The post Why You Should Hire a Journalist for a Stronger Content Marketing Team appeared first on B2B Marketing Asia.
Showing posts with label B2B Marketing Asia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label B2B Marketing Asia. Show all posts
Why You Should Hire a Journalist for a Stronger Content Marketing Team
5 Reasons Why Marketing Automation Will Elevate Your Business
Picture this: You’re a marketer working for a software enterprise. You and your team manage your organization’s social media accounts, lead generation, email marketing, paid search campaigns, content marketing efforts, and more, on a daily basis. As your marketing team expands, the manual tools you have at your disposal are no longer helping you manage one-to-one connections with customers.
If this sounds familiar perhaps it’s time to contemplate a solution that will help you create and handle customer interactions with more speed and customisation, increase your marketing productivity, generate a larger number of high quality leads and enhance your return on investment. That’s right — I’m talking about Marketing Automation.
Why an increasing number of Enterprises are adding Marketing Automation to their arsenal
A fundamental internet-age shift in power has thoroughly transformed B2B buying behaviour. Thanks to technology and steadfast access to new information, savvy B2B prospects have taken their educational odyssey of business products and solutions into their own hands. Prospects now have the tools they need to make informed business decisions, subscribing to content that’s relevant to them and engaging with brands who provide customised content catered to their needs.
It really boils down to this: prospects are now more empowered.
The Result?
Sales teams have had to leave behind their archaic practices of nurturing prospects through ineffective sales prospecting techniques. They instead depend enormously on the prospect discovering their product’s information organically. A growing number businesses have also changed the way they generate revenue, placing the responsibility for the top half of the sales funnel to marketing.
Marketing Automation has therefore become a strategic imperative for many enterprises to stay competitive, or lose their edge. It’s an interesting action-reaction scenario. Marketing’s increasing reliance on technology is due to the prospect’s independence thanks to technology.
Still unconvinced? Here are 5 Indisputable Benefits of Marketing Automation that might help you decide:
1. Increased Marketing Productivity
Marketing automation allows you to pre-schedule specific tasks, decreasing the time and resources required to plan, execute and keep track of your marketing activities. This frees up your time to address more strategic or urgent objectives and boosts your overall productivity.
2. Greater number of High-Quality Leads
Leveraging on the lead intelligence, scoring and nurturing components of Marketing Automation enables you to provide the sales team with not just more leads, but higher quality leads in terms of sales readiness. The lead intelligence element is of distinct significance as the sales team is outfitted with a deeper understanding of each lead before first contact. This means they can tailor their opening call to the lead’s particular realm of interest allowing for a much ‘warmer’ reception than a conventional cold-call.
3. Tighter Marketing and Sales alignment
Overall business success is dependant upon there being a strong relationship between sales and marketing teams. The application of the Marketing Automation technology can encourage this consolidation as it generates a closed-loop system, meshing marketing elements with the CRM system and forging a stronger partnership and transparency between these two departments.
4. Extensive Views of Contacts
Marketing Automation seamlessly bridges your marketing touch-points like CRM integration, lead intelligence and scoring, landing pages, email marketing, social media marketing as well as marketing analytics and campaigns. This integration allows for intricate, comprehensive profiles of your contacts, which can enable you to productively segment and target specific contacts based on interaction preferences and behaviour.
5. Enhanced ROI
Undeniably one of the most compelling driving factors for Marketing Automation implementation is the ability to not just bring about an improved ROI, but also to be able to adequately track and report on prized performance metrics. The inherent analytics of Marketing Automation technology enables a closed-loop view of marketing through to sales processes which means you can meticulously and productively report on your contribution to the overall organizational results. Marketing automation delivers value and ROI to your diverse marketing efforts. The right Marketing Automation platform, mingled with smart organizational and process alignment, enables you to connect the dots between that promotional newsletter you sent last month, that webinar you hosted last year, and the revenue your Director sees this week or can expect to view next quarter.
If you’re going to use it, use it right
Many companies do not take full advantage of the Marketing Automation platform, merely utilizing its email-blast capabilities. If you are one of them, you could just as well save time, effort and money by turning to an email service provider. But you’d be giving up a great deal.
