Category: Radix Podcast

B2BQ&A 105: How do you evaluate B2B content quality?

Posted on by Claire Goodfellow

This month’s question comes from Caroline Robinson who, among many other roles, is the senior editor of the British Cartographic Society’s popular magazine, Maplines.

She wants to know: “What QA/QC processes do other people have for editing content?”

It’s a fantastic question. At Radix, we use a version of this 16-point copywriting quality checklist when editing each other’s work, but we were also super curious to find out what processes others use to ensure the quality of their B2B content.

So we spoke to Laurence Taphouse, Director of Digital Marketing and Content Strategy at Deltek‘s EMEA & APAC Demand Centre, to find out how she ensures consistent quality across so many writers, subjects, and territories.

We also called on the members and experts of B2B Marketing’s Propolis Hive for Brand and Content Strategy and got a detailed response from Scott Stockwell, Propolis Hive Ambassador for Strategy and Evolution. You can hear Scott’s process in full, later in the episode.

This week, our co-host is the luminous Katy Eddy, a Senior Copywriter here at Radix and editor extraordinaire. She recently gave an editing masterclass at a local university, and shares some of her approach.

And we have two excellent copywriting tips this month. Giles Edwards tells us how to keep our content succinct, and we hear the first of a series of tips on creating inclusive copy from language consultant Ettie Bailey-King.

You’ll find a full transcript of our podcast at the end of this post.

Laurence’s top tips for consistent quality

First, Laurence tells us how she achieves consistently high quality across Deltek’s varied content.

A consistent editor

“You need to have a consistent editor; I think it’s crucial,” Laurence explains. “For us, it’s our product marketing team. So when we do editing, it will be me; you always add a constant.”

Include someone with industry acumen

“You need a person who’s got all the industry acumen,” she adds. “Someone who understands their role in the industry, who can make sure the messaging is resonating the way it should be.”

Check – and check again

“Once all that is done, a second pair of eyes can check this is all good,” she concludes. “And then we go back to me for proofreading, making sure there’s no grammatical mistakes or anything like that. Once that is done, we all agree that the content is good to go. And we always follow the same process.”

Scott’s advice from a tech giant

Next, Scott gives us a sneak peak into the content quality process at a bona fide tech giant. And, like Laurence, he reveals that quality control starts much, much earlier than the final edit.

“Assets go through agency production, and then face a rigorous ‘go live’ test before they’re launched,” he tells us. “The ‘go live’ alone has 12 elements that are checked before an asset is signed off, including the brand guidelines, legal requirements, and SEO optimisation, among others.

“Much of this happens within a standard set of tools and apps that all the content team share along with supporting workflows. The squad of marketers working on the campaign… will all have an input into the content being made for the campaign and how it will be deployed. So that quick quality check is a final glimpse at a far more detailed journey that each asset has taken to get there.”

Radix’s Quality Assurance Checklist

At Radix, our content quality checklist consists of 16 questions. We check for accuracy, clarity, authority, empathy, and wizardry to make sure our content is as complete – and as appropriate for its intended audience – as possible.

If you’d like to adapt it for your own purposes, or even steal it wholesale, feel free:

Steal this 16-point quality checklist when editing your B2B content. Click this image to download a printable PDF.

(Click the image to open a printable PDF)

In this episode, you’ll find…

1:10 – We welcome this week’s co-host, Katy Eddy

1:55 – Our first copywriting tip from Giles Edwards on how to keep content succinct

2:10 – We put Caroline Robinson’s question to Laurence Taphouse

15:20 – David shares Scott Stockwell’s thoughts about how to keep quality in your content

17:35 – David and Katy discuss her three-stage content editing process

25:47 – We hear copywriting tips from Ettie Bailey-King about how to keep content inclusive

 

We want to hear from you…

Have you got a question for B2BQ&A? Or a copywriting tip you’d like to share?

You could be featured on our next podcast. Send us a voice memo at [email protected]. And if there are any other thoughts you’d like to share, you can find us on Twitter @radixcom.

How to listen: 

Credits

  • Firstly, thank you to Katy Eddy for your excellent insight and co-hosting skills.
  • Thanks to Caroline Robinson for your question. It was really interesting to explore.
  • And thank you to Laurence Taphouse for the insights into Deltek’s quality process.
  • Thanks to Scott Stockwell for your brilliant contribution, too.
  • And last but absolutely not least, thanks to Giles Edwards and Ettie Bailey-King for your brilliant copywriting tips.

Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash.

Transcript: B2BQ&A 105: How do you evaluate B2B content quality?

Caroline Robinson: I would like to know what QA/QC processes other people have for editing content.

Katy Eddy: That’s a great question. Let’s ask Laurence Taphouse from Deltek.

David McGuire: Hello listener, you are extremely welcome to B2BQ&A, the podcast where we go in search of an answer to your question about B2B content writing. This is episode 105.

Katy: In a moment, we’ll ask Laurence Taphouse, Deltek’s Director of Digital Marketing and Content Strategy for EMEA and APAC, how she manages content quality, and get copywriting tips from Giles Edwards and Ettie Bailey-King. Plus, we’ll have news of a helpful new resource you can use to check your own B2B content quality. That’s a lot of stuff.

David: That is, it’s a lot, isn’t it? It’s a packed episode, I know. Before all of that, though, some introductions. My name is David McGuire. I’m Creative Director at Radix Communications, the B2B copywriting agency. And this month, our guest co-host is a familiar voice. It’s Radix Senior Copywriter, Katy Eddy. Katy, welcome back.

Katy: Thank you very much. It is good to be back.

David: It’s good to have you here. Before we go ahead and answer this month’s question, would you mind telling the listener how they can get in touch with us?

Katy: Yeah, of course. Listener, if you have any comments or suggestions you can find Radix on LinkedIn or Twitter @radixcom. Or if you want us to answer your question on a future episode, record a quick voice note and send it by email to [email protected].

David: That’s marvellous. Thank you very much.

Giles Edwards: Hello, this is Giles from …Gasp! My tip is: trim the fat. If you can take a word out and nothing is lost, you should.

Katy: Thanks, Giles, for that tip. Now it’s time to hear this month’s question. Who do we have?

Caroline: Hello, Radix Podcast. I’m Caroline Robinson, Marketing and Business Development Manager for Compusult Europe. I am also Senior Editor of Maplines, the membership magazine for the British Cartographic Society. I write and edit in different styles for my work. I would like to know what QA/QC processes other people have editing content. Love the podcast by the way.

David: Thanks, Caroline. That’s a great question. Content quality control is something we’re asked about a lot. And in a minute, Katy will explain how we approach editing here at Radix. First, I put your question to Laurence Taphouse, who’s Director of Digital Marketing and Content Strategy for EMEA and APAC at the global software company, Deltek. Laurence leads on content and digital strategy and works with stakeholders and writers around the globe. So I asked her what processes do you have to ensure that your content meets a high standard.

Laurence Taphouse: The process really starts with our marketing plan, when we decide to put in place a marketing plan to drive demand for some of our products. My role is to really do a content gap analysis. From this content gap analysis, I then decide with different stakeholders what type of content are needed. The type of content that are needed can be different formats to fit some of the digital tactics that we are using to drive demand. And based on that we do a content plan. So the content plan is very much around: “what do I want this content to achieve? Who do I want to read it? What do I want readers to think, feel, or do afterwards?” So if there’s any, you know, call to action? And then once I got all those answers lined up, is “what should this piece look like, really? When is the best time to publish it? What’s the best source of material? What’s the call to action? And then maybe where will the content be published?

Once I’ve got that it’s all started with a creative brief and a content brief and either we use, you know, writers in house or if we use third party writers, the content brief is the key for whomever is going to write the content, understand, you know, the audience to which the content will be targeted to. So normally in the brief you’ll have a synopsis, some key messages, the deadline on when we want the content to be created, the target audience, some of the source materials. Sometimes when we create these brief we also do a call with the writer to make sure that we go through all the detail and source material. So we give the opportunity to the writers to ask questions, and make sure that everyone is on the same page. So once we’ve done that, we are being really clear on the deadlines, any iteration will be done as well for that type of content. Because content is quite subjective. Some people might like it, some people might not like it, depending on the tone, and within the brief, you know, that’s where the standards come into play, to make sure that, you know, you don’t end up having 10 or 15 iterations, just based on the personal opinion, though, which is more… it needs to be around when, you know, you review the content around, “okay, this is for that, the format is that, the best practice is that, and the standard of the company is tone of voice should be that way, the way we address ourselves to the audience should be that way.” So once you’ve got all of that, then you can create this not rigid, but a little bit rigid deadline, where you say, “okay, and say three iteration would be the maximum that will be good for you”.

Then you need to have a consistent editor, I think is crucial. For us it’s our product marketing team. So when you do the editing it will be me. And then I will use some of my peers as well  so I have, you know, other pairs of eyes as well on the content because it’s always great. But you always have a constant, you know, consistent editor, person with … generally a person who’s got all the industry acumen. So they understand their industry, they understand their work so that they make sure that the messaging is resonating, the way it should be resonating.

Once that is done, the second pair of eyes is there to double-check this is all good. And then we go back to me for proofreading, making sure that there’s no, you know, grammatical mistakes or anything like that.

Once that is done, that’s when we, you know, we decide that we’re all in agreement that this is all good. And we follow, you know, always the same process, the briefing, once the briefing is done, the deadline once the deadline is done… We don’t let writers just write right away, we usually ask for an outline. So the writer being an internal writer, or third party writer, we make sure that whatever is in his mind of how he’s going to structure the content. So it could be a blog, or could be a white paper, what is it he’s going to write in each of the different parts – we agreed on this outline. So we know that when he start writing, it should be pretty much what we asked him or her to do, you know, he’s not far off, he’s not going on a tangent, where we’re like, “oh, actually, we didn’t want you to really focus on that part”.

And then once we do all this editing that I was telling you about, and this proofreading and this peer review, where we have multiple pair of eyes, that’s when we go into market. And what we also like to do is to take time and reflect once things are in motion in markets. So how this is engaging? Is it engaging the right way? Could we tweak some of the promotional copy that we are creating?

So it’s not just once it’s launched is gone. There is a constant optimisation of the content. We have standards as well, when it comes to publishing online. It is important that we think about search engine optimisation. So it should not be, you know, the main focus when you write, you don’t want to just use keywords, you know, in the wrong way. It is important when you promote, for example, a blog, you know, to think about your title, to be engaging in your subtitle, you need to detail the backend, your backlinks, you know, if you are talking and referring to other research or content on the web to link that through your blog. So there’s a big best practice that we follow for different type of format content.

David: That sounds really comprehensive. That’s great. Thank you. Obviously, kind of, you work across lots of different geographies, lots of different kinds of locations and kinds of writers and that kind of thing. How easy is it to apply a consistent set of standards across different formats, subjects, locations?

