Month: July 2020

Podcast 86: stakeholders and storytelling

Posted on by The Radix Team

In this month’s Good Copy, Bad Copy we’re joined by guest co-host Angela Cattin, as we find out just how much behind-the-scenes work it takes to align stakeholders behind an award-winning B2B campaign.

Our interviewee is Mwamba Kasanda, from Barings. In her previous role at Korn Ferry, Mwamba spearheaded the Global Talent Crunch campaign, which managed to bring a new perspective into the crowded space that is “Future of Work” thought leadership. It ended up garnering hundreds of PR features, reaching a business leadership audience, generating millions of dollars in revenue, and winning pretty much all the awards.

But that success is just the last mile in a long, long journey. And Mwamba shares the process she used to secure global stakeholder support for the company’s biggest and most ambitious campaign to date.

Ideas for aligning your stakeholders

The interview is a real eye-opener, with inspiration and ideas for B2B marketers in all kinds of organisations – especially if you’re in a sector with a lot of companies talking about the same subject. You’ll hear:

  • How Mwamba used a small, preceding campaign as a springboard to the big idea
  • The challenge – and benefit – of involving stakeholders right from the idea generation phase
  • Tips for preparing global champions to tell resonant local versions of the same story
  • The eleventh-hour stakeholder intervention that improved the campaign’s international appeal
  • When to fight for your idea, and when to compromise
  • Why data and storytelling are both essential factors in winning stakeholder support

Mwamba’s unusual approach succeeded in elevating the idea from a marketing campaign into an organisation-wide business initiative. And ultimately, this helped colleagues around the world to run with the story, and turn the content into sales.

The Anonymous Five: SME IT Director

This month also sees an outsourced IT director tackling the “Anonymous Five” – our semi-regular feature giving you a quick window into the minds of the real people behind key B2B marketing personas.

The subject, who works with small and medium-sized businesses, opens up about their ambitions, which content they actually read, and whether cybersecurity can ever be anything more positive than an annoying pain in the bum.

(Thanks, anonymous IT director, for your time. We’ve made a donation to your nominated charity: Pregnancy Sickness Support.)

Here’s what you’ll hear in episode 86…

2.25 – Angela shares how different tech companies are responding to COVID

5.33 – How Mwamba and Man Bites Dog gave “The Future of Work” a human angle

8.16 – Winning stakeholder support though involvement in the idea generation phase

11.40 – The stakeholder conversation that inspired a key campaign improvement

17.17 – Building on a smaller campaign to secure support for the big idea

25.15 – Mwamba’s key tips for winning stakeholder engagement

29.10 – Creating a global  “Champion’s Pack” with instructions and a social contract

32.34 – Angela shares her own perspective on global stakeholders and storytelling

44.34 – The Anonymous Five: an IT director talks technical content and cybersecurity

Send us your feedback, questions and thoughts…

Contact us through @radixcom on Twitter or [email protected] (best of all, email us a voice memo from your phone).

How to listen 

Credits 

Mwamba Kasanda is now Global Head of Client Communications at Barings. Mwamba, thanks for sharing your stakeholder engagement process in such detail. We’re certain our listeners will be inspired.

Angela Cattin provides specialist marketing support for B2B technology businesses – including interim marketing leadership – through Interalia Marketing. If you’d like to chat, you can find her on LinkedIn. Thanks, Angela, for being an awesome co-host.

Podcast editing and music, as ever, by the masterful talents of Bang and Smash.

How can I make complex B2B content readable and compelling? | B2B Content Tuesday

Posted on by The Radix Team

Great B2B content is clear, understandable and engaging – however complicated the subject. But it isn’t easy to simplify technical content without losing technical authority. In fact, we’ve written this blog about readability scoring in B2B, this blog about readability techniques, and even recorded a podcast with readability professor Chris Trudeau on tackling the task.

So when we were asked to cover the topic in our B2B Content Tuesday Q&A webinars, we jumped at the chance.

In this blog, we’ve put together our top three tips to help you reduce unnecessary complexity, and answered some of the great questions we were asked during the live session about readability tools.

(And if you’d like to watch the discussion in full, you’ll find the video at the foot of this page.)

