Is your B2B marketing on the boring side? Here’s how you can ignite a powder-keg of inspiration and burst forth with new content marketing energy to bring more boom and less boring to future B2B marketing efforts.
We have six boom-including content marketing antidotes to replace the status quo with inspiration, joy, laughter, energy, enchantment and other powerful marketing elixirs that can help you create relevant, informative, and — above all — memorable content.
#1 — Get An Inspiration Infusion From Experts
- Oftentimes you don’t have far to go to find inspiration for your B2B content marketing.
- Inspiration abounds if you look to your heroes, past mentors, and the industry influencers and business associates whose work you admire the most.
- We occasionally research and publish lists of top experts in several areas of marketing, which are great starting points for finding examples of marketers who inspire. Here are a few of our most recent compendiums:
This robust recent list, “Our 2019 List: The Top 50 Social Media Marketing Influencers,” includes 50 top social media marketing influencers, researched and ranked using influencer relationship marketing platform Traackr and numerous other social signal metrics.
Recently LinkedIn* published its new edition of The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn, a list of 24 B2B marketing experts, who all represent great examples of how to incorporate inspiration into you marketing, and we took a look at this group in “LinkedIn’s List of 24 B2B Marketers You Need to Know.”
For the past nine years we’ve also put out a helpful list of some of the most influential women in digital marketing, “25 Influential Women in Digital Marketing Who Rocked and Inspired in 2018,” also an excellent source for finding experts who are highly skilled at using inspiration in content marketing.
#2 — Find Your Joy Elixir
- Try looking at your content marketing practices in new ways, with fresh eyes, and with an open heart.
- As you tell your marketing stories, make a conscious effort to incorporate joy’s inherent happiness and exuberance in your efforts where appropriate.
- Joy is a powerful emotion that can have a home in many B2B marketing campaigns — as you’re creating, look for opportunities to use it.
- Are your own content marketing efforts sparking joy for your audience, à la Marie Kondo? Our own Anne Leuman examines how joy can help deliver amazing personalized B2B experiences, in “B2B Marketers, Are Your Content Marketing Efforts Sparking Joy for Your Audience?”
- Share joy with your target audience and you’ll both benefit, as Mark Twain once suggested when he wrote:
Research has shown that happiness is the top factor among U.S. mobile users when it comes to being receptive to advertisements, as the following chart from eMarketer demonstrates:
#3 — Create a Contagious Laughter Tonic
- Recognize the difference between joy and laughter, and realize that although separate, the two play off of one another, as Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh has said.
- Look for areas in your B2B marketing where it would be appropriate to incorporate content that will — with skill and just a little bit of luck — make people laugh.
- Don’t be afraid to tap into the lighthearted, the childlike, and the playful when looking to make people laugh — sometimes the simplest things can bring out the purest forms of laughter, or at least a wide smile.
For a number of years our own Joshua Nite has written an annual take on the latest marketing humor, with the most recent being “20 More Dumb Jokes for Smart Marketers” and “20 Jokes Only a B2B Marketer Will Get,” good sources for finding the role of wit and comedy in marketing.
“I made a joke about organic reach on Facebook… nobody got it.” — Joshua Nite @NiteWrites Click To Tweet- Statistics on the types of marketing most likely to attract attention have consistently shown that humor sells. SproutSocial recently published a look at “The importance of social media sentiment analysis (and how to conduct it),” looking at how emotions of all sorts play a significant factor in purchasing decisions.
#4 — Blast an Energizing Content Path
- Opening doors, removing obstacles, and solving problems can all be great ways to invigorate B2B marketing campaigns, and can bring out tangible energy when done well.
- By actively creating marketing that will guide the way and show a path to something that has seemed unattainable to your target audience, you’ll instill a new sense of energy with those you’ve inspired.
Statistics show that creating compelling content for digital experiences is among the top opportunities for companies in 2019, as the following chart from MarketingCharts shows:
- Seek out examples of B2B marketing done by people who are filled to the brim with energy for the work they do and the impact they make through their campaigns. In addition, look to yourself. Not long ago, our team members shared how their personal passions fuel their work in Nick Nelson’s post: “Becoming a Better Marketer by Embracing Your Passions Outside the Office.”
#5 — Present Enchanting Possibilities
- In the storytelling you use in your marketing, be open to incorporating your own unique touch and style to truly enchant your target audiences, as enchantment opens up a world of connection possibilities.
- Author and marketer extraordinaire Guy Kawasaki has made a living and written books specifically about enchantment, and it’s easy to see why this emotion is such a powerful method for connecting with people, both in person and in our marketing efforts.
We look more closely at some of the ways Guy likes to bring out enchantment in marketing in “Spicy Twists and Tactics For Unique Content Promotion.”
“When you enchant people, your goal is not to make money from them or to get them to do what you want, but to fill them with great delight.” @GuyKawasaki Click To Tweet#6 — Make It Share-Worthy & Bookmarkable with Best-Answer Content
- Sometimes being definitive is the key to crafting marketing gold — the kind of best-answer content that makes you take the extra step of bookmarking a website or social media post URL for coming back to again and again, and for sharing.
Providing the best answer for your customers is a great way to boost brand credibility, and recently we’ve explored just what best-answer content is and some of the ways you can strive to achieve it in your own B2B marketing, including our CEO Lee Odden’s insightful “How A Best Answer Content Strategy Drives B2B Marketing Results.”
Say Fare Three Well to Boring B2B Marketing
Using the six marketing ideas and tactics we’ve looked at here, the time may have finally come to say goodbye once and for all to many of the most boring elements of traditional B2B marketing.
Inspiration, joy, laughter, energy, and enchantment may not be the right fit for every initiative, but I hope you’ll keep your eyes open for the places that will be ideal to utilize these powerful storytelling elements.
Finally, to bring even more inspiration to your B2B marketing toolkit, check out our recent list of the top social media marketing blogs, in Lee’s “BIGLIST of Top Social Media Marketing Blogs for 2019 and Beyond,” or lend and ear and tune in to our list of “20 Podcasts To Elevate Your B2B Marketing.”
*Disclosure: LinkedIn is a TopRank Marketing client.