Laurence: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So we normally got standards from our digital team, our corporate team, so you will have standard that you follow. So that process that I just explained to you is a process that everyone will do across the globe. However, there’s something there is very important when you talk to different markets when different languages. This is something that in our email and admin centre is crucial is one. When you write content in English, and you know that this content is going to be translated, you need to make sure that you don’t play with words. Often we like to play with word and we feel like they’re more engaging, if we make a touch of humour or make the title a bit punchier in English. That’s great, but it’s not always translates really well when you wanted to, you know, target another market. Also, you know, the content that we are creating is very thought leadership, is not so much product heavy. So it is quite easily transferable, I would say for other markets, but you always need to have a think of who is the target audience, if the target audience is the same, but the market is less mature, you need to make sure they you know, you got that point across. So, it depends on the type of content, I think content that is very high level, for a specific persona, should be able to work and follow the right standard and the right process that I just explained across the globe, really. If there is something that is more specific, you know, I’m thinking sometimes when we do a piece of content around survey research, or based on dates and key points, it needs to be, you know, obviously updated and to resonate with the other markets. But obviously, the standard of the best practice to make sure that the content looks good, should be able to easily be applied across the globe. Because the importance of knowing what’s good look like, is crucial. Because if not, you will never really make the decision to go into market. Because some people might have another opinion of what good looks like. And you’ve got a different line of businesses, which are hot, because you’ve got the content and marketers who think marketing content, and what marketing good content look like. And you’ve got maybe someone who is more an expert in the product, or maybe an expert in, you know, an engineer in the product, where he feels that they need to talk about something more technical, is actually what good content will be.

David: So when you’re trying to apply those standards, and agree what good looks like, between the marketing team and stakeholders in product or sales or, or wherever, how does that work? How do you reach agreement on what the standards are and what good is?

Laurence: So we do something called RACI. So when we do every piece of content that we do, and that we create, if we need to involve multiple stakeholders, they need to understand their role within the creation of that content. So RACI will be you know, the, are you responsible, are you accountable? Are you going to be just a consultant? Or is it just informative that we’re going to provide you this content? Based on the RACI, we’ll set the standard and the process on the brief. So that’s always on the brief. So the first step, and when we agree on that brief, then people understand what good looks like and what we are aiming for and what the objective is. If you miss that brief, and the brief is not clear, that’s when it gets really hard for everyone to be on the same page on what good look like for specific content or specific campaign.

David: Laurence, that’s brilliant, that’s absolutely everything that we needed from my point of view. Is there anything when you were kind of thinking about the questions and what you prepared, is there anything that I haven’t asked you about, that you feel is important in this?

Laurence: I think often people think that content is, you know, you need to be very creative, you need to be someone who likes to read. And it’s true, when you are content, you need to really like the wording and all of that. But I think when you write marketing content, you need to have also this view of not only writing what you like to write about, but always thinking about the customer, and what they’re going to want to write. So following the process, it looks like really heavy, but once you do it for longer and longer and longer. Yes, it seems completely obvious is like, you know, it’s like if you were going into market without having a marketing plan in place or without having a budget in place. If you don’t have this process in place, then, you know, everything would fall apart. So I would just suggest to everyone who wants to do content, to also have a good eye on you know, digital tactics and format. Content is the oil of the machine of demand. So you need to think about where this content going to go before you start writing. I think it’s crucial.

David: Thanks, Laurence for giving us such a detailed answer to Caroline’s question. We really appreciate your time. Katy, before we hear your approach to editing, I’d like to share a bit of further information on this. I asked the members and experts of B2B Marketing’s Propolis Hive for Brand and Content Strategy, how they approach content QC. And I got quite a detailed response from Scott Stockwell. And I thought it showed some real similarities with Laurence’s answer. Scott says the following:

This feels like one of those, it’s taken me five years to do this in five minutes. If you’re just considering content, that’s something that’s coming off a content production line, then quality assurance could be seen as the quality controller equivalent. A quick look from a trained eye at the finished products, able to spot what passes muster, and what needs to be rejected. As editor-in-chief for EMEA, that’s part of my role: to examine finished assets. But like the tip of the iceberg that doesn’t show all the work that went into designing and fabricating that product, and sourcing the ingredients before any components even set out on their path to becoming a product. Where I work, we have a three by three model, three briefs, three sessions, three outcomes. We have an input brief that researches the market, the customers, the personas within the customers, the local conditions, et cetera. That moves into a content strategy that looks at the high-level customer journey and the touches along the way. The concept brief comes next, and looks at the creative landscape and options for testing at the campaign level. A SWOT analysis examines the creative testing results and implications. And a greenlight meeting looks at what it will take for all the assets in the journey to deliver on the vision for the campaign. A content plan takes the defined campaign deliverables, and looks at all the components needed to create them, which are detailed in an asset brief for each asset. The assets go through agency production, and then face a rigorous ‘go live’ test before they’re launched. The ‘go live’ alone has 12 elements that are checked before an asset is signed off, including the brand guidelines, legal requirements, and SEO optimization among others. Much of this happens within a standard set of tools and apps that all of the content team share along with supporting workflows. The squad of marketers working on the campaign, across discipline and involved throughout and will all have a good view of and input into the content being made for the campaign and how it will be deployed. So that quick quality check is a final glimpse of a far more detailed journey that each asset has taken to get there.

So Katy, now you have insight into content quality control at two tech giants. And to me, it’s striking just how much work goes into getting things right before that final review. Did anything else stand out for you?

Katy: I think firstly, it makes me glad that we’re just the copywriters. The amount of work that goes in, you know, to prep a brief before it reaches us, and everything that happens to it after we’re done with it. That sounds exhausting. It’s really interesting to have that, that little bit of insight into where our little bit of writing and editing that we do slots into a much bigger thing. And it’s yeah, it is a big responsibility to take on, like a little bit of editing journey.

David: Yeah, ‘cause I mean, our review process, I mean, we have a checklist. But that really is, it’s more at the end of that final check – right? – of all the kind of elements that are already in the brief to make sure that everything lines up.

Katy: Yeah, everything we do is as much in line with the brief as we can possibly get it. And the other thing that I thought was really interesting that Laurence picked up on was talking about how you adjust things for different locations and different markets. I’ve been doing a lot of that recently. And it’s a difficult challenge because unless you’re going and you’re talking to every individual person in that market, you don’t necessarily get a full picture of how they like to talk about things and things that you shouldn’t mention for their markets and things like that.

So recently, I did a big project for five regions. And we set up a massive spreadsheet that had all our main talking points in it for UK. And we handed it to the teams in each of the regions and we’re like, what do you need to change? What don’t you want from us because it can be really tiny accuracy, things like stuff that’s hosted in Microsoft Azure here might be in a different cloud provider in Sweden, something like that. But then there’s loads of really tiny things. Kinda like we don’t like… humour. Like, don’t give us puns, don’t come near us with a pun, which you know, you’re pretty safe with me. I’m not a great fan of puns. But yeah, just those little things that I’m so used to editing for stuff for the UK and for the US. And that’s really where my expertise is. So bringing in other people’s knowledge for that is really useful.

David: Yeah. Now, you were talking about that editing process at a local university, recently. You were talking to the students about – you have a particular kind of structure and an approach that you follow when you’re editing someone else’s content. Can you give us a quick summary?

Katy: Yeah, it was a 45-minute talk. So I’ll try and condense it as much as possible

David: We haven’t got quite that long.

Katy: Yeah, the way I approach it, and I’m not sure if this is best practice at Radix but it’s the way I’ve found that most effective. For me, I take three passes at something. And it’s very much based on our quality checklist that you mentioned earlier. So the first pass I do is as a reader, and I don’t think about anything from a writing or editing standpoint. It’s just the really basic, does this make sense? Am I interested the whole way through? Do I want to do whatever I’m being told to do at the end of the piece? And at this point, I don’t do anything to the copy, I won’t start picking things apart. Because there’s no point editing something in paragraph two, if you get to paragraph five, and there’s a massive structural issue, that’s going to negate all of that anyway. So that’s one I’ll just drop the occasional comment on if there’s something I need to come back to.

And my second pass, I tend to look at it as a kind of content editing pass, which is where I start looking at the structure. Is the argument logical? Does it follow through? Does it go off on a weird tangent halfway through? Are there logical leaps where, you know, we haven’t quite explained our thinking. That’s where you start, maybe having to pull bits apart and restructure and move paragraphs around, that kind of thing.

And then, once you’ve done all of that, you come back around for the last pass, which is where you look for the typos, the grammar, the really like nuts and bolts things of copywriting craft, that when you’re writing a massive piece can kind of get away from you a little bit sometimes. And, you know, if you’ve done major edits at the structural point, you might have introduced typos, which aren’t the original writer’s fault at all. So that’ll be my last major pass. And I always give it a quick proof before I send it back to whoever is working on it, that kind of thing. And it’s not always me doing these changes. Sometimes if they’re very small, specific changes to make, I’ll do them myself. But if I’m reviewing somebody else’s work, and there are multiple avenues to go down for how you change something, I’ll bounce it back to them with comments and suggestions that hopefully give them some guide and some rationale, because the really important thing for me is that you always have to have a solid rationale for why you’ve changed something. You never want to give it back to somebody and they look at it, and they have no idea what you’ve done to it and why. Yeah, so for me being very clear and very descriptive of why you’ve made changes, or what changes you want them to make is really important, too.

David: Yeah, I mean, one of the big traps I guess you can fall into as an editor is “I wouldn’t have written it that way”. Rather than does it meet these criteria, yes or no. I think it’s interesting that when we look at our checklist, we, you know… If you like work our way up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for copywriting, but you know, we start with the detail and work out to the picture, but you start with the big picture, and work backwards. So the total impression back from that to the structure, and then back from that to like, the detailed kind of words and commas and yeah, that kind of thing.

Katy: There’s no point editing the tiny bits if it doesn’t do what it’s meant to do. So if it’s, I mean, I’ve never seen this happen. But if you just look at it, and it’s completely wrong, and it has to go back and be rewritten from scratch, there’s no point spending, you know, 30 minutes fiddling around with semicolons. But yeah, it’s interesting you said that about not making changes just because you would have written it differently. It’s another point I had in my presentation I called editing without ego. Which is –

David: – it’s hard for writers.

Katy: It is hard and especially when you’re a content lead or a senior and you know something really well. You can get really protective over a topic or a client. But that doesn’t mean you’re always right or you always have the best answer or the only answer, so you’ve got to know when to loosen the reins a little bit on those things.

David: Sure. Listener, Katy mentioned the checklist that we use here at Radix to quality check the content we write for clients. I think we refer to it a few times, actually. And I’m delighted to let you know that we’ve actually just published a new updated version of that checklist that you can steal, and adapt and borrow for your own purposes and use it for your own content reviews. If you’d like a copy, just head over to radix-communications.com, and download it. And we’ll also put a link in the show notes.

