How to create B2B content around an award win

Every industry has awards, and winning is great, of course. But how much B2B content can you create around your win?

Picture of a gold winners trophy cup.
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

A lot of work goes into putting together an awards entry. Pulling together the information, data, images, testimonials and writing a submission that will grab the judges attention.

Your awards entry is the story of your business journey and achievements. It’s the story of a particularly successful project or product.

It’s the story of why you do what you do and what makes you stand out from your competitors. It’s all about what makes you or what you do the best in your industry.

All of which makes fantastic B2B content on your website, social media and a potential press story.

Leverage your win

This is more than writing about how ‘delighted’ you were and posting a picture.

It’s making the most of the work you did putting the entry together – and the work that won you the award.

Here are a few ideas for how to create B2B content around your award win:

1. Tell the story of what won you the award

Lifting the shiny new award was the easy bit. Getting to that point no doubt involved hard work, so write about what was involved.

What were your goals and how did you achieve them?

There were probably some ups and downs along the way. So tell the story of what you had to overcome, what the challenges were, how you solved them, and what you learned along the way.

Use that to frame what the award win means to you and your business.

You could also tease what’s next to move the story on.

Continue reading “How to create B2B content around an award win”

How to write about stuff that goes wrong

You succeed by trial and error. Practice and fail and practice some more. And yet when reading about business it would be easy to think that every job or project was a success from start to finish.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

There are good reasons to write about failures and struggles, as I explain in this post but it might feel counterintuitive or even uncomfortable.

So here are some ways to help you feel comfortable writing about the not so successful stuff so that you can lift the lid on a whole swathe of new content and business insight.

First of all think of failing as just part of the learning process.

The star basketball player misses a lot of hoops to get that one winning shot. A lot of work went into getting that winning shot. A lot of mistakes, a lot of adjustments and a lot of training to get better.

Continue reading “How to write about stuff that goes wrong”

Why writing about your failures can help you stand out

Do you write about your failures as part of your content marketing?

It might feel counterintuitive particularly when a lot of business communications are about success but it can really help you stand out from the crowd.

Photo by Ian Kim on Unsplash

And here’s why.

Not everything goes to plan. Not every plan is successful.

For every success, there is a history of things not quite going to plan.  I was listening to an interview with Jamie Oliver yesterday and he reckoned his failure rate was at around 40%.

What made it a really interesting listen is in how he talked about his failures – he talked about what he learned from them.

Learning from failures

No one gets everything right the first time – or the second. We learn from what doesn’t work.

We figure out why something wasn’t a success and we adjust our approach, our strategy, our thinking. And we try again.

New year, new content strategy?

A cork pin board with a yellow postit note on which is drawn a light bulb
Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

The start of a new year is an opportunity to take a fresh approach, maybe try something new or commit to publishing regular B2B content.

Or at least that is the intention anyway.

Sometimes good intentions get swept aside when it’s busy. It’s easy to default to the familiar way of doing things or sporadic publishing.

I know, I’ve been there.

Busy times

Editing the features section of a weekly magazine kept me busy and at its peak, I was responsible for around 1,000 pages a year.

I had a team to help but it still didn’t leave much wriggle room.

If you know in your heart of hearts that trying a whole raft of new content ideas is not going to be possible then why not try one thing?

Some suggestions

Perhaps introduce the occasional case study to your B2B content publishing plan. Continue reading “New year, new content strategy?”