The Content Creativity Gap: Why Aren’t B2B Tech Companies Using Inspired Writing as a Major Differentiator? And how to Solve the Problem.
By Gene Knauer
Content marketing is rapidly gaining ground as a lead generation strategy for B2B technology companies. Marketing professionals are highly disciplined as they prepare campaigns. Target market―check. Positioning―check. Personas―check. Buyer’s journey―check. Strategy and measurement―check.
But there’s a lingering problem. And it’s truly ironic. According to a new B2B Content Marketing Report from Crowd Research Partners, the ability to produce creative, compelling content is itself a huge challenge. Lack of time to create content and the ability to produce truly engaging content are among two of the top four major challenges cited in the survey of over 600 B2B marketing professionals. With content marketing, it seems that content itself is the major problem.
Source: B2B Content Marketing Spotlight Report, Crowd Research Partners, August 2016.
A closer look at some of the study’s other data may help explain why. Specifically: 89% of companies in the survey create content internally. Only 30% overall outsource any content writing.
To date, a lot of the content within B2B tech companies is written by people without “writer” in their titles. Could that have something to do with why so much of what we read sounds at best derivative and at worst ponderous and dull?
What Creative Content Marketing Writing Is and Is Not
The novelist Amy Tan started out as a marketing writer in San Francisco. She learned that effective, compelling content doesn’t require flowery prose. It must be written for the attention span of goldfish. With the brevity of rap or haiku. There is information to convey. A voice to embody. And ― with the very best content ― a dash of style between the lines that makes all the difference.
You see great content all the time in B2C marketing. Ad campaigns for major brands woo us to Think Different and Just Do It, to enjoy food that’s Finger Lickin’ Good, and to visit The Happiest Place on Earth. Body copy amplifies those slogans. We consume these brands. There’s absolutely no reason why B2B marketing can’t include more conceptual, fun, thought-provoking approaches and styles.
What B2B Tech Companies Should Do to Get Better Content
Quality writing ― just like quality anything ― requires skill, experience, and precision. It’s an art. It isn’t drag and drop. It can be grueling. History has shown that it usually takes a certain type of person to write well.
Whether companies decide to hire writers as full-time employees, contractors or freelancers isn’t the point. If the goal is to radically improve content ― and thereby improve marketing results ― B2B tech companies should consider the following:
· Evaluate writing properly: Make sure you have somebody on staff who understands how to judge effective, creative content marketing writing. Evaluating writers is not a subjective exercise. Someone with a keen eye can quickly tell if information in writing samples is communicated in the right order, succinctly, consistently, and to the target audience. They can tell if a writer has style and if they can write with a distinctive voice.
· Invest in experience: Why do so many ads for writers include low salaries or low hourly billing rates? Why not offer competitive compensation to seasoned writers and incentivize them to do great work for you? In this market, you get what you pay for. Effective marketing content is worth its weight in gold.
· Chill out and let writers work offsite: Writers are typically not the life of the party. They like to sit by themselves in small rooms. They need quiet. So companies that hire writers and insist that they work onsite are either adversely impacting their productivity or in other cases eliminating a pool of the most creative, conscientious scribes on the market.
So whether you’re selling cloud services, storage infrastructure or popsicles ― as the song in Casablanca goes ― “the fundamental things apply” when it comes to content writing. To improve your content, be choosy about what writers you hire, compensate them appropriately, and let them produce great work from wherever they are most productive and inspired.
Gene Knauer is the writer of “The Professional Content Marketing Writer in an Age of Digital Media and Short Attention Spans”.