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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.

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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.

       

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By Keith Reynold Jennings {grow} Contributing Columnist

How, on earth, are we to sell anything right now … especially, if what we have to offer is generally considered to be non-essential.

It seems if we tie our marketing into the coronavirus/social distancing narrative, we’ll be drowned out by the noise. Yet if we market apart from the coronavirus/social distancing narrative, we’ll likely be ignored as irrelevant.

In a recent post, Mark Schaefer suggested we approach our prospects and clients, at this moment in time, as if we were at a funeral. As if everyone were grieving. And that sparked an interesting connection for me: the blues.

For 150 years (at least), blues music has offered joy in the midst of sorrow, love in the midst of loss and hope in the midst of despair. The blues harness a powerful idea I think all of us could use right now. It gives us a heavy dose of reality while clinging to a hope for a better tomorrow.

Follow along now. You’re about to learn a fascinating lesson.

To get us started, let’s time travel back to another turbulent time: 1969.

A Narrative That Earned $20 Million in Six Minutes

As the war in Vietnam peaked, the Nixon Administration sought to cut $20 million in public broadcasting funding to feed the war effort.

The Senate Subcommittee on Communications was charged with holding a hearing in May 1969 to assess the impact of this cut. Senator John Pastore, who had a reputation as a tough, impatient man, chaired the hearing.

Two days into the hearing, a 41-year-old Presbyterian minister who, a year before had begun hosting a national children’s show, spoke to the committee.

He shared stories. He recited lyrics from children’s songs. And he emphasized the importance of helping children navigate everyday situations such as getting haircut, understanding divorce or grieving the loss of a pet.

While mid-sentence, Senator Pastore interrupted, “I’m supposed to be a pretty tough guy and this is the first time I’ve had goosebumps for the last two days.”

In six minutes, that man – Fred Rogers (aka Mister Rogers) – influenced a group of hard-nosed policymakers to approve the $20 million in funding to public broadcasting. And many of us grew up with shows like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Sesame Street, The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross and others, because of this.

When I first saw the video of this hearing on YouTube, I couldn’t help but wonder, “How did he do that?”

At first, I thought it was storytelling — Fred Rogers told a better story. However, over time, I came to realize that he was doing something much more powerful.

He created an open narrative – one others could join and impact – focused on creating a better future for kids.

Which leads to the question, “What is an open narrative and how can we use it right now?”

Narratives and Stories Are Distinct

It’s critically important we don’t confuse stories with narratives. They are distinct in what they are and how they work to influence us.

All stories are narratives. However, not all narratives are stories. Think about it like whiskey. All bourbons are whiskey, but not all whiskeys are bourbon. Other whiskeys include moonshine, Irish whiskey, Scotch, etc. In the same way, stories, whether true or fiction, are one type of narrative, but there are other types, as well.

A story can move us emotionally. It can connect us socially. But it rarely moves us to action on its own.

A story has a beginning and an end. It contains a protagonist and antagonist. And it typically tells about what was.

Stories and storytelling are essential to the human experience. We learn through stories. We communicate and connect with people, places and things through stories. We store and remember feelings through stories.

Stories are great for providing context and connection. But they depend on something else to do their job. They depend on contextual power of narrative.

Unlike a story, a narrative is open-ended. It doesn’t have to resolve itself. And it tells us about what is and what will be.

Stories capture and communicate a moment in time. Narratives create momentum over time. Stories are consumed. Narratives are co-created.

And that’s the secret power of an open narrative. You can’t join a story, but you can join a narrative and impact its outcome, since it is not yet resolved.

Let’s return to 1969. The Apollo space program and the first moon landing are stories we tell today, because they had a beginning and end. But the race to the moon started as an open narrative — it started as a challenge from John F. Kennedy to Americans in 1962. And the country chose to rally behind that narrative and make it a reality.

No one, except maybe an author, has sacrificed their life for a well-told story. But billions have sacrificed their lives for a narrative.

The Blues: Tomorrow’s Hope

Wynton Marsalis, the legendary jazz musician and artistic director at Jazz at Lincoln Center, has played in every type of setting with all types of musicians from B.B. King to Itzhak Perlman, Sonny Rollins to Willie Nelson, and Stevie Wonder to Yo Yo Ma.

In his book, Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life, he writes, “What sorts of songs could all these diverse musicians possibly find to play together” without rehearsal time or organized music?