Three tips for simplifying complex B2B content:

Tip 1: Complexity and jargon are not the same thing

Understanding the difference between jargon and complexity is vital. Jargon is the technical language your audience uses every day in their jobs. But complexity can also include the overly long sentences or unnecessary buzzwords that creep in with technical specifics. And that’s the stuff you can do without.

Look out for passive voice, nominalised verbs or anything that could be considered marketing waffle.

And “use” is almost always better than “utilise”.

Tip 2: The water-cooler test

Imagine you are reading your copy, out loud, to a single reader in your target market. Does it make you cringe? Are you being patronising? Or feel like you should be explaining something?

Try running it through the water-cooler test (patent pending):

Two IT engineers (or whoever you’re writing for) are conversing by a water cooler. The language they use will be absolutely specific to what they do, and they’ll use the correct technical terms. But they won’t surround it with any really complicated stuff – or speak in a way that you need a degree to understand.

(They might well say something like: “This is the third time the nozzle-alignment flangelator has corrupted this morning. I think the embedded system needs an update.” They certainly won’t say: “I am experiencing significant downtime as a result of nozzle-alignment flangelator’s sub-optimal reliability. Surely we must acquire and implement an automated embedded system update solution without undue delay.”)

Ask yourself: can you imagine what you’ve written being said over the water-cooler?

Tip 3: Readability algorithms are helpful – but not the be-all and end-all

From Flesch-Kincaid to Gunning fog, each readability measure has its own nuances and measures different things. Indeed, tools like Readable will let you grade a piece of text against several scoring methods at once.

As a general rule, the more complex a topic is, the harder you should work to make the copy easy to read and understand. Because readability algorithms tend to measure combinations of word difficulty and sentence length, they can help you to retain this balance – forcing you to make your prose simpler to compensate as jargon increases.

Having an objective readability score can also help you to avoid disagreements over your copy’s style.

If you don’t write for a living, it can be easy to think that complicated writing is somehow “better” content – although in fact it’s quite the opposite. Using a readability measure can help you move away from subjective conversations about writing style towards concrete, objective criteria.

Remember, though, that calculations based on word count and difficulty are still a fairly crude measure of our content’s quality. Algorithms can be a useful guide, but don’t be too slavish about aiming for a particular number.

Q&A: Measuring readability in B2B content

Q: What readability scoring model is best for B2B?

David: “Flesch-Kincaid grade level is quite simple and user-friendly. However, the way it’s aligned to an educational grade system might prove confusing for some stakeholders.

“For example, I’ve seen pieces of content about managed IT services, that have a Flesch-Kincaid readability level of 21 – that’s incredibly difficult, post-doctorate level text for an eBook on managed services. But if you talk about it in those terms to a stakeholder, they may point out that your audience do have doctorates, and assume it’s fine. In fact, they might decide anything less is “dumbing down”.

“But the truth is, most of the content we read at work is much, much more readable than that. Broadsheet newspapers have a Flesch-Kincaid grade of around 9, and they’re hardly simplistic.

“In that case, a model that gives you a readability score rather than a grade level could be more useful.”

Q: What readability score should B2B content aim for as a general rule?

David: “That really depends on your audience. For example, you might think about how many of your readers will engage on mobile, or have English as a second language.

“But in the areas of B2B tech where we work, I commonly see Flesh-Kincaid grade levels of 15 and more. Some sectors, like consultancy, are higher still. So if you want B2B content that is more readable than most, but without ever appearing simple, a Flesch-Kincaid grade of around 10 or 11 will help you to stand out. At that level, you can include pretty much all the technical detail you need, without overcomplicating things.”

Q: What tools can I use to judge the readability for microcopy?

David: “Unfortunately, most of the algorithms need 100 words or more to provide you with a reliable answer, as otherwise one long sentence could throw it off.

“But there are a few that could be useful for judging its readability: take a look at Readable and Hemingway.

“And for conversational interfaces, or chatbots, you could take a look at the XKCD comic site. They have a text editor that will keep you to the 1,000 most common words in the English language. It’s surprising how much you can write within that limit.”

Thanks again to everyone who attended the webinar, and took part in the Q&A. Here’s the full discussion:

Four tips to help you write B2B case studies with impact | B2B Content Tuesday

Posted on by The Radix Team

Case studies are among the most powerful tools in your B2B marketing shed. They allow you to put your reader into the shoes of your most successful customers – and prove (rather than just claiming) how fantastic your product or service really is.

