Are you over-packing your B2B content case?
How travelling light makes your marketing comms go further
Some of us are serial over-packers. Yes, it’s just a two-night stay – but each of those five pairs of jeans is indispensable. ‘What if,’ we ask ourselves, ‘we spill ketchup down one pair and develop an irrational hatred of pairs two, three and four?’ It makes sense to stuff number five (which we NEVER wear under normal circumstances) into the suitcase.
As a woman who regularly unpacks fifty per cent of clothes unworn after a trip, I’m not here to judge your holiday choices. But if the same attitude extends to messages in your B2B content, that’s a problem.
There are three main reasons marketers indulge in message overload.
#1 Copy by committee
Everything starts out wonderfully. You know exactly what you want to say and you say it crisply.
Hold on, though, here’s Gina from the product department. She needs you to add in a line about the features in the latest upgrade. Ravi from the verticals team has a sector insight that’ll make the message more relevant for manufacturing firms. Tori from brand needs the new tagline added to every communication.
By the time your ‘Happy holidays’ message gets posted on LinkedIn, it’s unrecognisable from its original form.
Don’t believe me? Check out this video (copywriters of a sensitive disposition, look away now).
How to fix it
In some organisations you’ll always struggle to stop colleagues meddling with your work. And – fair’s fair – there’s a place for external input and another pair of eyes.
To avoid things getting out of control, try these:
Share the objective up front and ask for input before you write the piece. Then present it as being the result of everyone’s suggestions.
Pick your battles. It may be that effing Tori from brand can have her tagline without too much impact, but the extra verticals message will really derail you.
Explain yourself. If you know those extra bits and pieces will ruin the effectiveness of the content, it’s your responsibility to make that clear to your colleagues.
#2 You don’t really know what you’re trying to say
Let’s say you’re writing an article about how your firm’s new AI platform can accelerate B2B sales pipelines. Sounds great! What does it actually mean? Erm…
Some B2B firms have an ‘emperor’s new clothes’ culture. One (usually senior) person says something that sounds good, but no one else fully understands it. The next person doesn’t want to admit their ignorance, so they pick up the phrase and run with it. Before you know it, the whole company is using that snazzy-sounding, but baffling, soundbite.
The way this manifests itself in content is in long rambling swathes of jargon, which the marketer hopes will hide the lack of substance.
How to fix it
Slow down. Give yourself thinking time before you start writing: who are you writing this for, what do you need them to know and why should they care?
Ask questions. Not sure what ‘accelerating sales pipelines’ means in relation to your product? Ask a subject matter expert about the customers’ sales processes, which elements the platform speeds up, how much time it saves and so on.
When you know precisely what you’re meant to be talking about, focus the piece on the strongest message and use clear, direct language.
#3 You hope the audience will get more out of it
‘The more messages I include,’ you say to yourself, ‘the more likely it is one of them will hit the mark.’
Nope.
We know this instinctively from our own B2C experiences. The messages that stick in our minds are simple. ‘Beanz Meanz Heinz.’ Not ‘Heinz produces delicious, nutritious canned goods covering everything from salad cream to spaghetti hoops to soup, ketchup and baked beans’. We’re prone to forget these instincts when it comes to writing B2B content. Heinz may have 57 varieties, but it doesn’t list them all out in one LinkedIn post.
As marketers, we have to be ruthless. What’s THE message we want our audience to understand? Every additional message we add is going to dilute that.
You can include more messages in the body of a whitepaper than in a display ad, naturally. But when it comes to headlines and themes for all types of content, keep it simple.
How to fix it
It’s your job to edit. Don’t make the reader do it (because – newsflash – they won’t bother).
Refer back to the brief. What’s the core objective? Strip out anything that might detract.
Stick to your guns. If you’re being tasked with sharing multiple messages, you’ll need multiple assets.
Travelling light is the way forward, everyone! Unless you’re going on holiday, in which case booking an extra seat for your fifteen spare jackets is wholly justifiable.
I’m Heather Barnett, a freelance B2B copywriter and creator of silly videos about marketing. This is my regular newsletter with tips on creating better B2B content.
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