Ettie Bailey-King: I’m Ettie Bailey-King. I’m an inclusive language consultant. And here are my tips on creating inclusive copy. Number one, ask people. Always ask people how they want to be referred to. For example, don’t think that you can guess somebody’s pronouns based on their appearance. There’s no way of knowing someone’s gender identity just from looking at them. So always check. Secondly, be aware that somebody might be out in the sense of out as having a particular sexual orientation or gender identity in one space, but not in another space. So always check, otherwise, you risk outing someone who might be let’s say out on a social media platform where you happen to follow them, but not out with their work colleagues.

Katy: Thanks, Ettie Bailey-King for that. We actually have a whole bunch of inclusive writing advice from Ettie, and we’ll be including that across our next few episodes. We’d also like to thank Giles Edwards for the tip we heard earlier, Caroline Robinson for this episode’s question. And both Laurence and Scott for answering it so thoughtfully.

David: Caroline, I hope you found the answer that you are looking for. And remember, we’ve published our revised content quality checklist so be sure to grab that, too. And thanks to you, Katy, you’ve been a wonderful co-host as ever.

Katy: Well, thank you for having me back, David. I think this was the one where I felt the most useful. So hopefully, I’ve given people some useful things to think about.

David: Absolutely. Listener remember, it could be your question we answer in a future episode. If you have a question for B2BQ&A to answer, email, a voice memo to [email protected]. Or find us on social media. Thank you, Katy. And thank you, listener. I’ll see you next time for another B2BQ&A. Until then, make good content. And remember, Hemingway may have said write drunk, edit sober, but he didn’t have HR to deal with.

David and Katy: Goodbye!

B2BQ&A 104: How can you keep your B2B content fresh?

Posted on by The Radix Team

Nobody likes B2B content that’s repetitive. It’s boring to write and – more importantly – it’s unlikely to be successful if your audience feels like they’ve heard it all before. But if you often have to write about the same products, services and ideas, keeping your content fresh and compelling is easier said than done.

It’s a problem B2B marketers and content creators face all the time. So we were delighted when Chelsea Groome of Fierce Content gave B2BQ&A the perfect excuse to go in search of an answer, by asking:

“If you’ve been working with a client for a long time and their product hasn’t changed much, how do you keep their content fresh?”

Not to brag, but we think we found the *perfect* expert to respond to this.

When you think of an (essentially) one-product B2B brand that still always has a mountain of relevant and valuable things to say, Xero has to be right up there. And Content Strategy Lead Richard Allardice (or “Dice” to his friends) agreed to dive into what marketers and writers need to keep in mind… with bonus insights from his colleagues Amy Stephens and Sarah Webb.

Joining us as guest co-host this month (and sharing some great insights of her own) is Kate Terry, Head of Demand at Turtl. Kate gives her perspective on personalising content down to granular levels and in using analytics and insights to constantly update and improve content.

We also have the joy of hearing from Claire Goodfellow, a copywriter at Radix, for the copywriting tip of the month. Stay tuned to learn the secret to clear, concise sentences.

You’ll find a full transcript of our podcast at the end of this post.

So, just how do you keep B2B content fresh?

Between Dice, his colleagues, and Kate, there’s plenty of advice in this episode. Here’s a handful of suggestions…

1. Consider the wider landscape

Your product might not change much, but the challenges your target audience face probably do. So think about the wider context: where, how, and why your product is used.

“Your product isn’t the only thing that changes,” says Dice. “The people who use your product will change; what they understand will change; things in the world will change.”

Remember, the information your customers need extends beyond your specific product. So if you’re struggling to keep your content fresh, consider angles that might be indirectly related to your main focus. Use your organisation’s broader sector expertise, and you’ll likely build up a relationship of trust between your audience and your brand.

2. Lose the “publish and done” mindset

With all the work that goes into creating a content piece, it’s easy to get into the habit of publishing, promoting, then moving on to the next one. But often, digital content can be updated after the fact – so even after you’ve published it’s always a live project.

Kate sees Turtl users doing exactly this. She remarks: “We see people doing things like changing the order of the content, changing the title, trying out different tests to see how the changes make an impact on readership.”

Dice goes further, and says every content team of a certain size needs to have someone who is specifically tasked with revisiting each piece, and ensuring it’s always up to date.

3. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

Having said all this, it’s worth remembering you’ll likely get bored of your content before your audience does. Not everything needs to be improved, and not always in the way you might think. So look at the data, and understand what’s working.

“Sometimes the answer is ‘no’,” comments Dice. “Sometimes a feature has not changed, we’ve written it up really well and it works… But things change around that; the context changes. Your company’s style might change, and you might want to weave that back in because otherwise that piece of content is going to start to sound a bit stilted in comparison.”

In this episode, you’ll find…

1:00 – We welcome our co-host Kate Terry, Head of Demand at Turtl

4:00 – We put Chelsea Groome’s question to Dice

22:55 – Kate and David share their highlights and thoughts

28:10 – Our copywriting tip of the month: write succinctly

Have you got a question for B2BQ&A?

We’re here to help! Send us a voice memo at [email protected]. And if there are any other thoughts you’d like to share, you can find us on LinkedIn, or tweet at us: @radixcom.

How to listen

Credits

  • Firstly, thank you to Kate Terry, for all the insight you shared as co-host.
  • Thanks to Chelsea Groome, for your brilliant question.
  • A massive thank you to Dice, Sarah Webb and Amy Stephens for giving us the benefit of your experience.
  • And Claire Goodfellow, thank you for that essential copywriting tip of the month.

Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash.

Transcript: B2BQ&A 104: How can you keep B2B content fresh?

Chelsea Groome: If you’ve been working with a client for a long time and their product or position hasn’t changed much, how do you keep their content fresh?

Kate Terry: That’s a great question. Let’s ask Dice from Xero.

David McGuire: Hello listener, you are very welcome to B2BQ&A, the podcast where we go in search of an answer to your question about B2B content writing. This is episode 104.

Kate: In a moment, we’ll ask Xero’s Content Strategy Lead Richard Allardice, or Dice to his friends how you keep content fresh when you only have one product. And later we’ll get a copywriting tip of the month from junior copywriter, Claire Goodfellow.

David: Before that some introductions, my name is David McGuire. I’m Creative Director at Radix Communications, the B2B writing agency. And this month, our guest co-host is Turtl’s Head of Demand, Kate Terry. Kate, thanks for joining us.

Kate: Hey, David, thanks for having me today. It’s really great to be here.

David: Oh, it’s fantastic to have you here as guest co-host. Lots of change going on a Turtl and kind of new products and surfaces and things, I understand, lots for you to do.

Kate: Yeah, a lot to do. That’s for sure. We’re in kind of high growth mode right now. So we’re really excited about some of the new product developments that have come out and new ways that we can help people make amazing and engaging B2B content. So yeah, lots coming out of Turtl these days, but all good stuff.

David: Yeah, we talk about Turtl a lot on this show. Listener, there’s no kind of affiliate relationship going on, I promise you. But there’s lots of new things there where there’s kind of more like a personalization, kind of ABM type vibe to it now.

Kate: Yeah, that’s right. So what you can do with Turtl is actually personalise your content at scale down to the individual or account level and you can use all of your data and insight and intent data you have, connect that up and turn that into a really automated process. So it’s a huge leap forward if you’re interested in personalising content down to your end user and then getting data back from them on how they’re engaging and kind of getting really granular account insight.

David: Yeah, I mean, anything that contributes to the death of the PDF is okay in my book. Kate, in your first official duty as guest co-host, would you mind telling the listener how they can get in touch with us?

Kate: I’d be delighted. So listener, if you have any comments or suggestions, you can find Radix on LinkedIn or Twitter @radixcom. Or if you want us to answer your question on a future episode, record a quick voice note and send it by email: [email protected]

David: That’s brilliantly done. Thank you very much.

Kate: Right, it’s time to hear this month’s question. So who do we have?

Chelsea: Hello, this is Chelsea Groome from Fierce Content. And my question is, if you’ve been working with a client for a long time, and their product or position hasn’t changed much, how do you keep their content fresh?

David: Thanks, Chelsea. That’s an important question and something copywriters and marketers have to think about a lot. Though, if it’s okay with you we’ll broaden the terms from talking about just clients, so we can help our in-house listeners too. I’m chuffed to say I got my absolute first pick to answer this question. Because when I think of a brand that’s created a mountain of really fresh content around essentially one product, I think of Xero.

So I was knocked out when their Content Strategy Lead, Dice agreed to tell us how they do it. This is a little longer than one of our usual interviews, but he had so much good stuff to say I think you’re going to want to hear it. I started by asking Dice Chelsea’s question: just how do you keep content fresh?

Dice: Yeah, so I spent a bit of time thinking about this, it in some ways does depend on the size of the company, or the size of the client you’re working with. Because one thing that you know, I’ve experience lately working in a bigger place is that to keep something fresh, it needs to be someone’s job. So someone needs to be tasked with looking after that page or that product or keeping across what’s changing needs to be someone’s responsibility.

And that sounds like a really, you know, obvious thing, but a lot of the time, you know, companies I’ve worked with in the past sometimes people don’t do that. They put something out there excited. It goes out into the world, but it’s not someone’s job to look back and say, “How’s that thing going and does it need changing, and does it need improving?” So I think it’s really important to make it someone’s job to own it, be responsible for it and have the clout to be able to change it.

And another really good point that Amy Stephens who’s a Content Strategist on my team made as well, when we were talking about this, is that part of that job needs to be helping your organisation or your company be comfortable with making changes over time.

So sometimes, if you are working with a client or a company, and there’s a lot of approvals, a lot of review needed, that process is really unwieldy, there’s a bit of a reluctance to change it. Now that we’ve said it live, we don’t want to go back over that again. So part of the job of owning it is to prepare your company or client for the fact that things need to change and be flexible and, and adapt to what’s happening out in the world or happening with your product.

And I guess the other part of that is that it’s not just enough to be someone’s job, that someone needs to be watching regularly, you need to be monitoring. And so what are you actually monitoring, before you put it out there, you need to think about what is effectiveness or success going to mean for this particular thing, and what kind of metrics might be looking at, and you actually need to go and look at them, you know, sometimes I think people, you know, rest on their laurels a little bit, put something out there, it’s beautiful in the moment. But don’t watch to see what happens.

The founder of AppSumo, a guy who I follow called Noah Kagan, he talks a lot about this idea of what you track will grow. So it’s not his own idea. It’s one that he adopted from someone else. But the idea is that if you’re looking at it, and you are paying attention to it, and you’re interested in the numbers, then they will grow because you will, you know, take action or do things, even if they’re minor to, to move those things onward. So what you track will grow, and I’d add to that what you track will improve. So if you are looking at it and monitoring it, then it’s going to get better, as long as you are doing your due diligence.

And I think that if it’s a product, that might mean checking in with the team, and forming a relationship with the team, who build the product, so that you can keep each other abreast of, for example, what’s changing with your target audience. So your product isn’t the only thing that changes, the people who are using your product will change, what they understand will change, things in the world will change.

A really good example of that for us, as a UK example, is Making Tax Digital. So that wasn’t a thing X number of years ago, but then it became a big UK government initiative. And it’s highly related to our product. And so we need to be talking about that, and being really up to date with what has been said about Making Tax Digital, because that’s what our target audience need to know in the hearing. And then they need more information about it.

