Okay, let’s start with an admission. That title might be taking things a little far. Nobody wants to be boring, so the clear answer is no it doesn’t. But the fact is, a lot of B2B content is sedate, information-focused, plain or any other euphemism for boring that your prefer. The problem comes from a good place though.
The target is never boring content, but it’s often business-ey content. B2B marketers often live in fear of veering off the business track into anything that might be described as fun. You know your content should be written for your audience so you write for them. It’s business content for marketing to business people; nobody has fun in business. At least, not successfully. Instead, the focus is on advice, detail, research and information.
None of these are bad things; you can build great content on those building blocks. But that doesn’t exclude the addition of more style, or humor or emotion. Nobody ever lost a client by making them laugh. The target of B2B content is to encourage your audience to become clients, the question is…
Who Are Your Audience?
For most B2B organizations the desired audience is a set group of business people. You might be targeting fleet managers or CFOs, maybe you need to access IT managers to sell software or it may be broader than that. You might just be looking for business owners. The only common characteristic is their position. In every other category from age, through gender to hobbies there is huge disparity between prospects. Your audience is a large group of loosely related business people. Therefore your B2B content should be geared towards that unifying factor, business-style, business content for marketing your business to other businesses. It makes sense doesn’t it?
The thing is, that’s what the next guy is doing, and the guy after that. And all of it uses a similar business style and offers the same business advice. How can anybody stand out, when everybody’s sticking to the same tried and tested formula?
James Altucher
Speaking of the next guy, James Altucher definitely isn’t him. If ever you wanted evidence that B2B content can be both successful and stylish, read one of his posts. To illustrate the kind of style I’m referring to, let’s take a quote from his latest post on how to treat employees.
Wade had caught the disease. The disease is very contagious and it spreads to the other employees quickly and it contaminates everyone’s work. Like a tumor you have to cut it out as soon as it appears. Wade was fired.
Altucher writes from the heart, makes fascinating points based on real world experiences and writes directly for business people. He just writes it as if he’s writing a collection of short stories. To illustrate his success, James Altucher has 61k followers on Twitter and averages around 10k Facebook Likes per post. He writes for business, in a stylish manner and has a huge audience.
Who Are Your Audience?
Which brings us back to audience. Let’s review the audience description I used earlier. “a large group of loosely related business people.” B2B content writers like James Altucher don’t write for business people. They write for people about business topics. They create stories that engage the heart, stories that entertain, and they place them in a business context.
That has to be the goal for B2B content. We’ve been focusing on the wrong word in our description of our target audience. We’re not creating business content for business people. We’re creating content for people, on business topics. And people like to laugh, or cry or be entertained, just as much as they like information. So why not give them both?
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