Takeaways from Consumer Marketing for B2B

B2B content is often kind of—dare I say—boring.

Working in the professional services industry, I am constantly looking for new ways to become an engaging storyteller for my clients. Of course, any content produced by businesses, for businesses is bound to be more factual and professional. But in the world of content marketing, it seems like too many B2B marketers are playing it safe, and being verbose. Often times, we get caught up in writing long, drawn out explanations that cater to ourselves instead of to our client. I thought it may be interesting to look at B2C communications and how I could relate it back to B2B marketing. 

As the content marketing world evolves, as professional service marketers, business developers and sales people, we must revamp the way we talk to our clients. Marketing to the consumer is often much more targeted because you are required to learn everything about who you are talking to. B2B marketers can learn a lot from the B2C marketing.

Here are three lessons that B2B content marketers can learn from B2C content.

1. Be creative & concise

Look for ways to get out of the traditional B2B content marketing box of white papers and blog posts. Try developing some infographics, which are easy and quick to digest. Our clients are just as busy as we are, so remember that when developing content. I've talked about this before in previous blogs - concision and precision. Piktochart is a great, free resource to begin to develop your own infographics.

2. Be entertaining & conversational

Typically, B2B marketing focuses on being informative. Try adding in a little entertainment. Think about it, would rather read a 100-page written proposal or a 5-page highly targeted and also funny, exciting, suspenseful or otherwise entertaining? Things like facts, statistics, metaphors, analogies and funny anecdotes are all great ways to keep people interested in what they're reading. Another good rule of thumb is to not be too technical, keeping a conversational tone and using words and phrases that are easily understood is your best bet when it comes to keeping your clients reading. B2C content marketing is doing a great job of this. What could your business do that might be similar to this strategy? How could you be informative AND funny? How could you convey your company’s brand values or competitive advantages while still making a fun, thought-provoking comment about the larger industry? Why not borrow a page from the B2C playbook? 

3. Be mobile-friendly

B2B content needs to be delivered to audiences in a way that is relevant to people’s preferences. Today, that increasingly means “mobile devices.” This is one area where B2B marketing is still catching up—many B2B marketers have assumed (wrongly) that B2B buyers don’t use mobile devices to the same extent that consumers do. But the truth is, B2B buyers engage with content and make purchasing decisions in similar ways to their lives as consumers.

For example, according to research from Panvista Mobile, 59 percent of B2B purchase decision makers and influencers use smartphones to gather information about B2B products and services, and 65 percent of executives are “comfortable making a business purchase from a mobile device.” Make your B2B content mobile-friendly. This can be as simple as making your white papers more concise or saving down PDFs to be viewable on phones and tablets. According to the 2013 Pardot State of Demand Generation Report, 70 percent of B2B buyers prefer to see white papers, case studies and eBooks that are less than five pages in length.

Bonus Tip

B2B buyers are “people” too. The same time crunch and short attention span and need to “get to the point” that we experience in our daily lives as consumers are also part of life for your B2B buyers. This makes it more important than ever to make sure our B2B content marketing efforts are a relevant fit for the needs of B2B audiences. There are a lot of lessons that B2B marketers can learn from the consumer marketing world—be creative, be entertaining and deliver the content in a way that is most relevant and engaging to the audience.

Sources: Business to Community, iAcquire, Northwestern