So when case studies were requested as a topic in our B2B Content Tuesday Q&A webinar series, we were excited to talk about them.

In this blog, we’ve unpacked four tips from that session, to help you create a compelling, informative and customer-focused case study: from subject matter to narrative and formatting. We’ve even suggested a few questions to ask your customer, so they give you the most human, relatable quotes possible.

We’ve also put together some questions and answers from the live discussion. If you’d like to see the session in full, there’s a video at the bottom of this post.

1. Don’t make your brand the hero

Your customer should always be the hero of your story. You don’t want your potential customers to identify with you; you want them to identify with the customer whose problems you’ve solved.

Instead, present yourself as a trusted guide or friend who helps the hero find their way and complete the quest. Basically, you’re Obi-Wan Kenobi. Maybe even Piglet.

Sharing how you helped the customer achieve the result is important. But remember: it’s “they achieved x by using product y“, not “product y achieved x for them”.

2. Help your reader to learn something of value

Give your readers a strong reason to read by providing clear value. Has the company you’re writing about achieved something that your next customer might want to achieve themselves? Tell the reader how, what the challenges were, or what the journey looked like.

A strong headline will make it obvious to the reader that your case study is helpful. “How this company achieved that” is always a great way to start – it promises value from the off and gives them a clear reason to read.

Boxouts can highlight key lessons from the story and provide them to the reader in easy, bitesize pieces that draw the eye if they’re not going to read in full. This could be something as simple as “Three key lessons this company learned along the way”.

3. Give the reader a figure to identify with

You want your reader to look at the customer at the centre of your case study and think “they’re just like me”. And that reader won’t be a company; they’ll be a human with thoughts and concerns.

The best way to appeal to that human is to talk about individual decision-makers – the real people whose working lives have been changed by your product or service.

But you’ll need to ask them right questions, to draw out the moments, feelings and images the reader can identify with. Here are some of our favourites:

  • Why is this outcome important to your business?
  • Was there a moment when you knew something had to change?
  • Could you tell me a little about your team?
  • When, and why, did you make the decision to buy this product in particular?
  • How much cheaper, faster or more reliable is this product?
  • What was the experience of working with us like?
  • What difference does this make to your job?

4. Make sure your reader can understand in five seconds flat

Ensure your case study is scannable. However well it’s written, most people simply won’t have the time or inclination to sit and read from top to bottom.

The company, challenges, solutions and results all need to be obvious. Use subheadings, bullet points and a standfirst to summarise these points before discussing in detail. And using customer quotes for subheadings is a nice touch – that way you’re summarising the point in your customer’s voice.

And once you’re finished, do the five second test. Give yourself (or a friend/colleague/random person from the street) five or ten seconds to read the story, and see if the critical points are clear.

Q&A: B2B case study questions, answered

Q: Is there a danger in making a case study too simple?

David: “Case studies shouldn’t be difficult to read, but you absolutely do have to speak the language your customers actually use. In the real world, your prospects likely use language that’s technically specific, but in a context that’s easy to understand. If you can do likewise, you can write something with real technical authority without overdoing the cognitive load. Headings should be clear and succinct, to set out the story and information clearly and effectively.”

Q: What do you do when you can’t use a company’s name or quotation?

David: “If you’re not using a company’s name, using their quotation probably won’t be a problem. You won’t be attributing it to them – although do always ask first. It’s also best to be as specific as you can, without giving their identity away or presenting any half-truths, to make it clear the story is obviously true. A case study is always better with all the names included – but the really important part is to help your reader recognise the situation the customer found themselves in at the start of the story.”

Q: Are there any ways to speed up the case study approval process?

David: “Getting in contact with your Account Managers can sometimes give you insight into the client’s internal marketing personnel, and if it’s appropriate you can approach them directly. From a writer’s perspective, it can make the process cleaner if we handle signoff on the customer’s behalf. It’ll save them time, and also gives a chance to build rapport and make any small changes that could help to secure agreement. It’s a good idea for the writer to include an introduction or rationale that explains the approach, choices, and language in the copy. That way, getting it signed off is more likely, because what you’ve written is more contextualised so they’re less likely to disagree.”

Thanks again to everyone who attended the webinar, and took part in the Q&A. Here’s the full discussion: