The Truth? Your B2B Content Marketing Is Boring

Have you ever read a blog post and said “Oh boy, I sure wish I could write like that”? I know I have. I read blog posts regularly & I totally understand the almost overwhelming feeling you experience when you read a good one. I also when you look at a majority of the content out there and think: B2B content is boring.

Maybe you’re the person writing the dry and boring blog posts? If you are, I am here to help you start writing blog posts that have you and others saying: “yes yes yes”.

The different kinds of content.

There are different kinds of content in any genre of writing. When it comes to marketing content for B2B blogs, it boils down to two types.

Filler content

The content that often gets people saying “yes, yes yes”.

For many people, maybe for you too, creating content is not your only job role. You have other things to do as well. For this reason content perhaps isn’t a top priority. In this scenario, because of time constraints, you’re more likely to create filler content.

If your content isn’t received highly, chances are you are writing filler content. Filler content is everywhere. I guarantee if you have an idea for a blog post, it’s already been written. Filler content generally doesn’t interest anyone because it says nothing new.

Think of filler content as buying a card for your great-aunt. You don’t really like or know her so you buy a generic card like everyone else and she ends up with a series of almost identical cards for her birthday.

Granted, filler content is easy. All you have to do is Google your proposed blog title, read a few of the already existing blog posts and with that knowledge, write your post. Simple, right? It may be simple but doesn’t mean it’s good.

See the chances of filler content going “viral” is slim to none. No one cares because they’ve read it all before.

Think about it like this. Why would anyone read your generic “3 email tips you must know” blog post, when a simple Google search shows all these other great articles.

In fact, there are over 21,000,000 results for “email marketing tips”. The likelihood of you standing out, unless you’re producing stellar content isn’t high.

The problem you might face, like so many others, is you think filler content is all you can create because of how long it takes to create the other type of content. You believe the other type of content takes months to put together, especially with your already busy schedule. But that simply isn’t the case.

Top tip: If you struggle to find time to create quality content, why not check out this resource of free content marketing tools to help you become more efficient at actually creating content.

Useful Content

The second type of content is what people miss out on creating. It’s the content that often gets people saying “yes, yes yes” and coming back to your website to see future updates.

The second type of content has people saying “yes yes yes” because it SAYS SOMETHING NEW

Let’s go back to our email marketing example. Okay, you want to write something about email marketing because you think your readership will appreciate that.

Even if you don’t have time or capacity to produce a 7000-word ebook about email marketing tips, you can still say something new about the space.

People come to your blog to learn something because they assume you’re an authority and know what you’re talking about. Don’t let them down when they get there by regurgitating content they’ve already read.

Anyone can compile a list of email tips, but only a few people will take the time to think about what new information, data, or thoughts they can bring to the email marketing space.

Do you want to know another secret about “yes yes yes” writing?

It’s all in the aim. The aim of good “yes yes yes” writing is not to write an academic piece only lecturers can understand; the aim of “YES YES YES” writing is to help your readers understand something more clearly.

Look at a blog post you thought was good and had the “yes yes yes” reaction to.

• Their content isn’t good because they use technical words.
• Their content isn’t good because they have good use of spelling and grammar.
• Their content isn’t good because they have used 10 statistics per paragraph.

Their content is good because they look at the content through new eyes and give you information in a way you haven’t yet considered. So while your b2b content is boring, theirs isn’t. But you just can’t seem to work out why that’s the case.

How to stop yourself writing boring B2B content?

To stop yourself writing boring posts, there are three steps:

1. Decide what sort of content you want to write
2. Do a google search to see how most people present the information.
3. Think about the topic and try and think of it through new eyes. How can you say something new?

Now you’ve stopped yourself writing boring B2B content, how do you write interesting content?

We often set our agency clients a task of looking at their current content and seeing how they could’ve improved it through looking at it with new eyes, but they find it difficult.

There are four core ways to look at content:

1. Empathy
2. Reality
3. Emotion
4. Story

Empathy: Empathy involves showing the readers you understand their problems. Example: You’re unsure about a scientific fact, would you rather a P.H.D lecturer say this to you “this is so easy how the hell do you NOT understand this? Wow, you must be really dense” or would you prefer someone to sit down, explain and let you know it’s totally normal to not understand, and it’s easy to move from not understanding to understanding?

Through empathy, you reassure the person their problem is okay, is simple to fix and you will be the one to fix it. Do this and you’re going to have the person “yes yes yes’ing” by the end of your post.

Reality: Show the problem affects real people. Write things like “have you ever had the problem of….”, “it’s really common to feel like….” let them know their problem exists in the real world, and they’re more likely to listen to your solutions. Remember a blog post should try and address and solve a problem. If it doesn’t you’re just throwing words onto the internet for no reason.

Emotion: You need to appeal to people’s emotions. This is not to say you write a sob story at the beginning of every post. But, convince your readers they’re reading content from a real person who feels things. How many times have you read the information the aircraft give you before take off and said: “yes yes yes”? My guess is never because it’s not emotional, it doesn’t mean anything (apart from life or death if you follow the instructions incorrectly). But the truth of it is, you don’t really care.

Story: Craft your content around a story. “What would Goldilocks and the three bears think of these three reasons to upgrade your website”. People by nature are gossips. They love stories. The truth of it is, stories are easier to read and digest than other forms of content. We get lost in the story and the message behind it follows. It’s the perfect way to add “yes yes yes” moments to your content.

How do you put this all together?

Back to our email marketing example:

Headlines:

That Sad Truth About Our Customers That We Learnt From Email Marketing (Story)

I Had Poor Conversion on My Email Marketing Until I Sent This Email…(Story)

Introduction content

We thought we knew what we were doing (reality) when we first tried email marketing, but like you, we made some grave mistakes (Emotion)

In this blog post, I’m going to show you the mistakes I made when trying out email marketing for the first time and the exact framework I used to improve it and increase my conversions by 46%. (Empathy).

Final thoughts

People often think the difference in B2B and B2C content is how boring it needs to be. Granted, if you’re writing about coffee you can probably have a lot more fun with your content, but it doesn’t mean your B2B content needs to be boring.

See, not hard at all is it? Why not write a blog post for your own company. Pick a generic, boring, done-before topic and turn it into something really fascinating. When you’ve done feel free to link to it here in the comments. I’d love to see what you created.

Originally published at copyandcheck.com on March 23, 2018.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 309,732+ people.

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