Month: May 2016

Podcast 37: The battle to stop B2B content from going to waste

Posted on by The Radix Team

A staggering amount of B2B content goes unused after it’s been produced:

In this episode I’m joined by Fiona Campbell-Howes, Radix’s founder, and David McGuire, Radix’s Creative Director, to examine what leads to content waste and if there’s anything you can do to stop it.

Listen now to find out:

  • How a lack of review time can lead to B2B content getting benched
  • Why it always seems to be the work you like most that disappears
  • The effect strategy changes can have on publishing content
  • Why delays gaining permission from third parties can stop publication altogether
  • What editorial can do to reduce waste
  • … and more

Download the episode here (right-click and “save as” to download). Or listen in the player at the top of the page.
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Alternatively: add our RSS to your preferred podcast player.

Music by Industrial and Marine.

How to brief a B2B copywriter

Posted on by The Radix Team

Brief even the world’s greatest copywriter badly, and they won’t deliver what you need.

The words they tap out won’t appeal to the right people. Or talk about the right thing. Or fit where you want to put them.

You might as well scrape them off your homepage and replace them with some significant-looking geometric shapes, or vaguely aspirational go-faster stripes. If they’re for a standalone content piece – like an eBook, or a SlideShare – there’s every chance it’ll end up languishing among the estimated 60+ percent of B2B content that gets created, but never actually used.

And yet… a lot of the briefs a B2B copywriter receives are woefully inadequate.

At a recent Twitter chat, we asked the assembled copywriters (TM pending) to share the biggest issues they have with the briefs they receive. Here are two representative responses:

And these are not lone voices in the wilderness. These are the cries of an army of professionals, desperately wanting to do a good job – so they can earn your repeat business, sure, but also so they can take some genuine pride in their work.

So, how do you brief well, and give a huge boost to both your marketing efforts and your copywriter’s self-esteem?

Here’s my take on the absolute fundamentals.

1. Help us understand who we’re writing for. (The audience.)

You know the kind of person you want to reach:

  • Where they work
  • What they do
  • What keeps them lying awake at night
  • What makes them gaze droolingly into the middle distance
  • What job title they’d ultimately like to call their own
  • What they already know (and don’t know) about your product or service

So, tell your copywriter. It’s a lot easier to be persuasive when you know who you’re talking to.

If you don’t know who your audience is, or you genuinely think your audience is ‘everyone’, you’re talking to a copywriter too early. Instead of rushing to produce content, you should be working to refine your marketing strategy.

In our Twitter chat, Dave Harland ‏@wordmancopy succinctly summarised the kind of brief that’s guaranteed to make a copywriter’s heart sink:

(Even better than telling us about your customers, you could introduce us to them.)

2. Tell us where the audience will read our copy.

That ‘where’ is both physical – on this blog, in an email that follows this template – and metaphorical. If you’re mapping your content to the good old sales and marketing funnel model, or it’s part of a larger campaign, let us know where it’s going to sit.

That way, we can make sure our copy forms a neat, logical journey, and even helps you effectively qualify leads along the way.

3. Explain how you speak, what you want to say, and why your audience should care.

Whether you’re producing a series of thought-leadershippy blog posts, or a thoroughgoing product guide, you’re producing it to engage your audience, and tell them something.

All you need to tell your copywriter is:

  • How you speak – if your company has a tone of voice guide, share it with us now
  • What you want to say – whether it’s ‘Hey, have you thought about how you’ll handle all the data from the Internet of Things?’ or ‘This is how our software helps businesses hire faster’
  • Why our audience should care – which of their challenges, worries and dreams does your message speak to?

4. Tell us what you want the audience to do next.

Thanks to the multiple teams, stakeholders and pressures involved in the creation of most marketing content and campaigns, it’s all too easy for the ‘call to action’ – what you actually what your audience to do after reading the copy – to be finalised very late in the day.

Ideally, however, it’s there from the start, front-and-centre in the brief. That way, your writer can create copy that carefully builds towards it – until taking that next step seems like the only natural thing to do.

