Humanize your B2B marketing content for buyers

by John David “JD” Woods

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

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

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

You’ve got to humanize your B2B marketing content.

An effective B2B program resolves problems for buyers 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, we need to place our hero (our prospect) in peril and demonstrate how our products or services allow them to save themselves. We need to entertain long enough to capture our buyer’s attention.

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

Along with that, we need to state a 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 simply “doing business” on the B2C side and that expectation is headed our way.

The challenge is, you can’t create quality B2B marketing content or express your purpose in a way that people want to align with if you are trying to engage a type of business.

A paint factory can’t respond to value-charged experiences, but the people that 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; you need to align your values with them.

Once you begin creating for a specific audience, for a human, you will find the feature lists deleting themselves, and see the important 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.