Month: August 2020

Podcast 87: B2B content for the public sector

Posted on by The Radix Team

The public sector isn’t like any other B2B audience. The people, the practices, and the motivations are very different – and there are whole ecosystems of sectors within sectors. So how do you avoid creating marketing content that’s tone deaf, and publish something that actually works?

In this special edition of Good Copy, Bad Copy, we go pretty deep to find out. We dive headfirst into the world of B2B public sector content, with not one, not two, but three interviewees, alongside other contributions from leading marketers and anonymous public sector buyers.

First up is Raine Hunt, marketing and communications director for NHS Shared Business Services – a joint venture between the Department of Health and the IT company Sopra Steria. As someone who’s part of the NHS, but also markets to NHS organisations, Raine’s double role gives her a wealth of insights into the biggest challenges you’ll face when creating public sector content.

Later, we’re joined by Hannah Marques and Mike Wilkinson of CACI Ltd, who won the B2B Marketing Award for Best Use of Content Marketing for the emotionally-led “Walk in their Shoes” campaign, addressing the youth justice sector. They talk about the power of content that helps a public sector audience to tell their own compelling story – underpinning emotion with logical, data-backed messages.

We also share valuable contributions from Microsoft public sector marketing lead Shona Wright, and experienced public sector marketer Lynn File.

And last, but by no means least, an anonymous director at an NHS trust spills the beans on which marketing goes straight in the bin, reveals what a bad day at the office looks like, and explains why they hate receiving content that’s aimed at local authorities.

Public sector content: takeaways, tips and advice

Here are just a few of the nuggets we gleaned from our guests in this episode:

  • There’s no one public sector. Although there’s a loose categorisation, every service is different – and each require a different vocabulary and messaging. Usually, you can’t speak to a local council in the same way you would to a police force. The NHS alone houses dozens of different sub-sectors.
  • Research, research, research. As with any B2B marketing content, it’s critical to know exactly who your audience is, the challenges they face, and how you can help them do their job. Even within organisations, there’s a world of different job roles, each requiring its own approach.
  • Use the correct language, correctly. The best public sector content carefully balances emotive content with a rational business case. In both cases, speaking the right language is the key to being taken seriously. But don’t scatter terms willy-nilly, or be glib about challenges you don’t understand. This audience can spot phoney engagement a mile away.

Public vs private sector content: what’s the difference?

Turns out, quite a lot. With a little input from Microsoft’s Shona Wright, and Brand Innovation’s Lynn File, George takes a look at how marketing to the two sectors varies – and where crossovers exist.

Take a listen to find out:

  • How customer experience expectations are shifting, and how the public sector can keep up
  • Why the internal processes and timelines in each sector are so different, and how that impacts content creation
  • What local authorities and organisations can learn from the digital disruption of the retail industry

(He’s also working on a longer article for us about this very topic, so keep an eye out.)

The Anonymous Five: Director, NHS Trust

This month’s “Anonymous Five” interview packs quite a punch. Our hardest-hitting yet, the interview offers a glimpse into the life of a director at an NHS Trust.

They tell us the best (and worst) pieces of marketing aimed at the NHS, explain why “service user” is the least-bad way to describe customers, and provide a humbling glimpse into their worst working days.

Thank you, anonymous director, for your time. We’ve sent a donation to your charity of choice: Refugee Action.

Here’s what you’ll find in episode 87…

2.42 – Raine Hunt offers a unique perspective on marketing inside the NHS

20.01 – Hannah Marques and Mike Wilkinson from CACI Ltd discuss emotion-led content

30.41 – We unpack the key lessons from our interviews

38.07 – George shares top content tips from leading public sector marketers

48.44 – The Anonymous Five: The life of an NHS trust director

Send us your feedback, thoughts, and deepest, darkest secrets…

Contact us through @radixcom on Twitter or [email protected] (if you want to be our favourite listener, send us a voice memo).

How to listen 

Credits 

A massive thank you to our wonderful interviewees, contributors, and anonymous public sector spies for taking the time out of your busy schedules to talk to us. We hope you’re happy with the results.

Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash

Four ways to find original B2B content ideas | B2B Content Tuesday

Posted on by The Radix Team

Few things in B2B marketing are harder than coming up with a genuinely original content idea. In our research report into barriers to great B2B content, just 43% of respondents said even their best content had a clever or original concept.

So it’s probably not surprising that one of the first topics requested in our B2B Content Tuesdays webinar series was “Where’s the best place to find B2B content ideas?”

Here are the four places we look first – or rather, where we see our clients looking; we’re just humble copywriters, after all.

(Later in the article, David answers some more detailed questions, and if you scroll all the way down, you can watch a video of the discussion in full.)

1. Find the real questions, that real people ask you, in the real world

We’re not talking about the neatly formed FAQs that you wish your customers would ask. We’re talking about the nitty-gritty questions they’re actually asking – whether directly, or through other means.

