This Blue-Ocean Strategy in B2B Content Marketing Could 7X Your Revenue

Are tired of your B2B content marketing cadence? Of endlessly producing blog posts, case studies, ebooks, and white papers that convey the same messages over and over? That talk about the same features and benefits in the context of different SEO-focused topics?

What if you could instead write one content piece that makes your offering, whether a software-as-a-service or some done-for-you service such as cloud migration, come to vivid life so that your prospects can immediately and easily see its value?

What I'm suggesting may seem impossible. After all, according to the conventional view of content marketing, content is a long game, with many stages: first, you build awareness about your company, educate prospects about your offering, and establish your credibility through blog posts and ebooks; then you nurture your prospects with more content that explains your value. At some point, your prospects schedule a demo or book a call, and, if that goes well, then you help them persuade others in their organization, with additional content, demos, and calls.

But why does it have to be that hard? Do you really think your customers want this tortured, drawn-out courtship? Don't you think they'd prefer to just find a solution that inspires immediate confidence?

Moreover, if you have something of value, why is there so much informing, educating, and persuading needed? Why can't one piece of content build awareness, clarify your value, generate excited interest -- and even demo your software?

This feat can be accomplished but not by endlessly explaining features and benefits or generally talking your prospects to death.

What your prospects would instead prefer is to experience how your solution will transform their business. If only you could create some kind of virtual reality machine that enables that experience.

Oh, wait -- we have that technology. In fact, humanity has possessed it since before we even developing writing.

So what's this technology? It's simple:

Stories.

When done right, a story is an experience that your audience vicariously lives. I imagine you already know all about mirror neurons and how they're activated when you read a story, but if you don't, you can read more here. The short of it is that readers of a story vicariously experience the challenges and emotions of the story's protagonist -- as well as their triumphs and gains.

So, if you want your prospects to experience how, for example, your patient engagement platform improves outcomes, frees up provider time, and reduces healthcare spending, tell a story about specific, named people using your platform to achieve these goals and include videos that actually show your platform in action. Let your audience actually see and feel how using your solution would change their business.

And if you think you're already doing this with your case studies (aka customer stories), I assure you you're not.

I've read your case studies -- or enough like them. And calling them stories is a stretch.

Nearly all customer "stories" I see are of the same ilk: they are written in a dry way; lack specific characters with concrete problems; fail to deliver critical context that would make the reader care; and are walls of text, with no photos or videos that would help bring the words alive.

What you should be producing instead is something I call a VALUE (Visually Arresting, Lead-converting, Uniquely memorable, Emotionally engaging) story.

These VALUE stories are so effective for growing your business's income because stories elicit an emotional response from the reader. And activating emotions in your prospects, according to this study, can significantly increase your revenue:

B2B marketing strategies that appeal to an audience’s emotions drive a massive 7x more very large business effects in the long term than campaigns that appeal to them on a rational level. They deliver far more value in terms of sales, profits, revenue and other bottom-line measures. In other words, appealing to the emotions is very, very good for business.
https://www.linkedin.com/business/marketing/blog/linkedin-ads/why-b2b-marketers-need-to-get-in-touch-with-their-feelings

But if all this talk of feelings is making you uneasy, read on, and you'll see that the particular emotional state you should be eliciting in your prospects is nothing to fear.

Does your content have crisp, professional photos like this one?

woman in black long sleeve shirt wearing black framed eyeglasses using macbook

Does your content cause people to tune out?

Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash

Eliciting the Right Emotional State in Your B2B Prospects

When it comes to business-to-business marketing, eliciting an emotional response in your buyers is even more important than it is in the B2C context.

That's because the cost and risks involved in B2B purchases are so much higher, as this study by the Corporate Executive Board Company (CEB) and Google observes:

Business purchases . . . can involve huge amounts of risk: Responsibility for a multi-million dollar software acquisition that goes bad can lead to poor business performance and even the loss of a job. The business customer won’t buy unless there is a substantial emotional connection to help overcome this risk.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/promotion-emotion-b2b/

The Google study goes on to conclude:

To stand out, B2B marketers need to create excitement — anticipation of both professional and personal rewards. How? By building emotional connections with their customers, which can drive important purchase outcomes like purchase intent and pricing power. B2B purchasers are almost 50% more likely to buy a product or service when they see personal value — such as opportunity for career advancement or confidence and pride in their choice — in their business purchase decision. They are 8x more likely to pay a premium for comparable products and services when personal value is present.

