In fact, 51% of all B2B customers turn to social media to do initial research, according to Accenture.

51% of all B2B customers turn to social media to do initial research.

Click To Tweet

Furthermore, the lines between social media and content marketing are blurring more than ever. More often than not, the content that our teams are creating live on social media channels, rather than on our websites. Therefore, looking at ways to create content within social media makes a ton of sense.

Mailchimp, for example, has used its Instagram account as a place to showcase the stories of what its customers are achieving every day, their creativity, and their stories to showcase the kinds of people who use Mailchimp to power their businesses. It publishes microprofiles on each Instagram post. 

It showcases their ethos, and it reassures potential users that they’ve found their tribe.

In this example of great B2B content, Mailchimp uses its Instagram account as a place to showcase the stories of what its customers are achieving every day, their creativity, and their stories to showcase the kinds of people who use Mailchimp to power their businesses.

CMI Facilitates Conversation Through Monthly Twitter Chats

B2B Content Lesson: Create Points of Interaction

If we’re talking about strong examples of B2B content marketing, what better place to turn that Content Marketing Institute itself? CMI not only educates marketers, but it also connects them through events like Content Marketing World.

An ongoing example of its content marketing practice is its monthly #CMWorld Twitter chat, where guests are invited to answer pre-selected questions, posed by a moderator, while Twitter users participate in answering those same questions, asking each other questions, and picking the brains of the guest. It’s like “Inside the Actors Studio” if the audience were up on stage participating too.

Not only does this approach create a strong network of devoted brand followers, but it (like our first example) helps the brand to leverage and extend its marquee brand. In this case, Content Marketing World’s #cmworld hashtag gets to be used once a week, rather than for one week a year. This keeps it front and center, when it comes to marketing conversations (their key market).

The #CMIWorld Twitter chat is an ongoing example of CMI’s content marketing practice.

Remember: As you’re developing your B2B content marketing campaigns, keep in mind your target audiences’ goals, challenges, and mindsets. If you are able to address those specific areas and make it easy for them to do so, your content will resonate and be effective.

The post 5 B2B Content Marketing Examples You Can Copy appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

       

Related Stories

• Podcast Statistics for 2020 – Charts and Data
• How to Create a Successful Virtual Event for Your Company
• How We Increased Time on Site from 4 min to 9 min with Audio Articles

 

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B2B marketing can sometimes seem to play second fiddle to its more glamorous sister, B2C marketing. When it comes to content marketing, campaigns built for consumer audiences are often more intuitive, more fun, or more colorful for the audiences and the marketers who implement them alike. However, as I like to tell my graduate students, marketers get tired of our own marketing way faster than our audiences do.

When it comes to B2B marketing, your content marketing campaigns can be highly valuable, highly sought after, and highly relevant to your audiences. These campaigns resonate most strongly when you are focused on your audiences’ goals, challenges, and mindsets.

Here are five B2B content marketing examples from companies that understand their audiences well and use their content marketing to provide Youtility.

CES Tech Talk Podcast Distills Key Takeaways

B2B Content Lesson: Leverage Your Experts and Break Down the Facts Through a Podcast

CES is such a huge trade show that there is no way that attendees can absorb even a tenth of the content, information, and demos that are presented at the event. How can the Consumer Technology Association, which puts on this massive annual event, create more value for its audiences, reinforce its reputation year-round, and extend its reach?

It produces robust content as part of its marketing approach, such as its Tech Talk Podcast. Each episode of the podcast features industry experts going deep on one specific topic area, such as tech in healthcare, self-driving cars, or the future of innovation.

This series leverages the experts that the organization is already working with and builds upon the brand recognition of its marquee event to build an audience of loyal listeners. This series works particularly well, because it synthesizes the information around each topic area into what you need to know today, as Michael Barbaro of The New York Times says in his podcast, “The Daily.”

The CES Tech Talk Podcast is a great example of B2B content marketing.

Athena Health Teaches Business Skills Through Webinars

B2B Content Lesson: Help Solve Their Other Problems

I was recently asked by a client what kind of content they should be publishing for their audience that doesn’t give away the types of frameworks that they offer as part of their services.

While I actually believe you CAN give away some of your frameworks (see the next example), an effective type of content for B2B brands is acknowledging the kind that acknowledges that problem that your product or service solves isn’t the (only) one that’s keeping your client up at night.

For instance, Athena Health is a provider of a suite of services such as electronic health records (EHR) and medical billing. But they offer webinars that help their clients deal with their most critical business challenges: to improve the ways in which they run their practices, recognizing that doctors don’t necessarily have MBAs and don’t always know how to grow their businesses effectively.

Webinars from AthenaHealth help their clients deal with their most critical business challenges — excellent example of B2B content marketing.

Convince & Convert (This Very Blog) Gives Away Tools & Frameworks

B2B Content Lesson: Provide Your Recipe to Build Trust and Authority

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that we actually give you quite a lot of tools and frameworks that we use with our clients. That’s because we recognize that for B2B businesses like ours, there is a difference between the DIY segments and the segments that want you to help them take those frameworks and put them to good use for their organizations.

Therefore, we give away templates, like the one in this example, along with a video and blog post to explain to visitors how to use it. It builds trust, and when those visitors (maybe like you!) are ready to take their digital marketing practices to the next step, we are already at the top of their list in terms of trust and authority. Not only does it build trust, it also helps us to build an audience—content like this has great value in search. 

In this B2B content marketing example, we offer a downloadable template, along with a vide introduction.