And there’s tonnes of places to look for prompts:

Every client, customer, or prospect conversation

Sounds obvious, we know. But anyone who talks to customers on a regular basis can deliver helpful insights. Just ask them to jot down questions they’re asked regularly, and pass them along.

Search engine data and tools

People don’t filter what they put into search engines. So looking through search keyword data can give you a great understanding of customer intent – and help you find out what people want to know.

Top tip: tools like Answer the Public are a really fun way to do this.

Your own website

If your website has a search box, start tracking the information people are searching for. These are the questions they wish you would answer, but you haven’t.

Forums and social media platforms

Anywhere people are having conversations can give you insight into what they know and what they need to find out (and how you can fill that knowledge gap).

2. Think about what you know, that nobody else does

It might be that you have a stack of data within your organisation that you can interrogate, to provide your customers with insights they never knew they needed.

Or maybe you have internal experts that can predict the next big industry trend, or the outcome of a certain event. Sure, it might not be a definitive answer, but if your expert can guess better than anyone else, you have the authority to discuss the future.

Even if you don’t have all the answers your audience needs, you can turn to external sources. Interviews, reviews, analysis, polls can all help spark new, fresh content ideas. Similarly, crunching publicly available numbers, or carrying out quantitative or qualitative research, will make your content highly shareable.

3. Zoom all the way in

One way to create compelling content, particularly in a crowded subject area, is to zoom right in – on the audience, or the subject.

If a subject has been done to death, try to think about a very close, specific angle that provides genuine insight without regurgitating old information.

Find an aspect that may previously have been one paragraph in a broader blog, then dig right in. This could be addressing a very specific part of your audience: a job role, an attitude, or even a particular challenge some readers may be facing.

4. Find places where your competitors are too afraid to go

What are the things in your sector that nobody wants to talk about? What are the problems, the challenges or the drawbacks that no-one has openly addressed yet?

Maybe it’s pricing, an obstacle, or a rumour that’s been circulating. But find out what the elephant in the room is, then talk about it – it’s a great way to spark cut-through ideas and establish yourself as a brand that’s straight-talking and honest.

(And if you need convincing, we once published a piece on why prices for blog writing needed to increase throughout the industry; it’s brought us leads ever since.)

Finding content ideas: your questions answered

Q: As a writer, where is the best place to find content ideas?

David: “At Radix, we find that the best ideas usually come from two places: the experts in the client’s organisation, and their customer base. But we’re not necessarily going to put ideas on top of what the experts already know; it’s all about teasing the best concepts out of them.”

Q: Beyond Answer the Public, what other social listening tools are useful for finding out what your target market wants to know?

David: “Anywhere people are talking about the subject you want to write about is a good place to look. Some people use tools like Sprout and Mention, which could help – but as a content writer, I don’t use them frequently myself.”

Q: How can I discover relevant customer conversations, without the help of social listening tools?

David: “There’s a simple Google trick. Search around the topic you’re interested in, but include the odd opinion word like ‘frustrating’, ‘annoying’, ‘enjoyed’ or similar. These are the words that will crop up in any chats your customers are having about their views on a topic or brand.

“Pulling on those threads can help you discover forums or social media discussions were people are engaged in conversations about the subject, or even just having a whine – which can be great for sparking content ideas and fuelling persona research.”

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

You are a cartographer (and other hard-won advice on B2B white papers)

Posted on by The Radix Team

Hands up everyone who’s written or commissioned a B2B white paper? Great. Now, keep your hand in the air if you were happy with the way it turned out.

Really, 100% happy? And it was downloaded a heap of times, by people who went on to buy your stuff?

OK – well… you can skip this session, head outside, and enjoy the sunshine or moonlight.

Everyone else, eyes forward. I’m not going to waste your time recounting the political origins of the white paper format, or exploring all the studies which testify to its effectiveness as a mid-funnel content asset. You can Google just as well as I can.

Instead, let me lay out what I’ve learnt over a decade of writing white papers for B2B tech brands.

1. You’re a mapmaker (with a not-so-secret agenda)

You know how the B2B buying process is often characterised as a multi-stage journey? Well, your white paper is going to be the map you hand to your prospects shortly after they’ve hit the road.

It’ll describe all the possible destinations, notable shortcuts, and likely hazards ahead, with scrupulous accuracy. But it’ll still – through careful inclusions and omissions – make the correct route unmistakably clear.

Or, if you prefer well-worn jargon to well-worn metaphors: your white paper will educate warm-ish leads, framing the business challenge or opportunity in the context of the solution you’re looking to promote.

However poetic you want to get about it, your white paper’s primary role is to inform and guide.

