Humanize your B2B marketing content for buyers

by John David “JD” Woods, The Weiwood Group.

Humanize content? No, we all don’t do it.

We sit down to add “What’s in it for me?” elements to our B2B marketing content, yet we still end up with lists of services and features.

Why is that?  The simple fact is that you cannot write B2B marketing content for a person if you do not know who that person is and what motivates them to engage.

You’ve got to humanize your B2B marketing content.

An effective B2B program addresses buyer problems with words, images, and videos, and increasingly describes how our organizations affect the environment.  White papers and infographics aren’t personal enough anymore; we need to create drama, place our hero (our prospect) in peril, and demonstrate how our products or services help them save themselves.  We need to hold our buyer’s attention long enough to capture it.

“You’ve got to assign demographic identities to your potential buyers and build a PROSPECT EXPERIENCE for them.”

We also need to clarify the purpose.  Most B2B buyers aren’t 100% on board yet, but the numbers are shifting.  We will soon need to give our customers a purpose they can align with – think fair trade, organic-only ingredients, work/life balance, children’s health, and safety…

This is “doing business” on the B2C side, and that expectation is headed our way.

The challenge is that you can’t create high-quality B2B marketing content or articulate your purpose in a way that resonates with the target audience if you are trying to engage a particular type of business.

A paint factory can’t respond to value-charged experiences, but the people who work there can.  Therefore, to be effective, you’ve got to assign demographic identities to your buyers and build a prospect experience for them.  You need to write stories for them and align your values with theirs.

Once you begin creating for a specific audience, you will find the feature lists disappearing and the essential elements of your brand experience emerging.

This is just the first step for B2B marketing content.

Telling stories is nearly a thing of the past – we’re coming to the point where we will have the ability (and expectation) to give stories to our buyers, to provide the environment where they can co-create their own prospect experience.

Don’t forget, humanize web content.

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”, and Multiview agrees.