For example, with Marketing automation, you can exploit trigger events to bring follow-up content depending on what content the prospect or customer just engaged with. Or hone your lead scoring processes based on determining patterns of engagement and intent. Or employ progressive profiling to ask incremental questions to help confirm what you trust to be true about a target segment and to better adjust content to needs and demands.
Marketing Automation gives marketers a helicopter view across the entire buying process. This is something that has not been readily available in the past. The platform enables you to innovate the ways in which you go to market and the amount of time it takes to help your buyers make the choice to embrace change. This is a huge deal for marketers who are prepared to put in the effort and do the hard work to innovate beyond what they have always done.
Marketing automation isn’t just a buzzword or a trend – it’s a vital part of a business’s strategic objectives for companies that use it right.
Read more: Marketing Automation solution by GetIT Comms.
The post 5 Reasons Why Marketing Automation Will Elevate Your Business appeared first on B2B Marketing Asia.
When a Buyer-led Marketing Strategy Redefines Marketing Roles
As prospects grow increasingly savvy, there’s less for marketers to stoke excitement. This trend of self-directed purchasing processes is gaining momentum as the buyer’s journey gets digitally oriented.
According to a joint report by Avaya and BT, even two years ago, 51% of buyers trusted social forums and reviews over organisations’ websites to make purchase decisions. The report shows how self-driven buyers travel halfway through the sales process without engaging any vendor.
In some cases, vendors get eliminated even before they surface on prospects’ search results. This could be the result of anything from vendors’ poor visibility on search engines to buyer’s proactive decision to eliminate the vendor.
How do marketers create demand and differentiate products?
The Answer Lies Within
Taking cues from the changing face of consumer behaviour, marketers can implement a buyer-led marketing strategy.
Studying user behaviour and B2B personas across social channels can reveal the habits, interests and pain points of a prospect. Based on this data, marketers can pitch customer-centric content, based on the simple philosophy of connecting by offering to help.
While positioning a product is equally important to support sales enablement, product positioning alone cannot turn prospects into sales-ready leads. For a superior customer experience, product marketing needs to be integrated with content marketing.
Interdisciplinary Integration
Product marketers are experts in writing about products within their sphere. In many B2B businesses, the product marketing department is closely connected with content and sales. However, due to the nature of organizational structures, or simply because of ownership disputes, a lot of informative product marketing content does not transcend departmental boundaries.
This siloing keeps other departments from accessing quality product marketing content, which could be otherwise utilized in creating a better brand voice.
But the truth is, product marketing alone cannot court a prospect’s attention. Well-informed prospects do not wait for product marketers to educate them. They have enough information to challenge the value of a product’s content, or even ignore it, depending on their needs.
So how do marketers handle that? To reach a prospect with relevant content, it is essential to include product marketing in an overall marketing process that goes beyond sales enablement. Enter content marketing – a vital part of the buyers’ journey.
Traditionally defined as two separate roles, product marketing and content marketing remained disconnected owing to their purpose. Each entered the sales process at different stages to educate and guide buyers through the journey. However, with buyers’ autonomy defining sales processes, the roles of product and content marketers require reassessment.
Today, prospects are bombarded with content on every channel they tune in to. Thanks to sales-led marketing strategies, content is falling short of the effect it was designed to create. When product marketing tries to fill in needs that marketers deem necessary, marketing runs the risk of losing potential leads.
Both content and product marketers need to take a holistic approach to plant the seeds of demand that will create a breeding ground for successful product pitching.
The situation further calls for an understanding that all efforts from individual marketing disciplines are largely wasted, unless they are aligned to meet customer needs. A connected business strategy is imperative for superior customer experiences, from the exploring stage to the sale.
Treating Content as a Product
With the digital revolution changing consumer behaviour, sales is at the beck and call of consumer sensibilities and choices. How do you inform an already informed person?
No matter how informed a prospect is, his search springs from a certain need or curiosity. And the best product always fulfills a buyer’s need. However, too many products often confuse the prospect. In turn,the buyer resorts to trusted sources for information and feedback. This can result in 8 out of 10 vendors written off before the buyer proceeds to the second stage.
This means all that brilliant marketing content failed to address customer needs. A study and dissection of every element of this need educates content marketers to pitch a story that addresses that need as a product.
