Content strategy Archives - Stacey Meadwell

B2B Content marketing: Selling without the sell

Do you read adverts? What about advertorials and promoted content? How about an article that helped you solve a problem or from which you learned something?

It is getting increasingly hard to sell to people. Ads are a turn-off, and content that whiffs of marketing can quickly lose the attention of a target audience and potentially damage the author’s credibility.

The problem with content marketing is it’s a long game. Building brand awareness, trust, and respect takes time and patience. It’s a subtle, slow-burn sell by positive association.

And that can be hard for those in the business used to ‘closing the deal’. Is it selling if it hasn’t got a direct sell or direct references to products and services?

The answer is yes, but measuring the results of content marketing can be tricky.

What good content market is

Good content marketing is at the top of the sales funnel. It’s about building a relationship and trust with potential clients, demonstrating your expertise and experience by offering something useful and valuable to them without seeking anything in return.

Put yourself in your potential client’s shoes for a moment:

💻 What can your content give them without you getting anything in return?

💻 Will they learn or discover something

💻 Will it make them think about something afresh?

💻 Will it change their mind on a familiar topic?

Continue reading →

Repurposing

What is content repurposing, and why repurpose?

What does repurposing content mean? And why should you repurpose your B2B content?

Think of content repurposing as redistribution or broader distribution, making sure a piece of content you’ve created gets seen by as many different people as possible.

Another way to look at it is return on time invested.

You’ve created a piece of content for a purpose. It takes time to write, edit and get signed off (or filmed or recorded), and time is money.

So, you want to maximise the value of your time and content. Making sure it gets seen by as many of the right people as possible will help you achieve that.

How do you repurpose content?

There are different ways of repurposing content, which break down roughly into four areas:

1. Multiple-channel approach

This is where you publish the same piece of content on several different channels that you use for your business.

For example, you make a video and publish it on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube, embed it in a client newsletter and put it on your website. That’s five different channels.

If you use Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, you could publish it there too.

2. Break up a longer piece of content into smaller pieces

Longer content, whether an article, report, longer video or podcast, can be repurposed into smaller chunks of content for different channels.

For example: Take your thought leader article or white paper, pull out key sections/points/quotes, and turn them into a series of shorter LinkedIn posts, blog posts or Tweets.

Continue reading →

General

People in business: How to add personality to B2B content

“We want our content to have a bit more personality” is something I often hear from clients, but when they see copy that reflects the individual, it can make them nervous.

It reads as more conversational and less formal than the traditional B2B content you normally see.

The built environment sector I work in is frequently described as a people industry, yet you wouldn’t guess that from the content that is regularly published.

A lot of it sounds quite similar, as if following a particular rule book about how you write to sound professional and authoritative.

To reflect personality in your business content, that rule book needs to be ripped up. It will read a little differently, but it can help your target audience get to know you and the people in your business. It can make you more relatable and approachable.

And content that is a bit different is good in the noisy world of the internet and social media.

You don’t have to completely change how you write or sound like an Innocent smoothie advert. There are small, subtle ways to add a sprinkle of personality to your B2B content that will make a difference.

Whether you are writing your own content or writing it for someone in your business, here are four ways of adding personality:

1. Particular word choice

Start with choosing words and phrases you would use in a real conversation with a friend, family member or peer. If you would naturally say you were ‘chuffed’ or ‘over the moon’, write that.

If you are writing a piece for someone in your business, listen carefully to the words they use. I like to record content chats and get a transcript (Otter.ai is the tool I use).

Are there any particular words or phrases they use? How do they explain their viewpoint or describe something when chatting about it?

Use these in the copy so that it sounds authentic to them.

A simple example is someone who works in the healthcare sector using the word ‘poorly’ rather than ‘sick’ to describe patients using a facility.

Continue reading →

Content marketing

How to make industry awards worth entering, without actually winning

In the latest, It’s a B2B Comms Thing LinkedIn Live stream, Ayo Abbas, Emma Drake and I spotlight industry awards and the value of entering.

It takes a lot of time to pull together a good awards entry, and there may be entry fees or the cost of a table at the ceremony on top, which can make it pricey.

It’s A B2B Comms Thing LinkedIn Live stream on getting value from awards

So we talked about how worthwhile it is to enter an award, whether you can make the most even if your name, company or project doesn’t get called out on the night.

Why and when should you enter an industry award?

Emma: The first thing is timing; make sure you’ve got something really compelling, and it fits with your timing as a business.

Have a broad range of things that you’re looking at, whether it’s your product, your service, your campaign or your business. But it has to be really special, it has to really stand out.

You have to do research and have a lot of facts. There’s quite a lot of work that goes into writing that award, so make sure that time spent is worthwhile.

Ayo: Does it fit into your overall campaign objectives? You have to ask: Is this project going to help propel us where we want to go? So there has to be a reason why you’re entering.

But also, I have used award entries as a way to get our story straight. It’s a test bed, it forces you to answer those questions and get the basics. And that can be a good hook, even if you don’t win.

Continue reading →

Content marketing

How I created 9 pieces of content from a LinkedIn Live

A piece of content doesn’t have to have one life in its original format. Repurposing that content to fill different content streams – and different mediums is the smart way to build its audience.

Get creative with repurposing content. Photo by Malte Helmhold on Unsplash

Besides, creating a ‘hero’ piece of content is time-consuming, so why wouldn’t you want to get bangs for your content bucks?

Here’s an example of what I did with a LinkedIn Live. It’s A B2B Comms Thing is a monthly Live I do with a couple of fellow comms freelancers in the built environment sector.

We decide the topic and three key questions, create the artwork, set up the event using Streamyard and promote it.

The Live is 15 minutes where we answer the three questions then a Q&A with the audience. The total broadcast time is 30 minutes.

When the Live is finished, Streamyard generates a video file and a separate audio file. Our latest Live was on repurposing, and I created nine pieces of content from that initial Live, and this is what I did:

Long form blog post

Using Otter.ai, I got a transcript of the Live and created a long-form blog post from the three key questions. This took 1.5-2 hours to create and edit but writing a 1,500-word post from scratch would have taken me the best part of a day.

YouTube video

I uploaded the video to our YouTube channel. I used the same words we’d used on the LinkedIn event page for the description, just tweaked slightly.

Continue reading →