So you need to be looking at it connected to that product team. So you know what changes are coming ahead of time, you don’t want to be behind there. And you need to be connected to your audience, you need to be talking to them and finding out what they are hearing or not understanding, not just to do with your product, but to do with the landscape. You know, what else? What else is entering that information landscape that they might need to know? Or you might need to adapt according to.

David: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s the product, but it’s also the context in how it gets used and who’s using it and what they’re using it for. And those kinds of things on the kind of copy level, if something is not changing that much like, you know, say there’s a feature in Xero, that’s a popular feature, it’s always been there, and it’ll always will. Is that something where you would change, just kind of on the writing, on a copy level, you’d change up how you write about it regularly? Or is it something where you’re kind of refining it, you’re testing and learning? And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and you can kind of you know, afford to talk about the same thing that the same way.

Dice: I think that there’s something really important in the “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” thing that you just said. There’s a temptation, I think, when it’s your job to write or refine – or if you’re trying to get work with a client, you know, because you are inherently motivated to get more jobs and do more work – to make change, yeah, to change things and tweak things and carry on.

And I think that impulse is a good one. Because most of the time things can be improved. You know, perfection is hard to achieve. What does perfection even mean? You can improve things but I think that there’s also something that people need to think about is that it doesn’t need to change. Sometimes the answer is no, sometimes it’s a feature that has long acted in the same way, has not changed. We’ve written it up really well and it works.

But you know, like I said, things change around, that the context changes. So your company’s style might change, you might change some things in your style guide, words that you might use or phrases you might use or a proposition or some nicety of language that you might start to use. And you might want to weave that back in. Because otherwise, if you don’t, that piece of content, even if the product stays the same, it’s going to start to sound a bit stilted in comparison to the other stuff.

So what can happen is on a bigger website, the top line pages, the landing pages, the home page, get the latest and greatest sort of brand propositions and feel really fun, if that’s the tone of voice for your company will feel really fresh, out of the deep pages of the product that we built 10 years ago, we generally not specifically Xero, you know, doesn’t have that same tone or the same messaging. And so while the facts or the accuracy might stay the same, the way you talk about it, your tone of voice, and your flow, and your style might need to change as well.

The other thing that happens in a large company is that writers change. So you know, the team of writers or the writer that worked on something a year ago might have changed. And so that’s where, again, this depends on the size of the company, the role of an editor really comes in when you’re looking at your publication, and you’re looking for that evenness.

So I’m the editor, I’m looking at this publication. I often try to think of a website as a publication and you know, having and editor who’s always looking at their publication, and to try and keep it as fresh and interesting. And what have we published before can we bring to the front? What are we trying to push out there that’s new? But you also don’t want to have unevenness, where part of your website is losing connection with what people need, and a part of it is really well connected.

So that might be slightly long-winded answer to your question. But essentially, like I think, yes, you would be careful, you want to just change stuff for the sake of it. And, but you also want to make sure that when new writers come in, and new ideas come in that you actually allow those to come to the surface.

So if a new writer comes in and provides a new perspective on a page, maybe incidentally, “Hey, I’ve just been looking at this page, you’re my colleague, I see that you wrote this a year ago, I think it’s awesome. But I think that, you know, we’re kind of moving to the style of shorter sentences, more clipped. And some of these longer sentences, you know, like, there’s a bit of research out there now that says that people find that kind of hard to read in a digital context. So like, how about we update that based on this new style guide entry we have now which says, we’re trying to aim for sentences of 20 or fewer words.”

Kind of an abstract example. But all of those things together, yes, you should be looking at them and monitoring them. But the level of change should be based on, you know, a few things, including whether it’ll have any impact and whether it’s actually needed.

David:  One of the things that really strikes me about Xero is that in terms of the content that you cover, the field of subject seems to be really pretty broad, but the audience seems to be really clearly defined. So it feels like almost anything that you might want to know about running a small business successfully, you can find on the Xero website. There’s a lot of small business information on there, obviously, there’s, you know, a lot of partner stuff as well.

Is that kind of a conscious thing to kind of own that space, because a lot of your customers are kind of, you know, owner/managers of businesses, so to kind of be a one stop shop like that?

Dice: Yeah, Xero’s business and accounting software, and it does a lot of stuff. You can add any number of, you know, 1000 things to it, you can integrate, almost, you know, so many things with it. And I think that I guess one of the challenges probably in the early days is when people hear accounting, with it comes with some perceptions for a small business person, genuinely of perhaps fear or concern or you know, or a lack of understanding.

So I think what’s really important if you are trying to help people use or promote or get people to use your product, if it’s an area that people may be a little bit anxious about or unsure about, you need to build up trust and authority you need to help people understand or see or get the feeling that you know what you’re talking about.

And so you’re right on the website, there’s a lot of information about our particular features because it’s a very featured product. There are a lot of things that it does. But the other thing we need to do is to help – we’re going back to that idea of the context of that landscape. The landscape in which we exist as a small business, trying to keep across the records and the finances, and you know, it’s a busy time, there’s a lot going on when you’re running a small business, or if they’re an accountant trying to make sure that they are keeping a record so when it comes to them to do their returns, it’s not, you know, problematic.

And so the landscape is already a complicated one, you’re running a business, it’s a lot going on. And so what we need to be able to do, and the content we provide is to assure people, “Hey, we’ve got some products that can help you out, use this product for X thing, we’ve got that covered. Hey, if you are a small business, and you’re trying to run your business, here’s how we can help you do that, here’s how you can choose a business name or here’s how you start a business in this particular country”. And, you know, with the side benefit that if you use Xero that will actually be easier as well. So it is a conscious thing.

So Xero, like many other companies, you know, take one of these strategies on board, which is to both inform people on their product, promote it, and help people within the wider landscape in which they work.

So really, like that depth of content is about generating trust, it’s also about generating awareness. So I might know about the company Xero, and I might go look for it. But I might not know about Xero, I might just have a problem. So my problem is, when I go to my accountant, at the end of the financial year, with a plastic bag full of receipts, they get a little bit irate with me, and suggested that I do something more digitally and modern focused. And so the problem is, you know, how do I do accounting? Or like, how do I keep my record straight, and so they know their problem, they don’t know that we that we have a solution for it.

So if they are looking for that problem, and then we would like to help them with that problem, we would also like them to know that we are a good solution to their problems. So you know that is why, you know, on a website like Xero’s, and this is not a strategy specific to us. You see that different content because we’re trying to solve the “do you know about a product? What does that product do?” problem or question, answer their question, but also answer the like, the use case question of like, “I have this life or business challenge, can you help me out with that?”

David: And there are so many challenges involved in running… I guess that also – going back to the original question – gives you loads of space to find ideas and find new and interesting and fresh perspectives and things to say.

Dice: Yes, yes. Like I think there are lots of different ways to help people feel assured, or calmer or feel like their financial records are taken care of. But also, it’s also worth saying that there are like really classic common things as well, that don’t really change that much.

For example, in these, when it comes to surprise, anybody starting a small business from a single person operation through to 10,20,30, 40 people, like they’re really really busy, you know, there’s just a lot going on, and they don’t have a lot of time, and that I don’t have a lot of time, it’s not something specific to us or our product, it’s just a, like a business challenge. And a difficult thing, because there’s just so much going on.

And in the beginning, you’re really just winging it, you know, especially if you’re just one person. And so while yes, we can put a different spin on or a fresh angle on being across things and being up to date and being ready for tax time. And we do that regularly. Some problems, or some challenges are kind of evergreen, which is that if you’re a business person, you are time poor. And so that’s kind of like a thematic thread that might go through a lot of content for any company publishing for small businesses, including ours.

And so like you kind of have this sort of like deep themes, and then on top of that, you might have a fresh angle. The latest campaign the New Zealand based one is taking tax out of the sort of too-hard basket, their angle is that, you know, people that get feel like taxes and returns are complicated and too hard. And you know, what we are saying is that doesn’t need to be you know, and so that’s, you know, it’s a fresh angle, but on a classic take, which is: tax is complicated. You are busy. We can help you.

David: Yeah. So you’ve been talking with your team. What other practical tips have you got for the listener about how they could keep their content fresh?

Dice: Sure. Okay, so, a couple of great points from Sarah Webb and Amy Stephens on my team. Amy talked a little bit about not just understanding your target audience but understanding the industry,  you know, the wider industry and what’s happening in that area. So what is changing in terms of the words that are used, what is changing in terms of the language or the themes that are emerging in terms of the technology, and what’s available to people.

So obviously, you need to be aware of that as a business where your business sits in there anyway. But as a person dealing with words, you need to also be listening for what language is changing. So you can appear up to date and modern and fresh, as you say.

Another good point that Sarah and my team made was you have to think about being proactive and reactive. So proactive measures of keeping fresh, going out and finding out industry trends, talking to users, monitoring different sources of data. So this is an interesting one that we could do a whole podcast on, which is, how do I listen or understand what people are saying.

So it’s things like looking in search logs, or looking at surveys or looking at other data that people have created, gathered other research that people have done, to understand what people are thinking, what their mental models are, what they don’t understand. So that’s proactively understanding your audience.

And then there’s some reactive stuff, which is when people write to you or say something to you, or you hear customer feedback. And sometimes that customer feedback depending on the size of the company won’t necessarily come directly to you. So you might need to, you know, ask around, is there a source of customer feedback? Do we do surveys, do we have any NPS data, any NPS feedback that we might make use of that’s really…? You want to get that pipeline of information coming towards you, or go and find it.

And also, in terms of being reactive, or proactive, you need to keep across, if you’re not writing everything on your website, which often is not the case. Or if it’s small, maybe you are, you need to be looking across what’s going on everywhere else and making connections.

So if someone else is running the blog, and you’re working on the feature information, you need to make sure that you are sharing notes, and putting things out accordingly so that you are not publishing disparate information, and that actually, they complement each other, you know, so things appear smooth, so that it makes sense when someone lands one in one place versus another and that as a person goes between them it feels coherent, and created deliberately.

David: That’s awesome. Dice, if people want to get more wisdom from you on content, and copy and more stuff like this, where’s the best place for them to hear from you?

Dice: If you have a question, and you want to reach out to me, feel free to follow me on LinkedIn and drop me a message. Always happy to chat.

David: Thanks, Dice for giving us such a full and well-thought-out answer. And thanks to your colleagues to Sarah and Amy, hello to you. Plus, thanks, Chelsea, of course for asking the question in the first place. Kate, there’s a lot in there. Could you pick out something that stood out for you?

Kate: Yeah, definitely. I really liked everything that Dice was saying. And one thing that I think is particularly interesting is this idea that your product isn’t the only thing that changes, I think it’s weirdly easy to forget that if you’re a team who actually is quite focused on what you’re doing, and what you’re bringing to market, and that’s a great place to be in, especially for myself, in demand working with sales, they’re really interested in what exactly we want to say about our product.