Drawing a parallel from product marketing, when content (addressing buyer needs) becomes a service, marketers can relate to it from a product point of view. This perspective prompts the content marketer to ask relevant questions concerning prospect’s pain points, interests and needs.
By aligning marketing disciplines, businesses bridge the gap between them and the prospects. Content marketing is an ongoing process, evolving with changes in purchase behaviour. In order to make sense in this ever-changing digital environment, setting a cross-functional goal shared by all marketing disciplines is imperative.
The post When a Buyer-led Marketing Strategy Redefines Marketing Roles appeared first on B2B Marketing Asia.
Why Communications Marketing and not Marketing Communications?
We all know how technology has changed digital marketing campaigns in the past few years. Social media has pulled down the corporate firewall preventing marketers from meeting consumers during the mass media days. Today, we have a platform that allows both marketers and consumers to directly communicate with each other.
Since social networks are freely accessible, and purchase decisions are increasingly influenced by word-of-mouth recommendations and peer reviews, the choice of “who sees the content” no longer rests with advertisers or marketers. Also, with the overwhelming penetration of smart devices across all age groups, today’s marketers have to work with a daunting array of communication platforms.
Perfecting the art of communication with diverse consumers in this highly volatile and interactive environment is a challenge.
Telling a story
Since businesses and marketers are now able to receive real-time feedback on their marketing strategy in the form of likes, diggs, shares and comments, media consumers are no longer limited in their capacity as readers or viewers. They, rightfully, qualify as ‘collaborators’ as well. The sheer need to effectively communicate with these collaborators gives birth to the need for ‘communications marketing.’
Enter substantive storytelling. Relationships, and sales, will flow as a by-product of strategic content marketing that resonates with consumers’ aspirations, dreams and pains. We saw Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign making waves, where people got to gift their friend a Coke with their name printed on the can. This inspired delightful stories of people who used the brand to express their feelings.
Conversations remain the core element of social media. Communicating meaningful and relevant information to a continuously distracted audience has become the cornerstone of any marketing strategy. For marketers to make the most out of social media, they have to incorporate the creative side of their discipline with the technical side.
This means using powerful and targeted narratives hinging on data, analytics and digital engineering, yet keeping conversations human.
Putting people before products
Clearly, the 4 Ps of traditional marketing – Product, Promotion, Price and Place – need to be preceded by another P: People. The traditional approach to marketing is slowing down sales and reducing conversions because marketers are misinterpreting the immense changes in consumer behaviour across various social channels.
With more and more channels to communicate through, marketers today are blasting prospects with messages and expecting some of those messages will be heard. They are ignoring the prospect’s perspective. A study by McKinsey on a ‘consumer’s decision journey’ shows the irrelevance of this traditional approach to today’s consumers, who have easy access to online information at any time.
In Edelman’s words, “social media has changed our expectations around what we see and don’t see on the Internet, and that’s forcing the hands of some brands.”
So how do we fix digital marketing?
- Think Like a Consumer
When people have recommendations from trusted parties, why would they entertain advertisements from strangers?
This is where traditional marketing is falling flat. Instead of trying to create a connection with potential customers, companies are putting their money on product-pushing. This fails to create any impact on consumers’ minds. Learning to see products on prospects’ terms is essential.
- Become a Publisher
Every business must start thinking like a publisher. Produce content that directly communicates with your audience: a one-to-one approach that resonates with their dreams, aspirations and pains.
In this volatile market where decision-makers are not limited to your targets alone, leads can be generated from unexpected places, like a blog, a social forum, or even a product review video.
- Have a Strong Data Foundation
The key to a successful marketing campaign is data – a strong foundation of data tells a marketer where and when opportunities exist. Marketers can capitalise on this by rolling out the right offers at the right times.
Anything from customer contact information, to comments on social networking sites, to purchase details can count as data. Brands today will not be able to hold the attention of omni-channel consumers without technology that collects, links and manages structured and unstructured data from myriad sources.
- Make Communications Human
With instant customer feedback through social networks, understanding customer behaviour has become even easier. Based on this insight, businesses can create content that meet customers’ needs.
