Tag: writing headlines

Content marketing, Writing tips

3 common B2B content mistakes to avoid

Photo by Mohamed Marey on Unsplash

B2B content marketing is a learning curve and there maybe things you are doing that damage your content’s reach and engagement without realising it.

Here are 3 mistakes to avoid with your B2B content.

1. Not making B2B content about the audience

The hard truth is that people don’t have time for all the content out there, including yours.

They are discerning about where they choose to invest their time (just as you are). This means your content has to work hard to make the time investment worthwhile: What’s in it for them?

Making a B2B audience care about your content means it needs to be helpful, interesting (to them), relevant, relatable…entertaining even.

There is always a place for news and business updates, but shoe-horning in referencing to the business and services at every opportunity is salesy and won’t serve.

The same goes for content that always starts from the perspective of the business, regardless of the topic.

Smart content marketing starts from the audience’s perspective, delivering something relevant and worthwhile.

It focuses on what the audience wants to know, not what the business wants to tell them.

Smart and effective content is clever with its messaging; it builds a positive reputation and respect.

Being known for being helpful, interesting, relatable and knowledgeable is more powerful than being a business that is just self-promoting or selling.

This leads neatly onto:

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SEO, Social media, Writing tips

Learning the hard way how to write web content headlines

When I first started writing my theatre blog 11 years ago my headlines were rubbish.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

I was trying to be clever or witty, sometimes using puns or a play on words.

But the more I learned about writing online content, the more I realised my approach was entirely based on what worked in print rather than online.

My experience and background was magazine journalism after all.

An article in a magazine or newspaper has images, graphics, tables, box-outs, subheadings etc. which help grab attention.

And an article in a magazine may already have context.

If someone has picked up a copy of ‘Window Box Weekly’, they are probably interested or at least curious about window boxes.

Try to find your own content

A big test was trying to find my own theatre blog content using Google. I knew I’d reviewed a particular production, but my ‘clever’ headlines meant it wasn’t coming up in searches – certainly not on the first few pages of results.

For example, I saw a play called Grief by Mike Leigh, and the headline of my review was ‘Good Grief?’

See what I did there? It might work if the piece sat in the theatre review section of newspaper or magazine, alongside a production photo and a subhead.

But out of context and with just two words to go on, it didn’t work so well.

Getting savvier about online search

As I started to understand how people find stuff to read online (search engines, social media etc.), I realised my headline style needed to change so that people could find my blog posts.

And know what they were about from the headline.

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