But I think you know, from a marketing and content perspective, it’s really important to remember the context that your audience is in, that the individuals you’re speaking to are in. And I really liked that focus that he had on kind of, you know, understanding the context and keeping up with the changes that are happening in the space that everyone’s operating in.

David: Sure. I mean, so much of it is about defining the space where you’re going to write content and understanding what your clients and your customers and prospects want to know about that you know about, as well, you know. For them, it’s, you know, it’s how to run a small business a lot of the time or, you know, and other elements of that.

And then I get, you know, for Turtl, you know, there’s a lot in there about just kind of the psychology of content, and that stuff that people will find interesting. I think one of the things also that I found interesting about Chelsea’s question is where she was saying, “how do I keep it fresh, I keep writing about the same thing all the time”.

And obviously, if you’re writing about the same thing all day, every day, but somebody is reading, once in a while, maybe the stuff doesn’t get as stale as quickly as you think. And maybe you don’t need to change it as quickly as you think. And that was one of the things that I thought was interesting. We’re always more focused on our stuff being the same all the time than perhaps the audience is.

Kate: I think that’s so true. And it’s again, such as easy mistake to make where because it’s not fresh to you, you assume that it’s not fresh to your reader, when actually, it might be working just as well as it did on day one. So I liked what he said about understanding what you do need to change and you know, reinvent and make sure it’s keeping up to date.

But actually, there’s some things that you might not necessarily need to change. So that kind of links up as well to understanding the data and making sure that you are actually tracking what is still working, what is still engaging people versus what might have dropped off and is no longer really resonating with your audience.

David: For a lot of people, of course, it’s all about the content production. And then you know, when you publish the piece that feels like the end of it, and you know, what Dice was saying about having someone whose job it is to go back and check.

One of the things that can be really interesting that you might have a perspective on is, obviously Turtl is a format that you can keep changing stuff live, after you’ve published it. And I’m kind of interested, do people actually go back and do that? Or do they have this attitude that once it’s done, it’s done and they’re on to the next thing?

Kate: Yes, people definitely go back and change and update and tweak their content. It’s something that we really encourage our customers to do. And it’s something where they’ve never really had access to the data to be able to do that in a meaningful way. So it’s pretty exciting, because it gives you a new way of working where instead of, you know, we like to think about the kind of old school publication mindset versus this more evergreen mindset.

And it actually changes the way you think about content all the way from when you’re creating it down to when you publish it, because if you publish it with the idea that you can go back and update it in mind, you’re going to have more, you know, it just informs how you actually write it, the kind of way that you write it, maybe in a way that you can either go back and regularly update it to keep it fresh, or just recognising it as like a pillar piece of content that you can create other things off the back of.

So what we see is people doing things like changing the order of the content, changing the title, trying out different tests, where they’ll run and see how different changes make an impact on readership and on the different pieces of the content that people engage with.

And even things like images, you know, you can really get as granular as you want to with testing things out. But one of the things we really like to talk about is this evergreen strategy, and how can you actually repurpose the content you already have and make the most of it?

David: Yeah, I think that’s probably a whole different podcast there. But that change in mindset from publication and done, to “this is a thing that’s live and your contents a thing that you have to keep working on”. I think some people… “I’ve not got time to write the stuff that I’ve got to write now, let alone keep it up to date!” But, you know, that’s absolutely the case that now that we’re in the digital world, there’s no reason for it to be one and done, I guess.

Kate: Yeah, exactly. Now it’s time to hear our copywriting tip of the month. So it’s from a Junior Copywriter at Radix, Claire Goodfellow.

Claire Goodfellow: Hi, I’m Claire, a Junior Copywriter at Radix. And my favourite copywriting tip is to use fewer words. Read over your sentences and ask yourself, can I say the same thing in less words? The chances are that if you can, it will make your writing clearer, more readable, and more concise.

Kate: Thanks, Claire. I love that tip. Brevity is so important. And it’s really great advice that I’ll pass along to my team as well.

David: I’m sorry to say that it’s all we have time for this episode – already! Kate, please would you thank this month’s contributors.

Kate: I would love to so thank you to Chelsea for such an awesome question. And of course, to Dice for answering it with help from Sarah and Amy, and thanks to Claire for the great copywriting tip.

David: And thank you, Kate, you’ve been an excellent co-host. It’s like you do this all the time. I hope it hasn’t been too painful.

Kate: Not too painful, no. Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed it and learned a few great tips to take away as well.

David: Oh, thank you. It’s great to have you here. Listener, remember it could be your question we answer in a future episode. If you have a question for B2BQ&A to answer email a voice memo to [email protected]. Or find us on social media.

I’ll see you next month for another B2BQ&A when we will try to answer the question: how do you measure content quality? Until then, make good content and remember, do one thing every day that scares you. BOO! There; there’s today’s. You’re welcome.

Kate and David: Goodbye!

 

B2BQ&A 103: What was the best B2B content of 2021?

Posted on by The Radix Team

This month’s B2B content question comes not from one of our lovely listeners, but from us here at Radix. And if you’re looking for content marketing inspiration, you’re in the right place – because we asked you: What was the best B2B content of 2021?

In our quest to find the answer, we invited you to vote for your favourites among eleven great content examples, in three semi-final categories:

  • Best short-form or standalone content
  • Best long-form white paper or report
  • Best B2B content programme or hub

The winner of each category went through to the grand final. But who did you vote as your overall champion?

In this podcast, we reveal the results – with expert analysis from our shortlisting panel: Atlassian‘s Content Strategy Lead for Software Teams, Ashley Faus; Nadya Khoja, Head of Content Strategy at Boast.AI; and me, David McGuire, Creative Director here at Radix Communications.

We also hear bonus nominations from the fabulous Doug Kessler, Luan Wise, and John Espirian.

You can listen to the podcast in full now, or read the transcript at the end of this post.

Inspiration and ideas: what can we learn from this year’s best content?

Both Nadya and Ashley had some interesting thoughts to share based on the best content shortlist, which could be useful for anyone planning their content for 2022.

Great content starts with humanity

Content needs to speak to the individual if it’s going to work. “Maybe a few years ago, B2B was focused on clunky data reports and heavy text,” says Nadya. “Not a lot of focus on engagement, or thinking about your audience as an individual human. So it was refreshing to see how creative this content was.”

Ashley agrees: “I feel like the tide is finally starting to shift where people remember that B2B does not mean you’re selling a faceless brand to a faceless brand. There’s humans behind the brands, and humans on the other side of the screen. What we’re seeing with the shortlist this year is, hey, if you’re going to do B2B content, and you want to be competitive, you have to think about those humans behind the screen. Because there’s some pretty stiff competition.”

Credit the audience with some intelligence

In B2B, your reader is often an expert in their job, so recognise that in your content. But that doesn’t mean your content shouldn’t be easy to digest.

Ashley says: “All of these finalists treat their audience like they’re smart. They know they’re not going to trick anybody into buying anything. And so they make it very clear and very easy for the reader to consume content, get educated, and get empowered.”

Copy and visuals need to work together

It’s no longer enough for your content to be just well written, or well designed. Words and images need to work together. “You have to be able to really marry the type of story you’re telling to the design and create that visual narrative,” says Nadya.

This is even the case for traditionally less-visual formats. “You wouldn’t normally think of a white paper or report as having visually engaging elements,” Ashley adds. “But all our finalists in that category were really well designed.”

White papers and reports need a story to tell

As well as presenting factual information, the best long-form content helps the reader by offering a clear narrative structure or angle.

“When you think about white papers,” Nadya suggests, “You think about a faceless, gated piece of content. But the finalists were really interesting; they provided a unique angle on the data, rather than just a bunch of numbers. The purpose of the white paper is really telling that story.”

Don’t overlook the power of a strong title

Without giving away too many spoilers, both our experts recognised the impact of a strong title in the voting. “Having really good copy and an engaging title can do a lot more than really great content alone,” comments Nadya.

Ashley concludes: “There’s a lot to be said for surprising and delighting the audience.”

In this episode, you’ll find…

1:00 – We welcome our guests, Ashley Faus and Nadya Khoja, to B2BQ&A

2:20 – What does this year’s shortlist tell us about the state of B2B content?

4:10 – Best short-form or standalone content

8:10 – Best white paper or research report

12:10 – Best B2B content programme or hub

18:40 – Ashley and Nadya share their key takeaways. What can we learn?

20:30 – The Grand Final: we reveal the best B2B content of 2021, as voted by you

Have you got a question for B2BQ&A?

We can get you the answer!

Send us a voice memo at [email protected]. And if there are any other thoughts you’d like to share, you can find us on LinkedIn, or tweet at us: @radixcom.

How to listen

Credits

  • Firstly, a big thank you to our expert panellists Ashley Faus and Nadya Khoja, for all your help collating the shortlist, hosting the voting, and sharing your wisdom.
  • Thanks to Doug Kessler, Luan Wise and John Espirian for telling us your favourite B2B content of 2021 – you’ve given us some great inspiration.
  • And last but not least, thank you to everyone who nominated and voted this year! We can’t wait to see what you come up with in 2022.

Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash.

Transcript: B2BQ&A 103: What was the best B2B content of 2021?

David McGuire: What was the best B2B content of 2021?

Ashley Faus: That’s a great question. Let’s ask the audience!

David: Hello, listener; you are extraordinarily welcome to a special end-of-year edition of B2BQ&A. Usually, this is the podcast that goes in search for an answer to your question about B2B content. But this time, we’re asking the question, you’ve provided an answer, and in the next few minutes, we’ll crown 2021’s best B2B content. We’ll discuss the nominees with two brilliant guests and hear some content nominations from friends of the show. But before all of that, some introductions. My name is David McGuire, I’m Creative Director at Radix Communications, the B2B tech writing agency. And I’m delighted to say that I’m joined by the wonderful panellists who selected the shortlist for this year’s best B2B content. We have Ashley Faus, Atlassian’s Content Strategy Lead for Software Teams. Hi, Ashley.

Ashley: Hey, good to be here. Excited to talk content.

David: And we have the Head of Content Strategy at Boast.ai, Nadya Khoja. Hi, Nadya.

Nadya Khoja: Hey, how’s it going? Excited to be here as well.

David: It’s amazing to have you both here. Thank you so much for dialling in from across the Atlantic and different time zones. I imagine the weather’s very different where you both are at the moment as well. Listener, if you want to have your say on the shortlist, or if there’s any great content you think we’ve missed you can, as always, find Radix Communications on LinkedIn or you can tweet at us @radixcom. Or if you want us to answer your question on a future episode, record a quick voice note and send it by email: [email protected].

Okay, so let’s get on with it. So before we get into the first category, let’s talk about the shortlist overall. This has been another bumper year for B2B content in terms of quantity. All the experienced writers I know have been really busy. But has that translated into quality? What do you think of the shortlist and content in general this year? Nadya?