Customers are human beings as well, so the content they access needs a human tone. Many modern buyers research products and solutions on community-based forums, full of real people with real experiences. Hence, addressing problems faced by different communities can take a brand much closer to its target audience.
Although there’s no one-size-fit-all formula to approach digital marketing challenges faced today, these guidelines are worth following to start adapting to the overwhelming changes in consumer behaviour, and building relationships with potential customers.
Have any views on this topic? Share them with us below.
The post Why Communications Marketing and not Marketing Communications? appeared first on B2B Marketing Asia.
Stopping Shadow Marketing with an Internal Content Drive
And before you know it, there are ten different spins on your collaterals and messaging out there, playing havoc with your brand image.
Shadow isn’t just an IT thing. Just as cloud services made it easy for business units to get the tools they want behind IT departments’ backs, it has never been easier for individual, client-facing folks to go rogue with company content. They may have good intentions. But ultimately, the risk to your brand image and marketing vision is too great.
No marketer likes to be cut out of their own ambit, so let’s look at how shadow marketing could be curbed.
The campaign conundrum
The rise of content marketing as an important business practice has added another dimension to marketers’ jobs. Combined with traditional campaign-driven marketing and promotions, they now have a continuous and ever-evolving content stream to maintain. This raises two issues.
Firstly, ‘shadow marketers’, more often than not, merely step up to the plate when marketing teams struggle with these demands. There is little to do here besides acknowledging and addressing the manpower angle; it is the second issue that bears examination.
Without a complete understanding of what content marketing is designed to achieve, ‘shadow marketers’ may approach it with the old campaign-oriented mindset. Perhaps they launch promotional email blasts that clash with lead nurturing newsletters. Or they create independent blogs focused on topics at odds with the content direction.
People are used to setting a goal and working towards it – and when that goal is short-term business, content marketing efforts get derailed.
If they’re going to do it, do it right
For marketers to regain control over their content, they first need to make the content strategy a matter of company-wide knowledge. Policy-making is not sufficient here. What is needed is honest sharing between marketing and the various business units, town-hall style, to ensure any doubts are ironed out.
Next comes making it easy for rogue creators to ‘officialise’ their work. This entails providing avenues for content to be contributed and aligned with the content strategy. Search Engine People has some great tips on fostering a culture of internal content creation – in your case, with marketing oversight, of course.
Taking this approach would lessen the burden on marketing teams by allowing them to take a more editorial role, as opposed to actual content generation. In addition, it encourages cross-functional dialogue and collaboration, which helps greatly in gauging and improving content efficiency.
Organisations where ‘shadow marketers’ limit their rogue efforts to conventional sales enablement assets, such as product decks, are likely to experience lower barriers to such initiatives. After all, contributing ideas on refining existing content is considerably less of a burden than regularly generating fresh content – and, at the same time, marketers can look into why that existing content is not being used.
At its core, shadow marketing is an often well-intentioned effort to bridge the chasm between client demand and marketers’ supply. Business needs always take precedence – no policy will stop determined achievers from taking ownership of your content, as long as it works. Perhaps this should be turned to the organisation’s advantage instead of stopped.
Stopping Shadow Marketing with an Internal Content Drive is a post from: B2Bento
The post Stopping Shadow Marketing with an Internal Content Drive appeared first on B2B Marketing Asia.
Putting the Enablement back into Sales Enablement Content
Cue Round X of the finger-pointing: the salespeople ‘don’t get’ all that high-value stuff, or are too busy ‘living from quarter to quarter’ to bother, while the marketers are ‘disconnected’ from the ‘harsh reality’ on the ground. It’s an old and tired refrain – and still as tricky a subject today as it ever was.
True, many times it’s the content itself that’s not working out. But when it does, and still gets less usage than a flashlight in a bright room, perhaps a few small shifts can help.
A shift in mindset
In many traditional companies, marketing produces content on demand. Sales goes to them and says, “I need a competitive analysis deck for Product X” or “Can you do up a case study video on Client Y?”. This point-solution mentality, though, has a problem: it cuts marketing out of the pre-production loop.
What’s needed is a bit of backpedaling. Sales enablement content needs a purpose, and that means ironing out three things:
- who exactly it’s for,
- what it’s going to be used for,
- and its desired effect.
