B2B Marketing Doesn't Need to Be Boring: Can be Interesting & Engaging
B2B often gets a bad rap with many seeing it as dry and boring. You would think its acronym stands for ‘Boring to Boring.’ But it doesn’t have to be boring! In fact, in this digital age of innovation, B2B can be fun and exciting. Just check out our guide here that shows you how to make your B2B marketing fun and exciting with best practices and real-life examples.
Be Human in Your B2B Marketing
Although B2B stands for business to business, the truth of the matter is that people do business with people. So, when it comes to your B2B marketing, the human aspect can’t be ignored. Often B2B gets caught up in the jargon and becomes dry and robotic. But people don’t want dry and robotic. They want the human feel in B2B.
Marketers then have a responsibility to deliver B2B marketing that’s human- shows emotion, empathy, and personality. Wistia a B2B brand shows its human side really well by being relatable to its audience through its content and Instagram account. Make your B2B marketing more human by:
- Doing an inventory of all your current B2B marketing & identifying where it could be more human- content strategy, branding, social media, etc.
- Analysing your B2B in the eyes of the consumer. Are you coming across as ‘human to human’ (feeling & emotion) or ‘business to business’ (dry and bland)?
- Going straight to the source- your consumers and ask them what they want. Conduct polls, surveys, questionnaires, etc. Invaluable for feedback.
Inject Personality in Your B2B Marketing
Injecting personality into your B2B marketing will go a long way in making it less boring and dry. Successful brands both B2B and B2C understand the importance of personality. Remember great B2B marketing rests on good positioning and differentiation in an overcrowded market. If your B2B is just like everyone else’s you’ll just blend in and won’t stand out at all.
To stand out you need what we call the ‘oomph factor’ – a personality that makes you stand out and be memorable to consumers. You occupy a piece of real estate in their minds. To do this well consider:
- Studying other B2B brands & even some B2C brands to get a feel for how they inject personality into their brand. See what works and what doesn’t.
- Removing or at least reducing the jargon and being more human and personable in all your marketing.
- Coming up with a great Unique Selling Proposition otherwise known as a point of difference for your brand that helps you stand out.
- Incorporating humour- who says B2B has to be dry? Humour even if a little goes a long way in making something less boring.
Have World-Class Content Marketing for Your B2B
You can’t ignore the role of content marketing for your B2B. Just about every brand on the planet has invested in some form of content marketing. They understand its importance in growing their brand. However, for content marketing to work, (you get a good ROI) it must be done well. This involves a lot of foresight, strategy, and consistent production of quality content that’s not robotic and dry. Implement proper content marketing for your B2B by:
- Getting a content marketing strategy in place. This is your first step. Have it custom-designed for your B2B by a content marketing expert who understands B2B.
- Consistently produce quality and engaging content that appeals to different consumption tastes- blogs, videos, infographics, whitepapers, etc.
- Writing content like you talk and making all your content highly consumable so it’s not boring and bland.
- Adding a little humour to your content – jokes, emojis, memes, etc.
Look for Gaps in Your B2B Marketing
This is all about getting highly strategic and having a good brainstorm with your team and then even considering hiring expert help who can further help you identify the gaps in your B2B marketing. The gaps are essentially bottlenecks keeping you stuck along with low-hanging fruit and other things you haven’t leveraged properly for your B2B. Identifying the gaps can help you with the following:
- Identifying your overall strengths and weaknesses for your B2B.
- Taking a more robust approach to your overall B2B marketing and identifying clearly what’s working and what’s not working.
- Implement better review and measurement practices so you can use what works and discard what doesn’t (thorough data analysis must be conducted).
- Staying on top of trends in your industry.
Spice up your B2B Branding
All businesses could do with ‘spicing up their branding’ but B2B even more so considering how it can easily fall into the trap of being boring and bland. Branding is all about creating a perception and a feeling of your product or service.
Ensure you’re creating a great perception and feeling amongst your consumers. When done well, branding helps you be memorable in people’s minds and builds your authority. When done badly, branding repels people. Spice up your B2B branding so that way your B2B marketing isn't boring by:
- Injecting more personality into your brand – showing empathy, humour, reliability, etc. Not forgetting to ‘be human.’
- Being bolder and more adventurous and incorporating more colour to your branding- website, business cards, logo, etc.
- Adding more visuals and better customer experiences.
- Reviewing your branding at least every 6-12 months.
- Having a great brand messaging including a promise that isn’t boring and dull.
- Showing the world what you stand for. Come up with at least five values. Remember more and more consumers want to do business with brands that stand for something. Could be the environment, eradicating poverty, fighting crime, etc.
Incorporate Storytelling in B2B Marketing
Storytelling has become an increasingly important part of both marketing and content strategy for business. Humans are natural-born storytellers. Storytelling goes back to our cave days. All of us have a story to tell. You want to leverage the power of storytelling for your B2B marketing.
Too many B2B’s still think that storytelling is simply just showing that a product or service is the best in the market. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It keeps them stuck in a loop. Perhaps you are one of these?
In order to get unstuck and properly do storytelling for your B2B consider:
- Showcasing your vision for your B2B to a wider audience.
- Showcasing prototypes of your product at different stages.
- Sharing the story behind your B2B. The who, what, why, when how.
- Sharing both your struggles and triumphs.
- Taking your audience behind the scenes– they see the ins and outs of your brand.
- Incorporating storytelling in all your content- blogs, videos, whitepaper, etc.
Three Examples of Compelling B2B Content
We’ve compiled just a short list of three examples of compelling B2B content that we hope you can draw inspiration from. Remember content is a huge driver of B2B marketing. In fact, without content, B2B marketing wouldn’t even exist! So, without further ado, check out these examples:
B2B Marketing Can Be Fun!
Hopefully, by now you can see that B2B marketing doesn’t have to be boring and bland. Implementing the practices discussed in this piece will get you better traction. It just requires some imagination and effort which will go a long way for your B2B.
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