His answer: the blues.

“The blues is a vaccine,” he writes. “It trains you for life’s challenges by administering a heavy dose of realism.”

Blues music accepts that things are, indeed, bad right now. Someone’s lost a loved one. Someone’s lost their job. Someone’s been cheated.

The blues hits us between the eyes with our stark reality (what is), while never losing hope and optimism for a better tomorrow (what will be).

I can’t think of anything more needed that that right now, can you?

What the blues does is it presents a story of now, as a micro-narrative. Then it hooks that story into a macro-narrative of hope that carries us into the future.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi and other inspiring leaders weren’t merely storytellers. They were narrative builders.

So what does this mean for us, as professionals trying to sell to others in this tough time?

It’s Time To “Reach for Community”

What future narrative are you now serving today?

How can tomorrow be a little better for us? What opportunities are you seeing? What hope are you holding onto?

Sure, you have to survive. We all do.

Sure, life isn’t fair. We’re all feeling it.

But, in the end, we’re not living merely for survival. We’re not even living for success.

We’re living for significance. We want our lives and work to ultimately matter. We want to contribute to something bigger than ourselves.

One of the serendipitous upsides that’s resulted in much of the world being confined to their homes is that it’s opened up access to people we normally wouldn’t have access to.

I had the unique opportunity to join a Zoom call with Wynton Marsalis, as I’ve worked on this post. So, I asked him, “What do the blues have to teach businesses and workers during this tough time?”

Wynton’s response: “Reach for community.”

The blues is survival music. The blues won’t put food on the table, but it bonds us together through shared struggle. And shared hope.

Wynton said this is a time we need to rely on the collective wisdom we can only access when we’re connected together in community. No one has the answers, including you and me. But, together, we can find some answers.

This is a time to acknowledge and accept today’s reality, while never losing hope and optimism for tomorrow.

The blues offers resolve. And resolve is what you and I can offer to each other and others right now.

This isn’t the time to sell like we typically have in the past. This is a time to serve one another. It’s time to ask for help and offer help.

So please share in the comments section or on social media: What losses and fears are you facing right now? And what hope are you holding onto for tomorrow?

Keith Reynold Jennings is an executive and writer who serves as vice president of community impact for Jackson Healthcare. He’s also an advisor to goBeyondProfit. Connect with Keith on Twitter and Linkedin.

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

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We’re writers, and as writers, we’re told we need to keep writing no matter what. Write every day. Write through the hard times. Write during great times. Just write.

Right now, as if you didn’t know, we have a bit of a pandemic situation. We’re isolated, possibly out of a job, overwhelmed with advice about self-improvement, and probably grieving life as it was before COVID-19.

But we’re still writers and writers (are supposed to) write.

Are you feeling Coronavirus burnout? You’re not alone.

This is the hardest blog post I’ve ever written. I often worry about what to say in these articles. I often have writer’s block when sitting down to punch out some advice for you.

Now, though, I’m distracted, worried, and burned out from the constant need to be doing something productive.

So what in the world could I tell you this week that would make you feel better during this pandemic? What would be motivational but not pushy? What would make you not feel like a failure for not being as productive as you’d like?

I decided to be honest. So here goes.

I do not feel like writing. 

There. I’ve said it. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way, but I normally avoid saying this out loud. Why? See above. Writers write, you see.

I felt bad about this until I started talking to other writers. It turns out, they’re feeling the same way.

Be kind to yourself.

I got some great advice from a woman in one of The Write Practice’s writing groups over the weekend. We’d all checked in (virtually) and let everyone know how we were handling this pandemic. We were discussing adjustments in routines, distractions from children and the news, and in general feeling bad that we hadn’t gotten “enough” writing done, despite having more time at home.

We were about to have a short break in the meeting, and one of our members piped up. “Be kind to yourself,” she said. “This isn’t a once in a lifetime thing. This is a once in more than a lifetime thing. If you’re not as productive as you’d like to be, that’s okay.”

That validation to just be for a bit and not be performing superhuman feats of writing/exercising/cleaning/self-improvement was wonderful for me, as I’m sure it was for the dozen other members on that video call.

So I’m going to give you the same validation: You don’t need to be a superhero right now. It’s fine to not be as productive as you’d like to be.

Writing doesn’t have to feel like writing.