5. Lay down the briefing law.

As our Twitter chat revealed, different writers like to be briefed in different ways. You could ask them for their preference. But you’re probably better off covering all bases:

  • Put together a written brief. This needn’t take long. The stuff you’ll want to include – from who the audience is, to how the copy is going to be used – is all stuff you should know already. Putting it in a Word doc will help you nail it down, and highlight any gaps or issues. (And once you’ve written your first brief, you’ve got a template you can use again and again.)
  • Arrange a briefing call. It doesn’t matter how comprehensive your written brief is, a good writer will relish the chance to hear you explain the project—and to ask questions.
  • Arrange further calls, if necessary. Some projects will require your writer to understand and convey complex ideas, others to present genuinely expert advice. If that’s the case, give us a chance to quiz the people with the ideas and/or knowledge. (Often, this means product experts.)

6. Give feedback.

If you’re working with a writer on a series of projects, the feedback you offer becomes a crucial part of the briefing process. Tell us if we met the brief. Tell us if you felt you had to tweak the tone of voice, or cut our hilarious play on words. Tell us if a project has met its targets, and if not, where it’s failed.

This is the kind of information copywriters thrive on. It helps us correct, perfect, and ultimately do an even better job next time.

Here’s the simple truth, and one that few will be honest enough to tell you.

Great copywriters can use their skills in two ways.

If you brief us badly – something the best of us will fight tooth and claw to stop from happening – we’ll reluctantly use our writing prowess to paper over the cracks in our understanding. We’ll produce words that read just fine, whoever’s reading them, and neatly fill some space. But that’s all they’ll do. They won’t hit home with your audience. They won’t make them sit up and take notice – and action.

And we’ll feel bad about it, even though we’ve done a bloody miraculous job under the circumstances.

But if you brief us well, it’s quite literally a different story.

We’ll use our skills to engage the people you’ve told us you want to engage. We’ll have the grounding and the confidence to write with genuine authority, find resonant narratives, and bring the full force of your expertise and our creativity to bear.

We’ll make any organisation look as clever as it is – if not more so – and its products or services look as invaluable as they are. Which is, after all, why you went looking for a great B2B copywriter in the first place.

All I’m saying is this. Let us show you what we can do.

For more B2B content tips…

Subscribe and listen to the Good Copy, Bad Copy podcast.

reddit v Quora: how can you use them in B2B marketing?

Posted on by The Radix Team

reddit calls itself “the front page of the internet”. It’s like a massive global forum that has sub forums for just about anything.

Alexa, as I write this, ranks it as the 9th most popular website in the US and 31st globally.

Quora says its mission is “to share and grow the world’s knowledge.” It’s a huge question-and-answer repository of knowledge. Alexa ranks it as the 127th most popular website in the world.

David McGuire, Radix’s Creative Director, told me he’s heard reddit might be useful for B2B marketing, but the site absolutely terrifies him. Quora? Zero opinion.

Keep on reading to find out what both platforms are like, how you can use them in your B2B content marketing efforts and why you might want to go with one over the other.

As a B2B content marketer, I use both

I’ve been on both sites for four years, so I’m pretty well placed to tell you what they’re like, how you can use them for B2B content marketing (and how you shouldn’t), and why you might go with one over the other.

Full disclosure: I use reddit a lot more than Quora and I was once a moderator of a large subreddit (like an online forum). This is not to say that reddit is better for B2B marketers; I just mainly have a Quora account so I can fully view site content.

The differences between reddit and Quora

reddit is made up of subreddits: communities of users (known as redditors) who discuss a particular topic or post content around a particular topic, with threads and replies. Quora has questions and answers, and a slightly hidden blogging feature.

Subreddits are communities of users on reddit and each subreddit has a particular focus. So /r/Games is about videogames and /r/scifi is about science fiction.

Quora’s topics are groupings of questions about particular subjects. You’ll find topics like Technology Trends or B2B Marketing.

Both platforms have the possibility to help with your content marketing efforts.

But what are the other main differences between the two sites?

(Click on image for a larger view.)

(What’s “astroturfing”? Check out this definition over on TechTarget.)

While there are many similarities between the two platforms, as you can see from this table there are a lot of differences too.