Nadya: I was pretty impressed by the shortlist of content. I think typically when you think of B2B content, or at least maybe a few years ago, this was more of the case. But a lot of B2B was heavily focused on, you know, the clunky data reports without like, heavy text, not a lot of imagery, not a lot of focus on engagement, or actually, you know, thinking of your audience as an individual human that’s reading it, and it was very targeted towards like, the bigger brand itself. So it was refreshing to see the shortlist and see how creative some of the B2B content and just like the content structuring itself was, a lot of really great stuff came out of that.

David: Sure. And what do you think, Ashley?

Ashley: Yeah, I agree. I feel like the tide is finally starting to shift where people remember that B2B does not mean that you’re selling a faceless brand to a faceless brand. There’s humans behind the brands. There’s humans on the other side of the screen. And so I think that what we’re seeing with the shortlist this year is really starting to show, hey, if you’re going to do B2B content, and you want to be competitive, you have to think about the humans behind the screen. And there’s some pretty stiff competition. And I also think that putting these things into more of a hub, not just oh, here’s one experimental piece of creative content, but it’s really a mindset shift to focus on the audience. I think that’s what this year’s shortlist demonstrates.

David: Amazing. Well, let’s jump in then, to the first of our three semi-finals. It’s the best short-form or standalone piece of B2B content. We had four nominees in this category: Assure Hedge’s blog post, “The Chicken McNuggets’ secret ingredient is not what you think…”, Postmark’s digital comic “Postmark Express: Journey to the Inbox”, Telenet’s interactive piece “Faites le test: Quel type d’entrepreneur êtes-vous en matière de wifi?” and Venngage’s infographic “8 Graphic Design Trends that Will Define 2022”. Ashley, what stood out in this category for you?

Ashley: Oh man, so many things. I actually really enjoyed walking through this category. I think that all of them had really great visuals, they were all connected, even if they were a standalone piece of content in terms of like a blog post, but it was very clear that it was part of a larger strategy. The Assure Hedge blog post, you would never think that, you know, a hedge fund would have an interesting read. And you would also never think that it would be about a chicken nugget. And so I think that the surprise of that was just really delightful. And then obviously serves their audience really well and helps them tell their story about their clients. Same thing with the Postmark Express, like, why would you make a webcomic? How fascinating. And then obviously, Venngage, you know, everything, the infographics really step up the game for data clarity and data storytelling, not just from a design standpoint, but really making it clear.

David: Absolutely. Nadya, was there one or more that stood out to you or anything that you kind of took away from the shortlist?

Nadya: Yeah, I think the really interesting thing about this shortlist is even the one piece that was a blog post didn’t really, like, it was a very unique blog post. And I think when we think of a short-form piece of content, it’s rare that people will create, you know, a comic, for instance, like that’s not the first thing that comes to mind. Quizzes, sure enough. But I think yeah, more interactive, more kind of these smaller snippets of engagement that tell a bigger story, let the audience pull away something that they can draw their own conclusions from is something that came across from this section. Especially, yeah, the chicken nugget piece like a hedge fund talking about that, but even so, it wasn’t really about the recipe behind the chicken nugget, right. They were connecting it back to hedge funds. And I think I referred to this in the past as what I called mashup content. It’s like taking this trendy theme or something that’s a little bit more pop culture and tying it back into an adjacent theme is really useful in content. So I’m not surprised that they stood out in this category, too.

David: Yeah. So I think, you know, Nadya, you might have hinted at it there. But I mean, Ashley, you hosted this semi-final on your LinkedIn feed. We also added in the votes that were emailed direct to Radix. So would you care to confirm that the winner from this semi-final?

Ashley: I believe it was Assure Hedge – the story of the Chicken McNugget.

David: It absolutely was. Congratulations Assure Hedge goes through to the grand final. Now, let’s hear who Doug Kessler of Velocity Partners thought had the best content this year.

Doug Kessler: Favourite piece of b2b content this year. I like to book Ask Your Developer by Jeff Lawson. It’s called Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers. And when in the 21st century hardcover book people don’t think of that as B2B content. But it is and it’s excellent. It’s really well done. I also really like, second is the MailChimp, presents shows they do a whole series of shows that are really well made, and you got to envy that – it’s good shit.

David: Thanks, Doug. All the best to you for the new year. Our second semi-final is for the best long-form white paper or report. This one had three contenders: “Polarised perceptions of corporate health and wellness” by Aetna International, “The Electric Opportunity” by Kalibrate, and “Customer data breaches: when will you find out” by Skurio. Nadya, I know white papers are not always your favourite content. But you kindly agreed to host this poll for us on LinkedIn. I hesitate to ask, but what did you think of the nominees?

Nadya: Um, I was surprised. You know, I feel like when I think about white papers, I think about the faceless gated piece of content that no one is allowed to see unless you give an email, and then you’re really surprised by what you get. Luckily, in this case, at least for me, all of these pieces were ungated so I was able to actually take a look at them. And yeah, I was impressed with a lot of them. I think they were really interesting. And they provided a unique angle on the data rather than just presenting like a bunch of numbers to an audience. Which I think is the purpose of a white paper report is really presenting that angle and telling a bit of a story with the data that you collect. In most cases, these are the purposes behind white papers and reports. I think they all did a good job in doing that. I don’t know what you what your opinions were on them.

David: No, I agree. I’m biased because embarrassingly enough for the nominations, I had nothing to do with it, but I did write one of these. Ashley, can I ask if there are any that stood out for you though?

Ashley: Yeah, I actually thought this category was really strong. I think that you know, first having them on gated so people can actually get the story and speak to the humans I think is huge. This is another shift that I’m seeing in content, which I personally support a lot, which is the shift in mindset that just because somebody fills out a form, they are not necessarily a lead. They are not an MQL if they fill out ten forms, and so instead really empowering the reader by giving them the data in an actionable way. The other thing too, all of them were really well designed. And so it’s funny, you wouldn’t normally think of a white paper definitely, in some cases a report, as having some visually engaging elements. And so yeah, I was really impressed by everything in this category. I was having a hard time picking.

David: Sure. And that was something that we didn’t have to do that our audience did, by emailing us here at Radix and also voting on the poll on Nadya’s LinkedIn. So Nadya, could you confirm the winner for us, please?

Nadya: The winner was Kalibrate’s “The Electric Opportunity”.

David: Yeah, absolutely was, so congratulations to Kalibrate who join Assure Hedge in the final vote. But who did Marketing Consultant and Social Media Specialist Luan Wise think should have won this year?

Luan Wise: Hi, my name is Luan Wise. I’m a Marketing Consultant and specialist in social media, my favourite B2B content this year? Well, I think as the most downloaded app of 2021, Tiktok, it’s taking the world by storm. And at the same time, it’s presenting this whole new challenge to marketers who are questioning how they might get involved, and if they need to get involved. So I’m nominating Tiktok’s own in-app resource, the business Creative Hub, which shares the latest trends, advise best practices, it’s a really good quick cheat sheet for brands to get all the information that they need to build business cases, make decisions, and get inspired.

David: Thanks, Luan, we appreciate the nomination. So we come to our third and last semi-final, the best B2B content program or hub. There were four strong contenders here, the “Animalz blog”, Atlassian’s “Team Playbook”, Canvas web content “What will you design?” and “Realise Your Vision” by Sohonet. Ashley, Atlassian are in this category, of course. So perhaps I’d better ask you first, what stands out for you here?

Ashley: Sure. So I actually, this is another really strong category, I’m very glad I did not have to vote in the semi finals, because this category is great. So obviously, I have been a huge fan of Animalz and the team over there for a while. I think that they write smart content. It’s very intelligent. It has a direct path into sales without being salesy. They educate, they empower their audience. And then that makes you say, man, I need to work with these people. So they’re an agency. So love Animalz, I highly recommend people check out their work. Obviously, Atlassian I am a huge fan of the content that we create. The thing that’s so cool about the Team Playbook is that it’s really meant for teams and everything is actionable. And it’s completely ungated. And so we are very passionate about empowering teams. And so if you go to the Team Playbook, there’s a ton of stuff to help you run better retros, there’s great information about roles and responsibilities and helping teams work better together. So I love that. And then Canva again, I think that their whole experience to go from SEO into templates and then a very smart conversion path into product, without it being overly salesy. I thought they did a great job. I was actually not as big of a fan of the Sohonet hub. It was very…it was visually beautiful. But I was struggling a little bit to kind of see the tie ins that I think the rest had in this category. So again, I think that it’s strong, but I from my perspective, the other three were much stronger.

David: Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. I was personally I think a big fan of the way Sohonet just curated stuff with a very defined target audience and just curated stuff that would just be really really interesting for them. Nadya, what stood out for you about this category?

Nadya: Yeah, it’s funny because I mean, I’ve having been a part of with clients or with teams, rebuilding and redesigning the resources hubs or the content hubs for a lot of different sites, these are usually the ones that are my go to reference points. So I’m not surprised that in this category, I think yeah, I like the Animalz, blog. Animalzs have done such a great job with becoming a thought leader in content, through content. Because I remember when they first kind of were starting out, and they were kind of doing a little bit of guest posting here and there. And then just like kind of exploding into the leaders of how to do content. Same with Atlassian, like I referenced the Atlassian Content Hub and various different products through Atlassian as a resource as well. I have my own, like, my own biases around Canva versus Venngage. So I won’t speak too much to that. But yeah, I think I do agree with you, David on Sohonet. I think that it was extremely, it was very specifically curated, you could tell that they were targeting a really, really specific audience. I mean, I didn’t necessarily I’m not the right audience, for them. But visually appealing, I watched the video was really unique, like really showed the, they’re talking about the soul of a story. And I think they kind of captured that with the video. I think maybe in terms of like the technical element, it would be cool to have like a snippet of that play automatically so that people don’t have to click in and watch it, and they can just see that unfold. So there may be like some technical changes I would have made on there. But this particular page, I wouldn’t, I don’t know if I would call it a content hub, seemed more like a page. So I don’t know if it was in the right category. That just kind of highlighted the different partners are people that they were giving a shout out to. So that’s the one piece where I’m like, I don’t know if it made sense in the same category and if it really competed in the same way.

David: As some of the others. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this poll was fought out on my LinkedIn page, as well as in the Radix inbox, so I can officially congratulate Animalz whose blog has been awarded this year’s best content hub. And congratulations Animalz, you complete our lineup in the Grand Final. Before we move on, and see who won the winner of winners, who did the relentlessly helpful LinkedIn guru, John Espirian back as having the best content this year?

John Espirian: My vote for B2B content of the year would be for Gong, which is a revenue intelligence platform, firmly in the B2B market. And they are non-boring, and they really stand out on LinkedIn through their relatable posts. They do a lot of text only content, which, if you look at a lot of B2B tends to be very image focused or document focused. But this is very much text based. And it really works well. Their engagement is just off the scale, there’s no one particular post that I would pick out. It’s their consistency of presence, and the light heartedness of tone that really gets them a lot of attention and a lot of business. And surprise, surprise, they’ve now got almost 100,000 followers, they’re doing a really good job, and a great example to follow.