Not writing makes me feel worse. I know that, yet I just don’t want to work on editing my book. I don’t want to write for anthology calls or magazine openings. I didn’t want to write this blog post. In fact, I thought about asking my editor to run an old post of mine today instead of me writing a new one.

When I really sat down to evaluate, I realized why I’m feeling this way: Right now, I don’t want to worry about the business side of writing. I don’t want the pressure of trying to sell my work.

Writing makes me feel better, though. Writing keeps me from slipping into depression. It makes me less snappy with those around me. It brings me peace and frees my mind.

4 Low-Pressure Ways to Write

If you’re the same way and want to keep writing but just can’t muster up the concentration to work on a large project, here are a couple of ideas to keep you writing during this pandemic:

1. Journal

I honestly haven’t written a journal since I was a teenager and that was just a lot of nonsense about boys.

This morning, though, I picked it back up again. I might not continue with it consistently, but it was freeing to get my feelings out on paper. (Pro tip: You should always journal with a pen and paper, not on the computer. There’s something about writing with a pen that ties straight to your brain and frees up your inner critic.)

Another reason to journal: history. We’re in a semi-unique situation right now. Historians will want to see what we wrote. Not to mention the killer notes you’ll have if you ever decide to join the thousands that are surely going to write books about the coronavirus pandemic.

2. Write a letter

I can’t be the only one who remembers the excitement over getting an actual letter in the mail, can I? (Are those crickets I hear? Yikes.)

Can’t see your grandparents? Write them a letter. (Obviously call them, too, but they’ll really like a letter.) Write a friend you haven’t talked to in a long time. Write a letter you’ll never mail if you want.

Emails do count with this, though I would really recommend getting out the old pen and paper again.

3. Write on a prompt

If you just want to get creative for a few minutes, I’d suggest a short writing prompt. We’ve got them all over this blog, but you can also find fourteen days’ worth in our Coronavirus Challenge.

The nice thing about writing from a prompt is if you don’t like what you’ve written, you don’t have to do anything with it. You don’t even have to finish the story if you don’t want. Start it, write for a few minutes, then go about your business. It’s all good!

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4. Write with your children

If your kids are home and you’re looking for something to do with them, this could be a fun project.

If your kids are younger, you can grab a coloring book, color a page together, then write a little story about the scene. If your kids are older, you can make up a story one sentence at a time, with each person taking turns making up a new sentence. (My husband and I actually do this, and it’s pretty fun.)

Alternately: Don’t write.

Guess what? That woman in my writing group was right when she said this was a once in more than a lifetime event. We’re going through something here that’s worldwide and definitely not normal.

So if you need to take a break from writing, do it. It doesn’t mean you’re not a writer anymore and it doesn’t mean you’re lazy. It means you’re dealing with this pandemic the way that you feel is best.

If you really don’t want to write, don’t.

2 Non-Writing Ways to “Write”

Luckily, there are other “writerly” things you can do without actually writing.

1. Talk to other writers.

There is nothing a writer likes more than to moan to another writer about how they can’t write. We’re sort of melodramatic that way. (Joking. Sort of.)

Seriously, now might be a good time to join an online writing group (I like this one), to reach out to a writer you admire and ask if you can interview them, or to get your video call on and chat with a writer across the globe. You’ll get some social interaction, meet some great people, and get to talk about writing with other people who “get it.” (There is nothing better than talking writing with another writer.)

Bonus: Networking counts as being productive!

2. Tackle the TBR pile.

I don’t know about you, but my reading really takes a backseat when I’m working on a book. I’m not one of those writers that can’t read while writing for creative reasons. It’s just I don’t seem to have the time or the willpower after working with words all day.

Reading, however, is essential to writing. If you don’t read, you simply can’t write. You won’t know how to write. So pick up a book and get to it.

Tip: Libraries might be closed, but luckily they have e-resources!

Stay home.

I just wanted to end on a final note that might be a little preachy, but I’m going to do it anyway. Mirriam-Webster defines “essential” as “of the utmost importance.” For your family’s sake, and mine, think about this definition before you leave your home.

Stay home and write if you want. Stay home and don’t write if you want. Just stay home.

I wish each of you health now and flowing words when the pandemic is over.

How are you feeling during this pandemic? Do you have a coronavirus writing tip that’s helped you? Let me know in the comments!

The post Can’t Write During Coronavirus? These 4 Tips Will Help appeared first on The Write Practice.