It would be easy to argue that the B2B marketing landscape has seen more disruption in the past five years than it has experienced in the past 50 years. First, the COVID pandemic brought a cataclysmic wave of unprecedented challenges for buyers. And last year, rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have further shifted how B2B buyers interact with vendors and brands. Thus, CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) are under more pressure than ever before to create a competitive edge and unique value proposition to not only build buyers’ trust – but keep it. Luckily, transforming your company into a trusted brand is easier than you’d think. So whether you’re a marketer in a digital start-up or a small business owner looking to become the next thought leader in your field, these four content marketing steps below, are an excellent starting point when it comes to establishing long-lasting trust with your buyers.
1. Atomise your content
Research from Informa Tech’s 2023 Trust in Marketing Index survey indicates that 52% of decision-makers regularly scroll, like and share across their social media channels. So, it stands to reason that your brand should be there as well, in the mix, serving up insightful content in social friendly, bite-sized formats for your B2B customers – and that doesn’t mean just LinkedIn alone. You and your content team should be thinking about ways of reaching potential buyers through content atomisation. But what is that? It’s simply the process of breaking up a significant content piece, like a long-form blog or gated white paper, into smaller, more digestible morsels, to get more eyes on your content.
Imagine you’re a Marketing Director, responsible for choosing a new task management system for your team. You’re scrolling through LinkedIn and see a comprehensive white paper about the best task management systems for your sector. Even if you’re too busy to read a 50-page document in one go, you can spare a few minutes to watch their informative top 10 task management software video and read their short, concise LinkedIn post. It piques your interest, and so you click on the brand’s business page to see what they offer – and you find a series of blog posts, four infographics and even a podcast episode, showing how each task management system works in situ. Each piece is a manageable morsel that you can delve into at your own leisure. Quickly, this brand has now become a reliable, trusted source for easy-to-digest insights, which encourages you to buy their software.
Content atomisation is all about looking for new and innovative ways of presenting what you already have. One example that has stood the test of time, is Adobe’s “Click, Baby, Click” campaign, which involved a series of witty TV adverts, social media posts, infographics and e-books, all designed to drive home the message that B2B marketers needed their newest integrated online marketing and web analytics product – The Adobe Marketing Cloud (AMC). To highlight how a lack of metrics-backed marketing can lead to careless and costly mistakes, Adobe released a brilliant TV commercial alongside other marketing collateral that made businesses stand up and listen.
The campaign is centred around Goodby Silverstein & Partners’ TV spot, where a company that sells encyclopaedias suddenly sees a dramatic rise in the number of clicks on one of their online banners. This surprising spike is the catalyst for a number of their rash business decisions, yet the source of the clicks is not quite what it seems. While the ad gave viewers a good laugh, it also makes a strong case on why you need sound analytics to save you money in the long term. Adobe’s series of TV adverts for their “Click, Baby, Click” campaign received over 4 million views – which is impressive exposure for a Business to Business (B2B) marketing campaign.
2. Stay on trend
For marketers, in particular, the constant shift in tactics can be exhausting and time-intensive. But another key way of building buyer’s trust is to utilise business development resources in order to stay informed, and “on trend”. It’s essential that you keep your fingers on the pulse of the business world, whether that’s consistently reviewing clients’ problems and needs with business analysts, reading reliable news sources and recent publications from industry professionals in the Economist, Commercial Observer and the Wall Street Journal, attending trade association events in your industry, and set up Google Alerts for monitoring emerging market trends and key industry terms.
To get ahead in business, standing still is not an option. In Informa’s Trust Index survey, 67% of decision-makers said they engage with content primarily to stay up-to-date on industry trends. So, it’s vital that you don’t gloss over this crucial trust driver – and give your audiences what they want – insightful, up-to-date information at their fingertips. However, Renae Gregoire, Freelance Columnist for Forbes stresses that, “Being on trend is about more than just being current. It’s about being relevant. It's about showing your audience that you understand the challenges and opportunities shaping their worlds right now. And when you can provide peeks into what's around the corner, your voice becomes a signal decision-makers want to tune into, especially in a world filled with noise.”
