B2B Marketing Doesn’t Need to Be Boring

B2B often gets a bad rap, with many seeing it as dry and boring. You might think its acronym stands for “Boring to Boring.” But it doesn’t have to be boring! In this digital age of innovation, B2B can be fun and exciting. Check out our guide that shows you how to make your B2B marketing fun and exciting with best practices and real-life examples.

 Be Human in Your B2B Marketing

Although B2B stands for business to business, the truth is that people do business with people. So, when it comes to your B2B marketing, the human aspect can’t be ignored.

Often B2B gets caught up in the jargon and becomes dry and robotic. But people don’t want dry and mechanical. They want the human feel in B2B.

Marketers have a responsibility to deliver B2B marketing that’s human—shows emotion, empathy, and personality. Wistia, a B2B brand, shows its human side well by being relatable to its audience through its content and Instagram account. Make your B2B marketing more human by:

• Doing an inventory of all your current B2B marketing & identifying where it could be more human-content strategy, branding, social media, etc.
• Analyzing your B2B in the eyes of the consumer. Are you coming across as “human to human” (feeling & emotion) or “business to business” (dry and bland)?
• Going straight to the source—your consumers. And ask them what they want. Conduct polls, surveys, questionnaires, etc. Invaluable for feedback.

Inject Personality in your B2B Marketing

Injecting personality into your B2B marketing will go a long way in making it less dull and dry. Successful brands (both B2B and B2C) understand the importance of personality. Remember, successful B2B marketing rests on good positioning and differentiating in an overcrowded market.

If your B2B is like everyone else’s, you’ll blend in and won’t stand out. To stand out, you need what we call the “oomph factor”: a personality that makes you stand out and be memorable to consumers. You occupy a piece of real estate in their minds. To do this well, consider:

• Studying other B2B brands & even some B2C brands to get a feel for how they inject personality into their brand. See what works and what doesn’t.
• Removing or at least reducing the jargon and being more human and personable in all your marketing.
• Coming up with a great USP for your brand that helps you stand out.
• Incorporating humor—who says B2B has to be dry! Humor, even if a little, goes a long way in making something less boring.

H2: Have Stellar Content Marketing

You can’t ignore the role of content marketing for your B2B. Just about every brand on the planet has invested in some form of content marketing. They understand its importance in growing their brand.

However, it must be done well to work (you get a good ROI). This involves a lot of foresight, strategy, and consistent quality content that’s not robotic and dry. Implement proper content marketing for your B2B by:

• Getting a content marketing strategy in place. This is your first step. Have it custom designed for your B2B by content marketing experts who specialize in B2B.
• Consistently produce quality and engaging content that appeals to different consumption tastes—blogs, videos, infographics, whitepapers, etc.
• Writing content like you talk and making all your content highly consumable, so it’s not bland.
• Adding a little humor to your content: jokes, emojis, memes, etc.

Look for Gaps in your B2B Marketing

This is all about getting highly strategic and having a good brainstorm with your team, and then even hiring expert help who can further help you identify the gaps in your B2B marketing. The gaps are essentially bottlenecks keeping you stuck along with low-hanging fruit and other things you haven’t appropriately leveraged for your B2B. Identifying the gaps can help you with the following:

• Identifying your overall strengths and weaknesses for your B2B.
• Taking a more robust approach to your overall B2B marketing and identifying clearly what’s working and what’s not working.
• Implementing better review and measurement practices so you can use what works and discard what doesn’t (complete data analysis must be conducted).
• Staying on top of trends in your industry.

Spice up your B2B Branding

All businesses could do with spicing up their branding, but B2B even more so (considering how it can easily fall into the trap of being boring). Branding is all about creating a perception and a feeling of your product or service.

Ensure you’re creating a great perception amongst your consumers. When done well, branding helps you be memorable in people’s minds and builds your authority. When poorly done, branding repels people. Spice up your B2B branding by:

• Injecting more personality into your brand—showing empathy, humor, relatability, etc. Not forgetting to “be human.”
• Being bolder and more adventurous and incorporating more color to your website, business cards, logo, etc.
• Adding more visuals and better customer experiences.
• Reviewing your branding at least every 6-12 months.
• Having a great brand messaging that isn’t dull.
• Showing the world what you stand for. Come up with at least five values. Remember, more and more consumers want to do business with brands that stand for something. It could be the environment, eradicating poverty, fighting crime, etc.

Incorporate Storytelling in B2B Marketing

Storytelling has become an increasingly important part of both marketing and content strategy for business. Humans are natural-born storytellers. Storytelling goes back to our cave days.

All of us have a story to tell. You want to leverage the power of storytelling for your B2B marketing. Too many B2B’s still think that storytelling is simply just showing that a product or service is the best in the market. This couldn’t be further from the truth. But it keeps them stuck in a loop. To get unstuck and properly do storytelling for your B2B, consider:

• Showcasing your vision for your B2B.
• Showcasing prototypes of your product at different stages.
• Sharing the story behind your B2B. The who, what, why, when, how.
• Sharing both your struggles and triumphs.
• Taking your audience behind the scenes—they see the ins and outs of your brand.
• Incorporating storytelling in all your content: blogs, videos, whitepaper, etc.

Examples of Compelling B2B Content

We’ve compiled a list for you below of three examples of compelling B2B content that we hope you can draw inspiration from. Remember, content is a massive driver of B2B marketing. In fact, without content, B2B marketing wouldn’t even exist! So, check out these examples:

Content Callout Podcast – How to Build a Stellar B2B Content Strategy

Unbounce (variety of content that is interactive and engaging)

Intercom (fantastic overall content marketing strategy)

B2B Marketing Can be Fun!

Hopefully, by now, you can see that B2B marketing doesn’t have to be boring. Through implementing the practices discussed in this piece, it can be fun. It just requires some imagination and effort.

Need help in creating your B2B content marketing strategy?  Book time with our B2B content marketing team, who will customize the right strategy for your B2B.