In short, your prospects want to feel confident that your solution will help them succeed in their work.

So, how do you make a prospect feel confident that you're the ally they need?

Can't you just provide a fact sheet to your prospects that lists the business benefits of your product or service? Or hit them with a few key statistics?

That's not enough -- facts and figures are often not as persuasive as an on-point story.

That's why I believe customer stories are your best best for increasing your conversions.

But if your customer stories are like most that I see, they lack the specificity and human elements to make them effective at generating emotions.

These so-called customer stories simply quote a customer representative or two and talk about abstract benefits the customer received, such as a 20% increase in productivity, greater team alignment, or a improved workflows that shortened the production cycle by 50%

Facts and figures, like these, even in the context of a so-called story, are not persuasive.

One reason facts and figures can fail to persuade is they are too abstract. We can't quite picture what a 20% increase in productivity looks like.

So what does an effective case study look like?

To make all of these very abstract ideas I've been discussing more concrete, let's take a look at an actual case study -- and how to take it from serviceable to memorable.

woman in blue tank top standing beside white wall

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash

Photo by Joseph Yip on Unsplash

woman in black headphones holding black and silver headphones

Photo by Charanjeet Dhiman on Unsplash

Photo by nrd on Unsplash

woman in white coat holding green shopping cart

Photo by Tara Clark on Unsplash

A "Customer Story" That Isn't Really a Story

Somewhat at random, I came across a case study/customer story by a company that I'll keep anonymous.

Here’s the case study in a nutshell:

The company that produced the case study has a customer support platform; let's call this company SupportSolutions. Their customer is a company in the grocery-delivery niche. Let's call them GroceriesNow.

GroceriesNow needed a customizable customer support solution that could help with support requests from two different end users: GroceriesNow's customers and the shoppers who fulfill the customers’ orders.

The actual case study underscores how SupportSolutions’ customer-support platform achieves this capability. But we're not given any context on whether this capability is uncommon among support platform providers.

Nor is there a real story in the case study. Yes, there are quotes from customer service representatives, but at no point is there anything that the reader can actually picture or a focused story involving specific customers and specific support agents. The case study traffics only in concepts, such as "rich data," "integrations," and "custom tools." As a result, we don't really feel anything; we're just hit with a lot of information.

Here's an example sentence from the case study to illustrate just how abstract everything is:

"No matter the usage, the transparency and flexibility of SupportSolutions allows GroceriesNow to capture the voice of the customer and dig deep into changes in satisfaction to discover the root cause and make changes at the product or policy level . . ."

Can you picture any of that?

What this case study cries out for is a specific, concrete example of the platform in action.

What makes something concrete? As the authors of the book Made to Stick explain:

If you can examine something with your senses, it's concrete. A V8 engine is concrete. High-performance is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness comes down to specific people doing specific things.

Want to see these principles in action? Below I re-write the case study, incorporating an actual, hypothetical story in it and hypothetical platform features.

After this revised case study, I explain how the company might have uncovered a story like this.

Here’s the hypothetical case study; you can hover over some sentences to see an explanation for my choices:

Excellent customer service is essential to your business's longevity. But most customer service platforms deliver a terrible support experience, involving endless automated requests for information when all your customers want to do is immediately speak to a live human being.

What’s worse is that even when your customers reach a real person in these systems, these people lack the information they need to quickly and effectively help your customers.

One of our customers, GroceriesNow, was determined to avoid this outcome. A three-year-old company out of Seattle, GroceriesNow has grown its customer base considerably during the pandemic but recognized that excellent customer service was necessary if it wanted to retain all its new customers. They also needed a solution that would help support the shoppers that fulfill their customers’ orders, but most customer support solutions in the market can only serve one end user.

GroceriesNow turned to us for a solution that would enable high-quality human support, with customer service agents empowered by data to quickly solve customers’ problems and help their shoppers.

We’re happy to report our platform has exceeded their expectations – and absolutely made the day of one grandmother and her granddaughter.