David: Thanks, John, and season’s greetings to you. So we have our grand final line up. We have Assure Hedge. We have Kalibrate. And we have Animalz. Voting was underway for a week on LinkedIn. And by email, I can confirm it closed a little while before we recorded this. Before we reveal those results, can I ask each of you for a final thought, something that the listener can learn from the shortlist this year? Nadya, can I come to you first?

Nadya: Yeah, I think there’s probably a few different elements here. Because we’re looking at different parts of content and different functions of content. I think the thing that stood out is, again, design and copy comes back to everything. So a lot of people say like copy is everything. I don’t think that’s it designs, not everything. I think you have to be able to really match and marry the type of story you’re telling to the design and create that visual communication, visual narrative. And that’s really the example behind everything that stood out here across each category. So that’s my takeaway.

David: Absolutely. Ashley for you, what can the listener learn from the shortlist this year?

Ashley: I think that the biggest thing is that all of these finalists treat their audience like the audience is smart. They know that they’re not going to trick anybody into buying anything. And so they make it very clear and very easy for them to consume content, get educated, get empowered, and oh, by the way, if you do need our services, or you do want to buy something from us, it’s very clear how you do that. But they’re not. It’s not a thinly veiled sales pitch. There’s no hard selling in any of the content, it’s basically just saying, we know our stuff so well and we respect you as an audience so much, that we know that when you’re ready, you’ll come to us and we can help you solve your problem. So I think that’s the biggest thing is just respecting the audience, and moving away from such a hard sell for content.

David: Amen to that. Thank you. Thank you so much both for the takeaways there. And for all the help you’ve given us in putting the shortlist and the vote together this year. It’s very much appreciated. So it’s time to reveal the final results. So the combination of the email vote and the LinkedIn poll. I think we could probably agree that all three of the finalists would have been a worthy winner. But this is the bit where they’re on tenterhooks, so according to the audience, in third place, we have Animalz.

Ashley: I’m like.. I thought.. I would have put Animalz as like first or second. Again, Kalibrate was great, but I’m surprised.

Nadya: I’m surprised too

David: Well, it’s comes down to the vote. In second place, we have Kalibrate with “The Electric Opportunity”. Which means that the winner, and this year’s best b2b content as voted for by our audience is…

Assure Hedge with their blog post, “The Chicken McNuggets’ secret ingredient is not what you think…” There you have it. It’s a surprising one. But that’s officially the best content of the year, according to the audience. What do you think? Happy surprised? How do you how’s that make you feel?

Nadya: I’m not surprised that they won. Especially when you give people like a short list of titles, people are going to click – it’s clickbaity, right to so people probably clicked on that first, they probably read it in its entirety, eventually get through the rest of the list. And they’re like, so that’s part of one of the reasons I think that you know, having a really good, really good copy and a really engaging title can do a lot more than just having a really great piece of content.

David: Oh, a title is so important. You know, so much of the of the time of a copywriter should be spent on the title and the first few lines. Ashely, how about how about you?

Ashley: Yeah, I agree with Nadya, I think I think the fact that the title was so quippy and the story was so unexpected. I think the other interesting thing is that because it was very unexpected, like the other two, you can kind of see the thread of what their goals are and how they’re positioning themselves as thought leaders and how that directly ties to business. And so I think that Assure Hedge all the way around. It was just kind of like, oh, this is how interesting. And so I think there’s a lot to be said for surprising and delighting the audience.

David: Absolutely. I don’t think that ever gets old. And there you have it. The best B2B content of 2021 is Azzure Hedge. Huge thanks to you, Ashley and Nadya for your time today and for all that you’ve done to bring all this together. Thanks also to everyone who nominated to everyone who voted and to all the nominees. There’s so much good stuff to learn from in this shortlist. Please remember listener it could be your question that we answer in a future episode.

If you have a question for B2BQ&A to answer, email, a voice memo to [email protected]. Or find us on social media.

David: I’ll see you next month for another B2BQ&A, when we’ll be trying to answer the eternal question: how would you keep your content fresh when you’re writing about the same subject all the time? Until then, make good content, have a wonderful festive season, whatever and however you celebrate, and remember, winning is a bit like old age, it isn’t everything but it’s certainly better than the alternative. Nadya, thank you so much. And goodbye to you.

Nadya: Thank you so much for having me. It was nice to be here. Take care.

David: Absolute pleasure. And thank you to Ashley. Thank you ever so much.

Ashley: Yeah, this was super fun. I’m glad we crowned a winner for this year’s best content.

David: And thank you listener Take care. Bye bye.

B2BQ&A 102: Why is there so little humour in B2B content?

Posted on by The Radix Team

This month’s B2B content question comes from Alistair Ross, who wants to know: “Why is there so little humour in B2B content?”

It’s a fair question. At a time when everyone in B2B is talking about the importance of emotion and brand likeability, content in the sector seems to be getting more and more serious. In fact, 69% of our pals on LinkedIn said there’s less funny content now than there used to be.

To answer Alistair’s question, we’ve enlisted comedian and copywriter Lianna Patch, an expert in using humour to boost conversion rates.

As well as considering why funny content feels so scary, Lianna shares some tips to help you avoid potential pitfalls and get off to a great start.

We also get a perspective from this month’s guest co-host, Radix Senior Copywriter Katy Eddy, and hear a copywriting tip of the month from our Head of Copy, Matt Godfrey – who tells us how to write a great opening line to get readers hooked.

You’ll find a full transcript of the episode at the end of this post.

Funny B2B content: where should you begin?

If you think about it, there’s a lot about work which is kind of ridiculous. So it’s no wonder Lianna thinks there’s plenty of scope for B2B marketers to use humour to good effect. Helpfully, she shared three tips to help you do it well:

1. Emails are a safe place to start

If you’re experimenting with humour, emails are a good place to begin. It’s a personal space where you’re building a one-to-one relationship with your reader, and gives you the chance to warm things up before reaching for the jokes. First, flex your tone a little – making it friendlier and less formal – so when you introduce humour it feels more natural, and less of a shock.

2. Observational humour works well – especially in B2B

Observational humour is one of the safest styles, because neither you nor the reader are the butt of the joke. Instead, you’re commenting on something you can both observe – whether it’s a pop culture reference, or something about the industry you’re writing for. If you can laugh together at an aspect of the job, it shows you understand how they’re feeling.

3. Don’t make a joke in isolation; help your reader too

Humour can be a powerful way to defuse a difficult situation. But you can’t leave it there, or your reader will feel like the joke’s on them. Instead, end your communication by explaining, very clearly, how you’re going to help. As Lianna puts it: “I know you’ve been waiting a thousand lifetimes for this delivery – so in the meantime, here’s what we can do…”

In this episode, you’ll find…

1:00 – We welcome our co-host, Katy Eddy, to B2BQ&A.

2:40 – We put Alistair Ross’s question to Lianna Patch.

13:20 – Katy and David share best and worst examples of humour in content.

21:20 – Matt Godfrey supplies our copywriting tip of the month.

Have you got a question for B2BQ&A?

We’ll find the answer! Send us a voice memo at [email protected]. And if there are any other thoughts you’d like to share, you can find us on LinkedIn, or tweet at us: @radixcom.

How to listen

Credits

  • Firstly, thank you, Katy, for being a brilliant co-host.
  • Thanks to Alistair Ross of LogicLogicMagic for your thought-provoking question.
  • And Lianna Patch for giving us an excellent answer and lots of useful tips. (Lianna promises to overshare about her personal life on Twitter.)
  • Thanks to Matt Godfrey and his (strangely Australian-sounding) robot twin for that dazzling copywriting tip of the month.
  • And last but not least, thank you to everyone who contributed to the LinkedIn vote and discussion, especially Andrew Last, André Spiteri, and Craig Clarke.

Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash.

Transcript – B2BQ&A 102: Why is there so little humour in B2B content?

Alistair Ross: Why is there so little humour in B2B content?

Katy Eddy: That’s an excellent question. Let’s ask… Lianna Patch!

David McGuire: Hello, listener, you are very welcome to B2BQ&A, the podcast where we go in search for an answer to your question about B2B content writing. This is episode 102.

Katy: In a moment, we’ll ask comedian and copywriter Lianna patch a question from Alistair Ross: why is there so little funny content and B2B? Lianna will also share some pointers to help you use humour well in your own copy. And we’ll hear copywriting tip of the month from Radix’s own head of copy, Matt Godfrey.

David: Well, sort of.

Katy: Kinda.

David: My name is David McGuire. I’m creative director at Radix Communications, the B2B writing agency, and this month, our guest co-host is none other than Radix’s senior copywriter Katy Eddy, and we’re actually in the same room for the first time in what feels like years. Katy, welcome.

Katy: Thank you. Thank you for having me back. Firstly, I’d like to apologise to people for the inevitable echo because we don’t believe in soft furnishings at Radix.

David: No. Yes, as you can hear we’re recording this surrounded by breezeblocks, and minimalist style.

Katy: It’s very fashionable.

David: How are you, Katy?

Katy: I’m very well, thank you it’s nice to be back near people.

David: Yeah, isn’t it?

David: And talking in real life and not having lag in conversations. But now I have no excuse for when my brain shuts down. It’s just all me.

David: I won’t tell anyone if you don’t. So Katy, as guest co-host, would you mind telling the listener how they can get in touch with us?

Katy: I can absolutely do that. Listener, if you have any comments or suggestions you can find Radix on LinkedIn or Twitter @radixcom. Or, if you want us to answer your question on a future episode, record a quick voice note and send it by email: [email protected].

David: Cracking job; thank you very much.

Katy: Right then, let’s get on to this month’s question. Come in Alistair Ross.

Alistair: Hello. I’m Alistair Ross, creative partner at LogicLogicMagic. And my question is, why is there so little humour in B2B content?

David: This is a really well made point Alistair. When we think about the really memorable examples of B2B work, I mean, especially B2B videos, so many of them are funny, but actually, those examples are few and far between. And when I asked on LinkedIn, 69% of respondents said B2B content is more serious now than it used to be. And that comes at a time when people are talking a lot more about emotion in B2B content and the importance of B2B brands being likeable. So it seems a bit well, weird. To get to the bottom of it all. I asked Lianna Patch from Punchline Copy. Lianna is a comedian herself, but also she’s a copywriter and she’s worked on subjects as interesting as accountancy software and legal contracts for business. So I started by asking her Alistair’s question, why is there so little humour in B2B content?

Lianna Patch: I think it’s because people are scared. And there’s a holdover from, you know, business culture of the past, where we’re expected to be very formal and professional. And the definition of what’s professional is still kind of mired in. “Dear Sir, or, Madam, I have this offer for you please, at your earliest convenience reply”. And that’s not how humans talk. Right? So there’s this resistance because it’s scary to try a new thing. It’s scary to be the only one in your industry trying the new thing. But I think the payoff can be incredible.

David: And is that harder to do in B2B, do you think?

Lianna: Only because of the mindset, and because there are more corporate structures and people to get through and permissions to get, you know, if you’re running your own thing, you can decide to change the way you communicate. But if you’re working with 50 other people who also have to be on board, then it’s much slower and often doesn’t happen.