Mailchimp Profiles Its Customers on Instagram

B2B Content Lesson: Showcase Your Community of Users

For many B2B companies, social proof takes the form of reviews or testimonials; however, as more and more B2B decision makers turn to social media, creating content that reflects your community is vital. In fact, 51% of all B2B customers turn to social media to do initial research, according to Accenture.

51% of all B2B customers turn to social media to do initial research.

Click To Tweet

Furthermore, the lines between social media and content marketing are blurring more than ever. More often than not, the content that our teams are creating live on social media channels, rather than on our websites. Therefore, looking at ways to create content within social media makes a ton of sense.

Mailchimp, for example, has used its Instagram account as a place to showcase the stories of what its customers are achieving every day, their creativity, and their stories to showcase the kinds of people who use Mailchimp to power their businesses. It publishes microprofiles on each Instagram post. 

It showcases their ethos, and it reassures potential users that they’ve found their tribe.

In this example of great B2B content, Mailchimp uses its Instagram account as a place to showcase the stories of what its customers are achieving every day, their creativity, and their stories to showcase the kinds of people who use Mailchimp to power their businesses.

CMI Facilitates Conversation Through Monthly Twitter Chats

B2B Content Lesson: Create Points of Interaction

If we’re talking about strong examples of B2B content marketing, what better place to turn that Content Marketing Institute itself? CMI not only educates marketers, but it also connects them through events like Content Marketing World.

An ongoing example of its content marketing practice is its monthly #CMWorld Twitter chat, where guests are invited to answer pre-selected questions, posed by a moderator, while Twitter users participate in answering those same questions, asking each other questions, and picking the brains of the guest. It’s like “Inside the Actors Studio” if the audience were up on stage participating too.

Not only does this approach create a strong network of devoted brand followers, but it (like our first example) helps the brand to leverage and extend its marquee brand. In this case, Content Marketing World’s #cmworld hashtag gets to be used once a week, rather than for one week a year. This keeps it front and center, when it comes to marketing conversations (their key market).

The #CMIWorld Twitter chat is an ongoing example of CMI’s content marketing practice.

Remember: As you’re developing your B2B content marketing campaigns, keep in mind your target audiences’ goals, challenges, and mindsets. If you are able to address those specific areas and make it easy for them to do so, your content will resonate and be effective.

The post 5 B2B Content Marketing Examples You Can Copy appeared first on Content Marketing Consulting and Social Media Strategy.

       

Related Stories

• Podcast Statistics for 2020 – Charts and Data
• How to Create a Successful Virtual Event for Your Company
• How We Increased Time on Site from 4 min to 9 min with Audio Articles

 

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Many of us are lucky to have people around us who understand or at least support our writing habits and dreams. But even with the best support, sometimes it feels like my writing is silly in the face of so many other pressing world problems. How do you keep writing when it seems inconsequential?

Do you ever feel like your writing doesn’t matter? As we write letters or emails to legislators, fight injustice in our communities, work to preserve the environment, or tamp down panic in the face of a new illness, some days writing feels inconsequential. 

It’s easy to forget why we keep returning to the page each day. Especially when we’re distracted or sick or in crisis. But we can address the difficult things in our lives and still make a little space for the life-giving practice of writing.

I spent some time this week thinking about why writing is so important to me and reminded myself why writing matters. 

3 Reasons Your Writing Matters Right Now

Ever wonder why does writing matter? Or worse, does writing matter? Here are three reasons writing matters. To put it more boldly, here are three reasons your writing matters right now.

1. Write to remember the past

Remembering the past can be comforting, painful, and every emotion in between. But those memories often give meaning to our present lives. 

I lead brainstorming activities with my students each year, helping them step back in time to pluck story seeds. I’ve had them draw a childhood home and annotate the special places. We’ve described childhood bike wrecks and trampoline injuries. They recount building forts and going camping and all kinds of other shenanigans. 

Flannery O’Connor once said, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” She reminds us that growing up provides us with a rich understanding about life—enough to get us through any current difficulty.

I’ve written those childhood exercises with my students for years and I always discover something new down those old roads that offer hope. We write to remember who we’ve been and what we’ve learned.

2. Write to process the present

My grandmother passed away a couple years ago, and I received dozens of spiral notebooks with her records of daily life. Everything from details about the weather and what she’d planted, to meetings she’d attended and quilts she’d worked on. She told herself jokes and made to do lists and worried over her children and grandchildren. Her notebooks were the place she processed life. 

Some of us, like my granny, journal to process life. Others write stories to help us make sense of the world, identifying problems and solutions, revealing everyday heroes and villains.

Those stories give us language to recognize shared humanity, even as we experience life in different parts of the world and universe, settings we may never visit with characters we may never meet except in our imaginations. 

3. Write to imagine a new future

In episode 3 of the Character Test podcast, Shawn Coyne talked about the importance of telling better stories to help people live better lives.

It stuck with me, because we sometimes perpetuate problems by rehearsing them using old scripts. For example, I hope by now we’re pushing back against harmful stereotypes in stories that always put certain ethnicities in the villain role or only present women as helpless damsels in distress.

We need stories that embrace the complexity and fullness of people, which requires imagination in some contexts where prejudice and “the way things have always been” tend to dominate. 

It comes down to how we respond to the uncertainty around us. At the end of the podcast, Coyne stated his personal code: “When a difficult event comes, the choice for me is the question of whether to create or destroy.”

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Stories Matter Today

Stories connect us and help us make meaning of the time we have here on earth. Whatever challenges you are facing today, don’t discount the power of writing.

What keeps you writing when it feels like it doesn’t matter? Share in the comments. 

The post Why Does Writing Matter? Why You Should Write When You Worry it Doesn’t appeared first on The Write Practice.