Of course, it’s the job of salespeople to know the people they’re talking to. But by rethinking the usual approach of giving them what they ask for, and providing an ‘outside looking in’ perspective, marketers can optimise their efforts. No sense in bringing out the battle cards when the prospect’s problems remain unaddressed.
Marketers should, likewise, ask these questions even in organisations where they take a more proactive role. Client-facing content always costs – making the most of it means examining not just what goes into it, but what it’s supposed to achieve. And the sales don’t always know the latter.
A shift in usage
Content is a tool, and like any tool there are ways to use it.
Using an asset as-is may not always be the best option. As the complexity of the sales process grows, so will the need to customise sales enablement content, to ensure prospects and clients get the most relevant messages.
Basic content modularity, such as slide decks sliced into removable chapters, is common. But just as important as these measures is their application. A closed-loop system of knowledge sharing and feedback, between sales and marketing, is necessary for optimum targeting.
As Tamara Schenk writes about communicating value messaging:
Salespeople are always responsible for the messages they use in front of customers. Only they can decide, based on synthesising the customer’s context, the different stakeholders’ concepts and their specific decision dynamic, what kind of messages will create value and support their perspectives.
This is where marketers come in – helping the sales decide. Data drawn from marketing automation can, for instance, aid sales in determining a prospect’s level of savvy – which will determine what messaging is used.
Without a feedback loop, salespeople don’t benefit from marketers’ insights, and marketers have no source for the practical experience they need to improve sales enablement content.
A shift in placement
The larger the organisation, and the longer its track record of content creation, the greater the chance it suffers from content sprawl. Findability is the final factor in bringing down the barriers for salespeople to make full use of marketers’ creations.
Self-service is key. Salespeople need to know where they can find relevant assets, and once they are there, how they can get their hands on what they need in as little time as possible. To this end, consolidating and categorising sales enablement content on a dedicated hub, separate from corporate systems, may be a good idea.
Organisations with existing CMS systems should weigh the pros and cons of consolidating on those, versus setting up a new one. While the latter is a significant investment, it is an opportunity to move away from ‘what we’ve always done’ and build a version fine-tuned to both sales and marketing sensibilities.
One real-world example is Cisco, who topped the content placement game with SalesConnect: a mobile app putting their entire content library in account managers’ pockets.
Sales enablement content is the product of collaboration between the creators and the users – in both the creating and the using. How does your organisation tackle the issue? Tell us about it.
Putting the Enablement back into Sales Enablement Content is a post from: B2Bento
The post Putting the Enablement back into Sales Enablement Content appeared first on B2B Marketing Asia.
Recharging B2B Blogging in 3 Steps
Like we said back when Facebook went the paid path, anchoring a content strategy to third-party applications is risky. Owned media is key to helping us, as marketers, play by our own rules. And as far as content hubs go, a blog does all a social media stream can – and more besides.
With that in mind, we’ve reached out for some tips to add an edge to your blogging.
1. Embrace a shift in thinking
One of the reasons, if not the reason, to blog is to grow an audience. Business audiences give their loyalty to sources of challenging, thought-provoking content, which means clickbait and “this just in!” posts have to give way to journalistic process.
The old ways still have their applications in some areas. People still need to be entertained and inspired (like what General Electric is doing on Tumblr). And, every now and then, they need to be reminded of what may seem patently obvious.
But to stand out, a business blog needs original, incisive thinking – and that’s why getting trained journalists on your blogging team is a great idea.
Good reporter-types ask the questions few others ask, push past the obvious, and dig up new angles (or explore familiar ones in new ways). Combine that with the fact that these angles tend to address hard truths – things every serious business reader wants to see – and the value of journalistic thinking is clear.
This is a major step towards creating content your readers find relevant. But there are others.
2. Create relevant content
For your journalists to dig deep into the tough issues, they first need to know what those issues really are. Pain points, for instance, have in many cases become so generalised and banal (like ‘complexity’, ‘scalability’, and similar one-worders), they might as well be buzzwords.
