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Why is B2B content failing to engage customers?

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Are you struggling to create B2B content that provides business value? If so, then you’re not alone — it’s been said that as many as 83% of B2B marketing leaders are failing to produce content that engages their customers. Here are four top reasons content fails to engage and some practical advice to put it right.

 

Nuturing_contentProblem #1: content focuses on early stages of the buyer’s journey
Picking up customers might not be a problem, but keeping them engaged through their decision-making journey is more challenging.

Solution #1: create nurturing content
Map your content creation to different stages of the journey, and focus on moving the customer from one stage to the next. Then you won’t only be creating content – you’ll be creating a relationship with your customers.

 

Document_strategyProblem #2: no documented strategy
You might have a strategy, but it’s different depending on whom you ask – and that means not everyone is pulling in the right direction.

Solution #2: document your strategy
It’s not rocket science. Get that strategy written down, get everyone on the same page and join up your approach to content marketing.

 

Get_human

Problem #3: stuffy content
“We’re a business and our content needs to reflect that. It’s what our customers will expect. But they just aren’t interested in our content.”

Solution #3: get human
Take the suit and tie off your content and turn it into something they’d want to read in the evening, not just at their desk. That’s partially about making it relevant to them, both professionally and personally, but also about the tone and style you adopt.

 

Say_something_newProblem #4: your customer already knows what you’re saying
Your customer does nearly 60% of their decision-making without talking to you. They’re smart and they’ve heard it all before.

Solution #4: say something new
Don’t settle for ‘interesting’ or ‘accessible’ content. Do your research and tell the customer something they didn’t know, which forces them to question their buying criteria. Perhaps they always assumed they couldn’t reduce their energy consumption, for example, when in fact you can help them with that?

 

You can download the full infographic here.

What are your secrets for creating engaging content?

Share your tips for creating content that grabs your audience and doesn’t let go on Twitter, LinkedIn, or in the comments section on our blog.

Listicle or Missticle? How to write engaging listicles

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Listicles — bulleted lists of information presented as an article — are a great way to engage today’s time-poor readers. But have you ever stumbled on one that feels like it’s missed the point?

You know the kind: “Top 250 PR stunts” or “61 social media tips you don’t know about”. Listicles are designed to make the information they contain accessible, but there’s a fine line between achieving that and turning your readers off – sometimes before they’ve even clicked the link.

So how can you keep your listicle on the straight and narrow? We’ve come up with a few ideas to help your listicle avoid being a “missticle” (pardon the pun). To help, we’ve even arranged them in a list…

1: Get the numbers right
The best listicles keep to low numbers. Ten would be an absolute maximum, but five or three would be better. Though numbers like 13 or 9 stand out, they do risk giving people the impression you couldn’t decide which ideas to use so just chucked them all in. Even numbers are fine – as this listicle from hubspot shows.

2: Watch your language
If you have 30 points, are they all “top”, “significant” or “best”? It’s important not to over-hype your article. Your readers will see it a mile off and likely vote with their feet. Take this CMI article , for example – no hype; just a promise to list some useful tools that’s then delivered on.

3: Find the thread
This is the one that can make the difference between a good and a great listicle. Even though you’re writing a list, it’s still important to find an arc that draws your reader in and gives them a reason to read the whole thing. In a list of top social media tools, for example, you might start with tools that focus on curation and finding content and move through to those that are more geared towards analytics and review. Or, as we did in this listicle on barriers to social in business, start with a surface issue and then dig deeper with each successive point.

It does take a careful bit of planning to write engaging listicles – short and accessible as they are, they aren’t necessarily quick things to write. But once you’ve got the format working for you, your content will shine.

You’ve probably come across a variety of listicles. Why not share the best – and the worst – in the comments below, LinkedIn or Twitter?

The secret to making great Slideshare presentations

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Here at HN, we’re big on recycling — and we don’t just mean paper and glass. We think that when you’ve spent time (and money) producing great content, it’s important to use it in as many ways as possible to get the best value out of it. We’ve written about this before in the context of presentations, but there’s one medium that we neglected to mention last time: making great SlideShare presentations.

SlideShare is wonderful because it makes it easy to share your presentation and so increase its lifespan, but a quick search reveals that many are tempted to simply upload a set of slides and forget about it. While that may feel like a quick win, it means that a lot of the value your presentation delivered — the value that came from the words you said around the slides — is lost. So what can you do to optimise your SlideShare presentations to make them stand out from the crowd?

1: Tell the story without a speaker Presentation slides are usually there to support what the speaker is saying. There’s no opportunity for that in SlideShare, so you have to be certain that your audience will get the message from the slides alone. If necessary, use more slides – as long as each is engaging, your audience will keep clicking (see point 3).

2: Make it visually appealing Again, presentations created to support a speaker may not place emphasis on visuals since they don’t want to distract the audience from the speaker. But on SlideShare, the slides are the focus. Use high-quality images (so they still look good on full screen) and use them liberally to support the story.

3: Keep them clicking With every slide you create, ask yourself this question: why should they be interested in what the next slide says? If they don’t have a reason to click on, they won’t. With that in mind, try to spread your arguments across multiple slides, creating an engaging story that your readers will want to click through.

There are lots of great SlideShare presentations out there, but we particularly like this one by Seth Godin that achieves all of the above and also gives some helpful, entertaining advice on… achieving all of the above!

Convert or create?
It may seem like it would be easier to simply create a new presentation for SlideShare, rather than repurposing what you have, but at HN we think otherwise. If you bear in mind all the uses to which a presentation might be put when you start to create it, you’ll find that repurposing it for different purposes and media will be simpler.

What do you think? Join the conversation by leaving a comment below, tweeting us or posting on our LinkedIn page. Or, in keeping with our theme, you can follow our adventures on SlideShare.