July.
This month, we’re considering a great opportunity to do less (but better), questioning whether B2B and community are suffering an existential crisis, and imagining a future where B2B businesses can personalise for the customer journey AND diverse needs of buying committees.
Plus, our brand new podcast ‘The Problem with B2B’ is officially live and you’re the first ones to hear it. Have a listen to the launch episode and let us know what you think!
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Content.
Less is more… This month new research from B2B tech PR agency 10fold was brought to our attention (via DemandGenReport) and the headline really got us thinking… Amidst Content Boom…92% Anticipate Content Production Increases.
92%? Practically EVERYBODY in the survey? Now, of course this ‘insight’ is potentially very valuable to businesses in the business of creating content for B2B tech businesses, but we would argue in the strongest terms for a totally different approach; do less. Way less than you’re currently doing. But much more of what works…
For instance, we've written before about the 2024 Linkedin Thought Leadership research that reported ? of C-suite respondents saying thought leadership content has prompted them to research a product or service they hadn't considered, with 23% of them going on to buy. 90% said they were more receptive to sales outreach having read useful thought leadership content. 70% had considered changing supplier as a result of reading thought leadership from a competitor of their incumbent; so, huge potential.
But only 48% of respondents said that overall the quality of thought leadership they see is good - and only 15% say it’s very good or excellent. So why is so much B2B content so bad? And how can we stop it??
The Linkedin report points to solving problems through better leadership, measurement and governance:?
“There are clear rewards for those that do it well and yet half of businesses say they under-resource thought leadership, fewer than half have effective measurement in place and 25% of firms say they are not leveraging their best talent in their thought leadership, with a further 25% saying they lack the skills internally. In practice, these are all relatively straightforward to fix, by training and supporting internal thought leaders on content planning and creation, and / or adding outsourced expertise on distribution and management.”
The CMI 2024? B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks research, published late last year highlights another challenge, and opportunity:
“Most marketers (57%) cite creating the right content for their audience as their biggest challenge. This is a change from many years when “creating enough content” was the most frequently cited challenge.
They go on to point out that? understanding what audiences want is more important than ever: “As the internet gets noisier and AI makes it incredibly easy to create listicles and content that copy each other, there will be a need for companies to stand out. At the same time, as … millennials and Gen Z [grow in the workforce], we’ll begin to see B2B become more entertaining and less boring. We were never only competing with other B2B content. We’ve always been competing for attention.”
So the question we should all ask ourselves is how do we win our customers’ attention? And how do we reward their engagement. (Clue: It’s probably not by shovelling more sh*t in their inbox or feeds…) And if if it’s clear that there are rewards for those that do content well, why do half of businesses say they under-resource thought leadership, why do fewer than half have effective measurement in place and why do 25% of firms say they are not leveraging their best talent in their thought leadership?
Our take? These are BIG questions for any business, touching on leadership, ops, culture, capacity and capability, marketing and sales (mis)alignment,? allocation of budget between brand and performance, alignment of content strategy with marketing and business strategy… But there are some quick win questions to ask yourself as a way to start doing less, but better.
In practice, all this issues raised above are?relatively straightforward to fix e.g. by training and supporting internal experts on content planning and creation, and adding (short-term) outsourced expertise, including content distribution / promotion and management. And the data to track performance is often already there, or relatively easy to set up even if it’s not currently in place.
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Community.
RIP Community / Long live Community: Sadly we understand that Guild.co, the leading UK platform for professionals to build communities and engage, is shutting down in October. Does this mean B2B and community are suffering an existential crisis? Or are we looking at the current tough micro trading conditions in the B2B marketing space and macro issues facing a social technology platform operating in a challenging investment space (where you’re also bumping up against the dominance of the big US social networks).
Guild offered a safe digital space to build a community free of adverts, vacuous humble brags and salesy content posts. We will miss it and respect and thanks must go out to the founder Ashley Friedlein for launching the platform and being such a successful advocate for Community Based Marketing.
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We’ve always considered that B2B brands need to look at building community as CapEx - invest now for long term return and value - the issue is we’ve been living through an era of OpEx meaning businesses have to make short term investment decisions with less money and immediate returns needed.
So, as businesses start to look at brand building as the economy turns a corner and more favourable trading conditions return, we expect community to become a smart investment.
Next month we’ll dive into where next for the business of community….
?AI.
A medium-long read (via Martech.org) on the possibilities of AI to deliver true personalisation on content marketing. The author points to a future where B2B businesses can personalise for the customer journey AND diverse needs of buying committees.
Our take: We’ve outlined above the problem of creating too much content and a big part of this is the difficulty of running truly 1:1 campaigns at scale. However, tools like Mailchimp are enhancing email personalisation through detailed customer profiles, enabling more relevant messaging. And HubSpot’s AI templates are beginning to incorporate customer context into communication workflows, promising deeper personalisation - e.g. by making sense of unstructured data and using this to personalise elements such as tone of voice in CRM? in a fraction of the time it would take a human. This in turn frees up more time which can be spent on ‘real’ personalised interaction and relationship-building with customers and future clients; ABM at scale??
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Team VOLUME.
Headlines from a truly useful and properly insightful event earlier this month - The New Normal, from the always excellent TBD. According to new research from foresight experts Trajectory:
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Brand new VOLUME podcast is live! ‘The Problem with B2B' is a podcast for everyone in B2B marketing, interviewing practitioners working in B2B to discuss specific problems each of them has faced, to learn exactly how they fixed it.
We’re really excited to share that we’ve gone live today, and our newsletter subscribers are the first to receive a link to the launch episode! Add us to your playlist and let us know what you think.
Episode 1 Matthew Gale, Deloitte: The Problem with B2B Podcasts: We talked to Matthew Gale, Director of Brand & Creative Content at Deloitte and architect of The Green Room, one of the most successful podcasts from a brand, about the problem with B2B podcasts... From getting started and working out exactly who you are for, to working hard to earn your audiences’ time and attention, what makes for effective distribution and how you define the ROI for the business, Matt shares his experience, the good and the bad, common pitfalls, and how to deal with them. Listen to episode one here.
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Roundup.
Director, Brand & Creative Content
6 个月Thanks for having me on! Looking forward to the rest of the series ?? ??