The reality on the ground is often much more nuanced. Only by talking to the people in the field can you understand these nuances, so connect your bloggers to field sales and clients to explore the drivers behind the problems and complaints. Authenticity can’t be faked – armed with these real-world examples, your bloggers have a better chance of speaking directly to readers in their pieces.
Supplement this approach with ideas and content from unlikely places – like Quora and Reddit. Quora’s Q & A collection can be a great source of inspiration for angles, while the anecdotes on Reddit may offer glimpses into what people face in markets and sectors beyond your sphere.
And when the time comes to put all those findings into words, it’s worthwhile for your bloggers to remember Seth Godin’s golden ‘write for one person’ rule.
3. Measure and adjust
Like everything else in modern marketing, a business blog needs optimising, and the only way to do that is by knowing what works.
If you’re not already measuring your blog’s performance, a plethora of analytics and marketing automation tools exist to mine data to that end (Google Analytics does this nicely, and it’s free).
Utilise them, and act on what you see. These are a few common tactics you can employ:
- Monitoring traffic to find peak periods, and increasing post frequency during those periods
- Monitoring topics, and repackaging old posts on the ones with the most traction
- Tracking traffic referrals from social media, and boosting promotion in the most active platforms
- Building a mailing list, and collating recent, high-performing posts into bulletins for syndication
Turning your blogging initiative into a newsroom may seem a tad far-fetched. But you don’t have to build the next AMEX Open Forum – you just need to keep readers coming back. Which means getting hands-on, digging for insights, and experimenting all the time.
Recharging B2B Blogging in 3 Steps is a post from: B2Bento
The post Recharging B2B Blogging in 3 Steps appeared first on B2B Marketing Asia.
How To Adapt To The Facebook News Feed Tweaks
With the latest updates to the Facebook News Feed algorithm,
- multiple posts are allowed from the same source in a row
- updates from friends are prioritised over brand Page posts
- there will be fewer ‘alerts’ when friends like or comment on other posts
At the time of writing, Facebook has created a new survey to improve the News Feed for each individual user. The survey questions pit posts from friends and brand pages together — asking users to choose between 2 recent posts they would like to see.
It might appear that this is yet another step towards throttling brand reach. But a closer examination will reveal workarounds to help you keep your reach high.
How Can Brands Adapt?
1. Think like a publisher
Facebook has come a long way from being the ‘hip’ social network. When a journalistic publication like The New York Times agrees to host its content natively on the platform, the signs are clear — of a move towards a publishing platform.
Brands should aim to build an audience by publishing transparent, educational and informative content on the platform.
Updates to the Facebook News Feed algorithm should not surprise you anymore. They are after all a business — and thrive on charging content creators for better reach. Think of it like a game and explore new methods to reach and build a wider audience.
2. Own content first, then syndicate
If you only use Facebook as your content channel, you are bound to take damage. With its frequently changing News Feed, it is better to be safe than sorry.
House your content on your own website or blog first. Consider Facebook as a medium for syndicating that content — with tone and voice synced to that of your blog. As a bonus, you will also save resources by avoiding recreation of content from scratch.
While you are at it, mix up your content types – with videos, images and text – to surprise and engage your audience.
3. Align content with trending topics
Facebook News Feed algorithms bump up trending topics. They stay on top of the News Feed longer — so more users are more likely to interact. And posts with greater interaction in turn rise up the News Feed.
4. Use videos to educate and entertain
Video is the new photo, at least when it comes to social media marketing. Photos used to have the best reach, but now videos have taken top spot.
Use videos to tell your stories, with an emotional arc and sign off with a persuasive CTA. Your viewers will not forget you.
Look at what happens with a show like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. His segment on Net Neutrality was so informative and entertaining that the video went viral. What’s more, the CTA was so persuasive that Federal Communications Commission website crashed due to the heavy traffic of viewers lodging complaints.
Do you have any more ideas on how to keep your brand reach high on Facebook? Let us know in the comments below.
Read more: Social Media Marketing solutions from GetIT Comms.
How To Adapt To The Facebook News Feed Tweaks is a post from: B2Bento
The post How To Adapt To The Facebook News Feed Tweaks appeared first on B2B Marketing Asia.