What could a B2B marketer use reddit for? (hint: it’s NOT promoting your own content)

There are many articles, blog posts, that describe how to use reddit to gain web traffic. Almost all of them involve concealing that you’re a marketer while doing this. They say you should embed yourself within reddit and in subreddits relevant to your business in order to build up a reputation as a “genuine poster” and then start to promote your business.

Do not do this.

What those articles don’t really mention is the fact that if you are found out, all that hard work you put into pretending to be genuine will have been for nothing and your brand’s reputation tarnished.

Or, as this article on SocialMediaExaminer points out:

redditors expect extreme transparency and authenticity from advertisers. Spam and hard selling aren’t tolerated and using either tactic will damage your brand’s reputation.

It doesn’t matter how awesome your content is. You can’t approach reddit the same way that you do Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. If you jump in and submit content blindly, you could find yourself banned or your websites blacklisted.

Despite all this, paid-for ads that link to your content are perfectly acceptable. Why? Because you’re being honest that you’re marketing something.

So what should a B2B marketer use reddit for?

Outside of content promotion or starting a subreddit specifically for your brand?

You should use reddit for finding out about part of your audience.

I say part, because the users of reddit are, anecdotally, incredibly skewed towards a particular demographic (white, straight men who are under 40). But for B2B marketers looking to find out more about everyone from end-users to senior decision-makers, there are subreddits on almost anything related to industry and business.

For example, there’s subreddits like /r/sysadmin, /r/engineering and even /r/talesfromtechsupport.

Lurk and listen.

There are no quick fixes and it might take some time to find where you should be listening (the first part of that SME article has good advice on finding relevant subreddits). The benefit of listening is that you might discover ideas for content and ways to flesh out audience personas.

Can you try posting on reddit?

You have to be really careful about posting to reddit and linking to your brand in any way. When reddit advises you to “tread carefully” they really mean it.

If you decide to post, do as SocialMediaExaminer advises:

Submit appropriate content, provide insightful answers, ask questions related to your industry and respond to people who engage with you.

So what do you use Quora for?

Well, you use it to be yourself.

A lot of what you would do with Quora you could do with reddit. But Quora encourages you to be yourself:

Having profiles that are meant to be based on who you are gives Quora an edge that reddit doesn’t: Quora gives you a true public face as a user. This means you can do a lot more, because you can be honest about who you are from the start and build up a reputation that you can use to your brand’s benefit.

Ways to use Quora for B2B marketing

This article from Buffer’s Kevan Lee is an excellent guide on how to set up your Quora profile and how you can use the site as a marketer.

As Kevan suggests, here are just some of the things you can do with Quora:

  • Research a topic your business is interested in
  • Crowdsource content
  • “Re-answer questions you’ve answered in your blog”
  • Discover new content ideas based on questions

But its main strength for marketers is how public-facing it enables you to be, and the transparency that enables.

I’ve previously written on this blog that the impact of being truthful and authentic should never be underestimated; existing and potential customers appreciate it.

Quora is essentially a place where you can build a reputation as a thought leader and gently tie this back to your brand. This includes linking back to your existing content in answers when it’s relevant to do so.

We’ve even seen clients’ contributions to Quora discussions being quoted in the media, so it can be valuable from a PR point of view, as well. (As long as you’re saying something you’d be happy to see quoted!)

What about Quora’s blogging feature?

The blog feature is not nearly as prominent as some other self-publishing platforms, like LinkedIn’s Pulse. However, if you’re looking for somewhere you can atomise and reuse content then it has potential and helps to build up the authority of your Quora profile when people check it out.

reddit v Quora: which do you pick?

Like any online platform, the first part of looking into its marketing benefits is finding out whether your audience is there. If your audience isn’t on reddit or Quora, then you shouldn’t waste your time on the platforms, because they won’t help you bolster your marketing efforts.

But if your audience is on both and you only have time for one?

Then decide if you want a public profile or an anonymous profile.

Public brand building? Choose Quora.

Anonymous information gathering? Go with reddit.

But above all, remember: spam is not your friend.

(I don’t know if David is any less terrified of reddit after reading this post.)

Want more B2B copywriting and content advice?

Check out the Good Copy, Bad Copy podcast.

Header image adapted from “Daily News Golden Gloves Boxing” by Mike Lizzi under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.