One marketing guru, Mark Schaefer, asked the question and concluded we are in the early days of a marketing epoch of “content shock,” when “exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect our limited human capacity to consume it.”
The Law of Diminishing Returns
The supply of content is so high that demand is collapsing and content producers have to pay their audiences to pay attention. He cites Chipotle’s expensive social media campaign featuring highly produced, animated mini movies as a case in point.
Making it About the Reader
Meanwhile, I was completely entranced by an essay recently in Harper’s magazine - so much so that I pedaled well beyond the end of the tiresome 30 minutes I endure on the stationery bike every day. I just kept chugging and reading about the author, fiction writer Heidi Julavits, and her encounter with the American healthcare machine (and her mid-life crisis, and the philosophy of what makes readers care about characters in fiction).
I was oblivious of the time and in awe of her seemingly effortless ability to craft something so highly entertaining and useful (useful to someone like me who worries about getting old and becoming a ward of the healthcare system.)
Since then I’ve been thinking about the difference between that essay and the content I usually run across doing research online for my clients. Could a B2B blog post ever be that compelling? I do think it’s possible but it requires a different approach from what we’re used to – and are usually comfortable with.
Howard Gossage, an ad writer during the “Mad Men” era said, “People don’t read ads. They read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.”
How to Be Interesting
1) Know your customers and what interests them.
What interests people usually is their own stuff. In fact, each sentence in your content marketing that talks about your own company pushes your audience a little farther away. That’s not the case, however, for those sentences that explain how your company addresses their challenges.
And that’s one advantage B2B marketing writers have over Harper’s writers: our audience, B2B buyers, is very challenge focused. If you can nail down their problem and provide ideas for ways to solve it, (not wax poetic about your great company and solution) you can get their interest pretty quickly without needing to be as good a writer as Ms. Julavits.
2) Tell stories (people experiencing events over time).
The idea of stories in business sounds like fluff, but human beings are wired to pay attention and be ultra-receptive to the unfolding of plot. It’s a trait likely favored by evolution, the ability to learn from our tribe.
Cognitive psychology professor Keith Oatley says, “The reason we're interested in stories is that we are intensely social creatures: we want to know what others, and ourselves, are up to.” He says that just as pilots-in-training spend time on flight simulators, stories may act as flight simulators for real life.
Whether it’s a full-blown case study or just a few-sentence quickie, incorporate concrete specifics about client issues, the people involved and how the solution produced a happy ending.
3) Be human.
This one represents a huge opportunity for creating connection and even competitive differentiation in the B2B market, especially in technical industries like software and finance, where too much of the content reads like the drone of a self-involved robot.
Imagine yourself as an overworked B2B buyer, trolling the internet, doing the due diligence and finding only web sites where the necessary info is buried in this difficult-to-read drone.
And then imagine her coming across your site. Starting from wherever she lands, the text is about the problems her company is facing and is written in an engaging, friendly tone, by a person she could imagine doing business with. She’s certainly going to be inclined to spend more time on your site and to be more likely to include your company on her short list.
In content marketing, all else being equal, the humans will always beat the robots. In fact, not only is it OK to write like a human and allow something of yourself to creep into a blog post, it’s probably the only thing that will allow you to make a connection with your audience.
And, Schaefer says, “Connecting in a human way is what leads to trust. Trust leads to loyalty… and loyalty trumps everything else I have written about in this blog post [about the demise of content marketing].”
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