One of the best ways to set yourself apart from the competition is to improve on existing trends and take them one step further. By building on a trending concept, a brand puts it’s best foot forward. For example, back in 2017, beverage giant, Coca-Cola, was facing global challenges with vending machines and saw an opening with the emergence of big developments in AI. This encouraged them to invest in building their very own smart vending machine and create a robust content marketing campaign promoting this new technology. These state-of-the-art devices provided data on machine conditions, stock levels and even customer behaviour. As a result, Coca-Cola became better at managing inventory, forecasting demand, and performing machine maintenance quicker than ever before. Their smart machines keep a history of past transactions, control temperature, and allow for dynamic pricing – which in turn became a big selling point for B2B vendors looking to buy for their stores. From then on, if a vendor was running low on supplies, Coca-Cola received a low inventory warning which prompts restocking orders. If a product line wasn’t selling well in a certain area, Coca-Cola dropped its prices to move older items off the shelf. The machine also deployed promotional videos and ads on the vending machine screens to entice potential customers.
3. Create a content series for interested buyers
Imagine you walk into your local bookstore, but instead of alphabetised, organised sections and clear signs indicating genres and topics, you find a chaotic stack of books scattered all over the shop. Overwhelming, right? The same sense of content overwhelm is also commonplace in the world of B2B marketing. But some of the smartest marketers out there, always look at the bigger picture and create a well-curated bookshelf, in the form of a step-by-step content series, that’s main purpose is to guide audiences through a coherent narrative on the yellow brick road to conversion.
We’ve previously touched on the overarching benefits of creating episodic content, which helps brands generate a return audience; build subscribers; establish trust and credibility, while also positioning your brand as an expert in your industry. This can be any type of content where the plot develops as each episode/blog piece/ Instagram story goes on, enticing the audience to get lost in the narrative and suspense-inducing content, which keeps them coming back for more.
For example, Future Forward, the fascinating episodic series from The Climate Pledge (part of Amazon’s environmental sustainability efforts), shares innovative corporate climate solutions related to clean water, air travel, civic infrastructure and more. During these episodes, Future Forward highlights B2B solutions from a couple of the more than 300 signatories on the Climate Pledge – a pledge where each business is committed to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. This inspiring series creates a platform where like-minded B2B businesses can easily get in touch and share their ideas on how a brand’s social responsibility can be the instigator of social and environmental change. But this tactic doesn’t only have to be environmentally focused, it can work across any industry.
Imagine you’re an Information Security Officer looking to implement a programme for best practices on cybersecurity and phishing in the workplace. Your email inbox is overloaded with newsletters you’ve signed up to, to get more information on the subject. Then you discover a brand that offers a step-by-step content series, which identifies the actions your company should take from start to finish to ensure your information doesn’t get stolen. Each content piece provides actionable insight without a hard-sell push for their products. You’ve now received valuable free information, so this will make you more likely to approach this brand against others. But remember, creating a successful content series is not just about stuffing important insights back-to-back for your audiences, it’s about constructing a holistic content experience, that touches on your audiences’ needs.
4. Produce high-quality thought leadership content
Dorie Clark, Marketing Strategist for clients including Google and Yale University, explains, “Good employees and good executives are nice to have. Thought leaders are irreplaceable — and indispensable. So how do you build a reputation as a singular expert — someone who doesn’t just participate in the conversation, but drives it? In a word: leverage. No matter how brilliant and talented you are, you won’t be sufficiently appreciated within your organisation or by your customers until the broader public recognises you. This outside reinforcement becomes an echo chamber that brings money and respect.” And how do you achieve that? Through creating a consistent stream of robust thought leadership content.
It's not just about what you say and how you say it anymore – it’s about the depth of thinking behind it and what your conversation is bringing to the table. Informa’s Trust Index Survey showed that a whopping 85% of decision-makers said that high-quality thought leadership enhances their perception of a brand. When done right, thought leadership content has the potential to attract investors, buyers, customers and outside talent to your brand.
Say you’re the CEO of a Digital Marketing company and you want to take your digital capabilities to the next level. However, all the listicle articles you’ve come across online simply skimp the surface of what you need to know. You not only want to know about what top 10 savvy digital tools to use, but you also want to know how to adapt them to your digital marketing mix and industry examples of how this has worked in the past. Great thought leadership content would be pieces that are grounded in research, rich in strategic insights, and offer a visionary perspective on navigating digital change. Creating this type of content might involve taking risks or at times challenging the industry “status quo” but if done right, it will boost your reputation, credibility, and create a steady stream of trusted buyers ready to do business with you.
Building buyers’ trust with content is achievable, but it’s no small feat. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will establishing meaningful relationships with your potential buyers. However, if you invest more of your time in atomizing your content, creating robust thought leadership pieces, and developing a gripping content series while also capitalising on emerging trends in your industry, these actions will serve as your path to gaining lasting trust - and trust is the key to success.