6 Approaches To Storytelling In B2B Marketing
Stories have a universal power to effect change and influence behaviour. Whether you are a salesperson, an IT pro or even a C-suite executive, great stories never fail to captivate.
The Chemistry of Emotion
Think back to the last good story you enjoyed. What made you finish it in the first place? Something must have grabbed your attention upfront.
That’s a start, but an attention-grabbing opener alone won’t do. You must have cared about someone, rooted for someone – empathised with someone in the story.
Despite the limitless ways to tell stories, they all share a common trait – they stir emotions deep inside us. And human emotions are a direct consequence of neurochemistry. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak’s research shows that dramatic arcs in a story coincide with spikes in our body chemicals – cortisol in times of distress, and oxytocin when we feel empathy.
What’s more, those who were found to release more amounts of both chemicals were more likely to part with their money.
A Sixfold Path
This is great news for B2B marketers. To influence buying decisions, tell a good story that affects your audience’s emotions. Here are some approaches to get you started.
1. ‘Personify’ the narrative
Humans are naturally inclined to care about people over inanimate objects. So one way to invoke empathy in your audience is to have characters they can relate to – or even better – identify with.
This is where a well-developed target persona is critical. Create a ‘hero’ for your story: a character with the same traits and pains as that of the persona. This approach is ideal for explainer videos where your product or service can be showcased as a catalyst for the hero’s journey.
You can also use personification in a quirky way. Remember the video series What If Google Was A Guy?
Not every piece of content is educational. Convey ideas indirectly and infuse some fun into them. Are you selling a service instead of a physical product? What if that service had a mind of its own? What if it behaved like a person?
Content that goes viral is usually of the short and unconventional – i.e. shareable – type. If brand awareness is your top priority, try taking your content for a spin with analogies and metaphors.
2. Go from audience problems to your solutions
The ‘fear, uncertainty, doubt’ approach always finds a niche. Present a worst-case scenario and everyone takes notice. Pinpoint your audience’s problems and pain points upfront to catch their attention. Then show how your products can help them overcome those problems.
This approach has a narrative arc that lends itself well to case studies, testimonials and ‘how-to’ guides.
3. Use data to drive storytelling
For giving your story that extra ‘punch’, start with hard data and figures. This adds authority to your case, and targets the rational half of business decision makers’ minds.
For example, which of these openings will grab your attention? Security breaches are a major concern for enterprises these days? Or: Did you know that 60% of enterprises will discover security breaches in 2015, as per Forrester Research predictions?
Both aim to tell the same story, but the second statement creates more urgency. Humans are emotional creatures first, yes, but convincing them depends as much on logical appeal.
4. Take your audience on a journey
Sometimes, a journey contains enough of a dramatic arc that the story tells itself. Why do biopics, epics and millennia-spanning stories sometimes become popular?
Films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Lawrence of Arabia – or even documentaries – still appeal to our emotions. The narrative arcs of these works are stories in and of themselves.
Company histories are ripe for this approach. Tell your brand’s story – how it evolved from its roots, overcame obstacles, and helped customers.
If technology is central to your business, then you are blessed with even more options for these ‘journey’ stories. Educate your audience with stories about the evolution of various technologies and services.
5. Gamify content and allow interaction
Finally, stories may appeal to your audience’s intrinsic emotions, but it’s extrinsic motivators like real-time control, points and rewards that keep them engaged. This is especially relevant to Millennials, many of whom grew up with video games and classroom reward programs.
This is the idea behind gamification – using game thinking to engage audiences and solve their problems. Showing real-time survey results, making your videos interactive, or creating game-like scenarios that educate your audience are just a few examples.
6. Break the rules
There is one more approach – that of no approach at all. As George Bernard Shaw famously said about storytelling – “The golden rule is that there are no rules”.
When it comes to creative content, there are only guidelines. Follow them for a start, but don’t be afraid to break away from the norm if necessary. Experiment with new technology for new ways of telling stories.
As more brands turn to content marketing, we discover new and better ways of storytelling. How do you plan to tell your stories?
Read more: Content Marketing solutions from GetIT Comm
6 Approaches To Storytelling In B2B Marketing is a post from: B2Bento
The post 6 Approaches To Storytelling In B2B Marketing appeared first on B2B Marketing Asia.
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