Shortly after GroceriesNow began using our platform, they received a call from Vivian, a new customer. She said she wanted mangoes, but couldn’t see them as an option for check-out. She explained that she would be seeing her granddaughter Amelia that weekend for the first time since the pandemic began, and Amelia would be heartbroken if they didn’t make mango sticky rice like they did the last time Amelia visited.

Because our customer support platform can pull in all of a company’s customer purchase data, a capability our platform is alone in possessing , GroceriesNow was able to see that, even though mangoes weren’t available at Vivian’s local grocery stores, a store 45 minutes away had them.

The customer support team was also able to reach out to Vivian’s shopper as well as another shopper close to the grocery store with the mangoes. The customer service agent was able to direct that shopper to buy the mangoes and meet Vivian’s shopper at a location halfway between the two of them.

So, Vivian received her mangoes in time, and she reports that Amelia was delighted to once again make mango sticky rice with her Yaa. Vivian has since become a regular GroceriesNow customer and is determined to have her favorite shopper, Phil, over for dinner one night. She’s also convinced a few of her friends to start using GroceriesNow.

Ready to provide your customers with instant live-person support and empower your support agents with the information they need to be your most effective brand ambassadors?

You can schedule your demo here.

woman in blue denim jeans and black jacket walking with woman in green jacket

Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash

girl wearing black vest raising two hands near green grass field during daytime

Photo by Eye for Ebony on Unsplash

Would you agree that was a real story?

Did it make you feel something? Did it make clear how the platform's features would be advantageous and different than everything else out there?

Of course, the above case study could be a bit longer and unpack some of the technical details of how the platform pulls in data and makes it searchable and easily interpretable for agents, but I think you get the point.

And, as I mentioned in my annotated comments, the company would want to include videos of the platform itself to help the reader experience what using the platform would actually be like. In this way, the VALUE story would serve as a product demo.

How to Discover this Type of Story

While the above story may only be a hypothetical, I bet if the anonymous company looked they would have found a story like this – that is, an interesting story involving real people and real stakes.

So, how could they have found it? And how might you find similar stories involving your own customers?

Here’s how: you send a survey to your customers and their relevant staff that asks those staff to tell you about significant or memorable experiences they’ve had in which your software/service/product played a part.

Is it possible that such a survey wouldn’t yield any interesting stories? Sure. It’s possible. But it’s far more likely that such a survey would generate not only one story but several worth pursuing.

Even if your business is in cloud migration (something seemingly so dull), your company’s services are positively impacting some specific human in some specific way at some specific point. When you survey the right people, you can uncover that specific, memorable story to use in your case study.

Once you have such a story, then you need to --

Tell the story in an engaging, effective way.
Obtain professional photos of the people featured in the story.
Create videos that illustrate or support key aspect of the story, such as videos of the customer and videos of your platform's interface.
Then, you can lay out the story and the associated media in the Shorthand platform (upon which I wrote this story) to achieve a dynamic and visually interesting layout.

Why VALUE Stories are Superior to Conventional Content Marketing

You don't have to abandon your conventional approach to content marketing if that makes you uneasy. You can simply add VALUE stories to your mix of content.

But I would submit that your current approach is high volume and low value when you would be better off with low volume and high value.

Stop chasing SEO and page rank and thought leadership and all this other stuff that underwhelms.

Instead, discover and produce high-quality, emotion-generating stories with embedded demos (in the form of videos) that make your prospects excited to work with you.

If you include a "contact us" or "schedule a demo" form at the end of the story, you can see how the story leads to more conversions than your other efforts.

I bet you're worried, though, that you still need to maintain your publishing cadence because Google rewards websites that publish frequently.

I would argue, though, that a low-volume, high-value approach can still outperform a high-frequency, low-value strategy simply because the former has the potential to go viral or lead to word-of-mouth business. Who needs organic traffic when everyone is talking about you?

But if you would prefer to hedge your bets, why not just produce one high-value story per month? Each month you can feature a different service offering or a different customer story that highlights a different capability.

There's no reason you can't do high value with regularity.

I call this approach a blue-ocean strategy in the headline because, at the moment, no one else is doing content marketing in this way. Why compete with others for page rank and keywords when you can instead create a marketing asset completely unlike anything else out there that's also far more powerful than some keyword-stuffed blog post or some bland, boring case study?