If you’re selling sporty convertibles, it’s almost impossible not to make your content sexy. How do you make accounting software or medical supplies memorable with your content marketing, though? Transforming B2B content into something exciting takes a little more thought than glossy pictures and marketing hyperbole. Here’s why we believe there’s no such thing as a dull subject – only content marketing teams that don’t know how to handle a challenge.
Show How It Works
People love getting a glimpse of how the magic happens, and your B2B content might be perfect to showcase with a demonstration video. Products that involve many manufacturing steps or undergo dramatic changes during use are especially good candidates for tours and demos. If you have a water jet cutter or electroplating rig, you’re set to go viral if you get creative with your concepts. For products that aren’t as photogenic and for services that don’t lend themselves to demonstrations, animation and infographics can bring your content to life.
Show Your Personality
No matter what you sell, you and your team have the charisma to sell it – or more accurately, to sell your company. Think of how many huge companies got their start with one visionary founder, and you start to see how much personality can matter when it comes to content. Even if you don’t have the next Steve Jobs in your office, you and your company have a personality. Show it off with your content in blog posts, email content and social media channels. If you want to promote the team instead of a particular prodigy, express your company culture in your content. To help you hone in on what you’d like your content to reveal about you, work with your marketing company and come up with a few words and phrases you feel describe your company: ″tech-savvy,″ ″quirky and cool,″ or ″grass-roots practicality″ are some examples.
Show Something Unexpected
Most of your B2B content, including your SEO content and email marketing, is aimed squarely at your target market. When you take a look at the analytics, though, you often find a few buyers who don’t come from your expected sources. For instance, your refrigerated cases might go mostly to grocery stores, but a little digging could show you florists are a viable market too. If you target everything too narrowly at one portion of your firmographic or behavioral data, you might miss out on those outliers who represent a new market for you. Make sure you mix in some content that has a broader reach.
Show Your Creative Side
B2B content naturally leans toward practical applications, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get creative with it. We tend to think of metaphors and analogies as the stuff of fiction, but these tools can be tremendously effective in B2B content marketing. They give readers a new look at your products and services, framing them in a novel and memorable way. Imagine if the white-coated team who brought you YouTube videos of Mentos and Coke had done it as a demonstration of a new floor cleaner or anti-stain treatment on clothes, and you have an idea how powerful creativity can be for non-fiction content.
Colorful, creative content stays with viewers. Even better, it convinces them to share, something B2B content doesn’t always produce. More sharing means more traffic, and more traffic means more revenue – not a bad trade-off for putting in some extra effort on your B2B content.