Remember this, and let it shape:

  • Your white paper’s content – which should be original, useful, and at least ostensibly objective, drawing on your company’s true fields of expertise
  • Your white paper’s structure – which may nod to academic literature with summaries, named authors, author bios, diagrams and citations
  • Your white papers’ voice and tone – which, whatever your broader brand voice, should be clear, concise and confident, like a born teacher. (Not the jaded, abrasive university lecturer I’m apparently channelling today…)

Do all of the above, and your white paper will be a true map: a practical tool that offers its readers genuine value. And along the way, they’ll get to see the landscape from your point of view.

2. Don’t ask your SME to write your white paper

The person who writes your white paper should understand:

  • Your marketing objectives
  • Where the white paper fits into your marketing activities
  • The technology/trends the paper’s speaking to
  • Your target audience, and their pain points and ambitions
  • How your solutions alleviate those pains and support those ambitions
  • How to use language that resonates with your target audience
  • How to use language – period
  • How to structure a long-form content piece

If you have an in-house subject matter expert who can do all of the above – and there are a handful of genuine B2B tech polymaths out there – then congratulations. But good luck finding them the time to craft you 2,500 words.

They’re almost certainly already contributing to a hundred internal projects, in between excelling at their day job and being dialled in to shore-up crucial sales calls.

At Radix, we have been known to “edit” – i.e. review, rewrite and even restructure – white paper copy drafted by our clients’ regular, non-superhuman SMEs. (The ones who’ve mastered the tech but not all the other pieces of the content writing puzzle.)

While we’ve helped create some stellar white papers this way (like the third example here), they often could have been even more stellar if we’d written the copy from scratch. What’s more, they might have been faster and cheaper to produce. An “edit” might seem like a quick job, but if it goes through multiple rounds of amends it can easily take as long as a project that starts with an intelligent conversation and a blank page, and hits the mark first time.

3. If possible, get a professional

So, who should write your white paper?

Let’s say you’ve no writing resource within your marketing team – or you’re the resource, and writing has never been your strongest suit. You can always find a gun for hire. But who?

White papers are one of the more challenging content formats. So you’ll ideally want a content writer with a solid understanding of B2B sales and the B2B marketing machine, as well as a few years of experience writing for your sector.

They should be a decent interviewer – so they can get what they need out of your SME, even if you can only secure half an hour of your expert’s time. They should also have a portfolio of similar pieces that demonstrate their ability to write with clarity and authority.

My advice? Use your professional networks to find a freelancer you can trust. Or, if you’re likely to need an ongoing programme with supporting content, opt for a dedicated white paper writing service like ours.

4. Be as technical as your audience

It’s easy to think of the white paper as the drier, more technical alter ego of the ebook. Drier, maybe. But more technical? Not necessarily.

I’ve written a lot of white papers that educate C-level decision-makers about business challenges and industry trends. I’ve written very few that educate engineers or developers on the inputs and outputs of specific technologies.

Now, I’m sure there are some white paper projects that simply never cross Radix’s threshold; projects that are so technically niche, even our experienced team would struggle to deliver them. But I think there’s another reason highly technical white papers don’t pour onto our doormat.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen many of our clients arrive at the same conclusion: white papers aren’t the best way to reach technical roles. Better to organize a chance for them to get hands-on with those APIs, or to talk, peer-to-peer, with your own engineers.

All of which is to say: don’t fall into the trap of thinking a white paper has to be more technical than other content pieces. Instead, decide who you’re targeting with your white paper. Check that a white paper is the best way to reach them.

And then, the rule is simple – be as technical as they are.

5. Keep a tight grip on the project

It’s common for white paper projects to involve multiple sales, marketing and product stakeholders. Getting a good paper produced on time and on budget means nailing down costs, and booking input calls. Then it means managing everyone’s expectations, and shepherding busy, opinionated humans through any necessary feedback cycles.

The first part of this process shouldn’t be too tough – especially if you’re using a service like ours, that’s always there when you reach out during office hours, ready to quote upfront, and to arrange SME calls on your behalf.

But the second part can be much harder work. It’s all too easy for great copy to be fed into the feedback machine, mangled, expanded, and spat back out with all of its glorious lustre stripped away.

There are a few things you can do to shepherd your content safely through the feedback cycle:

  • Know exactly what you want the white paper to achieve, and communicate this to all stakeholders, at every opportunity. “Mission creep” is one of the leading killers of white papers that show up DOA.
  • Provide (or use writers who provide) a rationale for contentious decisions. When you delete the features table your product manager has pasted into the middle of page two, add a comment explaining that, at this stage, your readers are still understanding why they need your tech – instead, let’s link to the data sheet at the very end of the paper?
  • Remain open to legitimate complaints. Feedback cycles are there for a reason. However rudely someone sticks their finger through a hole in your work, don’t take it personally – acknowledge their wisdom, and make the change. Welcome your stakeholders’ good ideas, and it’ll be much easier to countermand their bad ones.

We have reached our destination

Have you ever noticed how much a long blog post can have in common with a short white paper? Well… I hope you find this little map helpful. Class dismissed.

(You can find out more about our white paper content writing service here.)