David: Do you think the picture has changed lately?

Lianna: Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I hope that I see a trend toward using it more. I wonder if the pandemic has affected people’s willingness to go out on that limb? Because like everything is on fire all the time. So like maybe we shouldn’t joke, although I think it works to lift the pressure sometimes.

David: So if the listener was tempted to start trying a bit of humour in their B2B content. Do you have tips for them? Where should they start? Because you know all about being funny, right?

Lianna: I hope so. God, I hope so. I’m just an enthusiast, just a casual observer. I always say start in emails, because that’s where you have that one-to-one relationship building opportunity. It’s less risky. And then even within that, you don’t need to start your email like, “Hey, David, knock, knock, who’s there cold email” although I love that, and I would love receiving that. There’s a spectrum, right? You can sort of ratchet up the warmth and the personality. So maybe you switch from saying, Dear David, to Hi, David. Maybe you contract more words from “we do not do this” to “we don’t do this”, which hopefully, you don’t have to say all the time. You know what I’m saying? Like there’s a way to just be friendlier, that’s on its way to actual humour and jokes.

David: So you’re kind of warming them up. And then you’re hitting them with the jokes…

Lianna: Hopefully. And maybe that’s a confidence builder on the end of the person who’s trying it for the first time.

David: Sure. And then are there aspects of B2B that you think are kind of particularly – so emails as a format, good place to start? Are there kinds of aspects of when you’re writing to someone about their job where humour can be particularly helpful?

Lianna: I think so. Especially if you have to deliver bad news, or you have constructive criticism or feedback to deliver, couching that in some sort of humour or observation that makes them feel like we’re in this together, or I know how you might be feeling to get this news. And I get it. And like, hopefully, it doesn’t ruin the rest of your day, or whatever. I think that can help soften things and make people more receptive to receiving bad news or criticism. But you don’t want to joke about them. You don’t want to joke about their ability, like big warning sign, big caveat.

David: Okay, so you don’t make jokes at their expense. But you might joke about the realities that they’re facing as part of their work.

Lianna: Right, right. So this is something that I tend to teach is that observational humour is one of the safest styles of humour. And that’s making a joke about something that we can both observe in our environment, or in pop culture or current events. That brings us closer together, but I’m not the butt of the joke. And you’re not the butt of the joke. So we can safely laugh at it together

David: with you. And presumably, within B2B, the point is that you have to show them how well you understand their job.

Lianna: Right. So like, if you’re, if you’re delivering the bad news that supply chain disruptions have kept your container in port, and you still don’t have, you know, this product for your client, depending on how many times you’ve had to tell them and like how receptive they might be to this. You might say, like, I know, it’s, it’s been 84 years and use that gif from Titanic of the old lady like holding them. “It’s been 84 years…” although that might be too niche. Like, I know, You’ve been waiting forever. And it really feels like this for me. I feel like I’ve lived 1,000 lifetimes just waiting for your container to be offloaded. But in the meantime, here’s what we can do. And here’s some ways that I can help you. So if you’re going to make a joke, in a bad situation like that in a fraught situation, remember that you should end with helping them. Don’t just like, make a joke and leave them there.

David: As you mentioned earlier, for a lot of people in B2B, the problem is going to be getting that stuff past their stakeholders, right, getting that stuff approved and signed off. You got any tips on how they can approach that?

Lianna: They can point to the piles and piles of research, showing the benefits of humour for relationship building information recall, anxiety reduction, you know, ability to see someone who’s making your life harder as a person with their own issues, and not just like a problem. There’s so much research out there pointing to the psychological, social and emotional benefits of humour.

David: So could you give an example that has kind of worked for you in B2B of using humour?

Lianna: Yeah, so I worked for a client called Sprinkler Supply Store, and they wholesale sprinkler parts and landscaping equipment. So I wrote some email series for them, some automated email series. And I think usually in all across all industries, but especially in like B2B and manufacturing, you get someone clicking on in Klaviyo, and just using the default flows that are already set up, but we wanted to do something different and fun. And so we set up an abandoned cart flow, where we talk about one of the guys who works at the company is crying because you haven’t finished checking out and then the second email is like “Kyle is under the desk, now he won’t come out we had to call his mom” and the third email is like, “Look, Kyle’s on his last legs, we need you to finish paying.” And the client gets good feedback on that all the time, people respond to those emails and say like “This brightened my day, this was really funny and unexpected.” And they notice elsewhere in the funnel that I worked on optimising with them, they noticed that microcopy that feels friendly and feels funny and like, hey, a human was here, a human paid attention to this, I will buy from them with more confidence now. Because if they pay this much attention to their checkout flow, someone will be there when I need support.

David: I guess what I see with a lot of brands that use humour to attract certain clients is that by doing that, they’re trying to kind of turn away people that maybe aren’t such a good fit for them. And maybe it’s a good way to find the clients that are the best fit for you and the way that you want to work. Does that sort of make sense?

Lianna: Yeah. When you start to get more comfortable with your sense of humour, and your personality, and how you can bring that into your communication, any disconnect between that and a potential client is probably a red flag. Like, I have no problem with people who want to be very formal about their projects. And like, obviously, I send proposals and we do contracts. And you know, I have an invoicing software like that kind of professional, obviously, very important. But if we’re not able to write each other quick email saying like, “Hey, did you get a chance to look at the document? Yeah, I did. I’m out this week, but I’ll look at it later.” If every email has to be like, “Julieta, upon receipt of your former email…” I have decided that, you know, that it’s not a good fit. And I tend to sort of repel those people before they even get to me on purpose.

David: Is there a challenge where people are maybe nervous because not everyone agrees on what’s funny, right? It’s a very personal thing.

Lianna: Definitely. Yeah. And I think that’s part of the resistance. People are afraid to make a joke because they don’t know if it’s gonna resonate with the other person. And I think getting around that starts with knowing your own sense of humour. And starting to know your own sense of humour involves looking at what you enjoy. What makes you laugh, being mindful in the moment? What shows and comic books and cartoons do you like now? And did you like as a kid, what stand-up comedians do you find really funny, and just get very curious about what it is about them? Maybe it’s the subject matter, maybe it’s the delivery, maybe it’s the sophisticated joke setup, and you just have like an incredibly highbrow intellectual taste and humour. But that will help you connect with what you find funny. So you can bring a little bit of that in at a time, and it feels authentic and not like you’re trying to be someone else.

David: If the listener wants to find out more about you, either your comedy or your copywriting? How can they get in touch with you?

Lianna: They can find me on Twitter @punchlinecopy where I share far too much about my personal life.

David: Don’t we all. Thanks again, Alastair, for your question, and thank you, Lianna. I had an absolute blast talking to you, which is kind of predictable when you think about it. Katy, what stood out for you there?

Katy: I mean, I think for a start, she is very correct in saying that people are scared of it because I personally am terrified. There’s something that feels so risky about putting a joke down on paper and sending it to a client. I feel like an inherent need to defend a joke that I make and over explain it to the point where it stops being funny.

David: Explain a joke, it no longer works.

Katy: Exactly. And it will always get taken out anyway. Because I think, yeah, people are super nervous about it. And with good reason, I think. Well, I think I see more examples of humour going badly than humour going well. And it depends whether you think all publicity is good publicity.

David: Can you think of an example of humour going badly?

Katy: I mean, I always lean on the same thing every time, which is the messages you get when things crash. This isn’t a B2B example, specifically, but it’s something I see a lot when Chrome breaks and you get a little sad face, and you get oops, and I’ve been harping on this literally my entire career at Radix. I hate it. I hate it so much. It makes me so angry, just irrationally angry. And I get it like objectively it’s, you know, it’s designed to diffuse something that’s frustrating to you, but I see red at that point. I’m starting to think that maybe I’m just a bad person that doesn’t like humour. I thought I did. But maybe I don’t.

David: Yeah, I mean, I think like MailChimp do this really well, like there’s a whole guide for MailChimp’s writers about what you do and what you don’t joke about. An error message is, you know that the whole thing is about what is the reader feeling in that moment, if the reader is frustrated and a bit annoyed, making a joke at that moment is maybe not the thing to do. But it’s all situational, about the audience rather than about you, which I think is pretty is pretty clever. I mean, there are good examples, though. I mean, B2B is kind of ripe for that observational stuff that Lianna was talking about, because there is so much about work that is ridiculous.

Katy: Oh, yeah. So silly. And I think, with the exception of a few, probably executive level, people who take it very seriously, I think it’s universally accepted that business structures and things we do on a daily basis, are very silly.

David: You just need to want to point it out. Right?

Katy: Exactly. Like you need someone who’s probably braver than I am to point out that we’re all just sitting at our little computers writing our little emails.

David: One of the best examples of humour I’ve seen lately, in a B2B context is like the Apple thing that they did last year that was shortlisted for the best content of the year. The one that like this whole working from home thing. And, you know, they kind of just exaggerated how ridiculous everything was now everyone was kind of working from home, but not doing it in a way that was anyway, kind of making a light of the pandemic, I think it was quite skilfully done. So when you’re writing a piece of content, and you’re thinking of putting something in funny, is that coming from you? And then you’re explaining to the client, or is the client pushing you to be more funny?

Katy: I think usually, if a client is telling me to be funny, I will do absolutely everything in my power to tell them not to be funny. I feel like if they come to me expecting to try and be funny, it’s not gonna end well. I do. Only with clients, I know really well. And I’ve spent a lot of time like, stewing in their brand voice, I think, then you get, you get a sense of what you’re able to joke about, and the kind of jokes that would fit with their tone.

David: I have this theory that puns specifically – humour, I have time for – puns specifically, I think are a nightmare in B2B. Because most of the time, we’re writing for people that have spent more time in that industry than we have. And so they’ve seen all the puns, like if you’re someone like us, and you write for this industry, that industry, the other industry a little bit at a time a pun might seem really fun to you. But like if you’re an OEM in the air conditioning industry, how many times do you think you’ve seen puns with the word “cool”? That’s a cool solution. Yep. You know, or I see so many things aimed at the automotive industry, that are always switching gear or puns with drive, you know, drive results? Like do you not think that they’ve seen all of that already? I think that’s always the slight worry that I have. Is it the like, it’s old hat already for the audience.

Katy: Yeah, I kind of think about it, in the same way as I experienced in retail, when I was younger, when something wouldn’t scan properly. And the other person is like, oh, it’s free. And, and you know, that’s very hilarious. Well done, congratulations. But also, you’re probably the eighth person, probably on the same product that doesn’t have a proper barcode on it, asking me that question. And, I mean, in that case, you’re paid to laugh. But when you’re trying to sell to somebody, or you know, convince them to come to your company, they’re just gonna roll their eyes is so hard, like, there’ll be a physical creaking noise.

David: So we think probably observational humour about how ridiculous work is, is good. And it helps you as a B2B brand to show someone how well you understand their job. Puns may be less so

Katy: Maybe, definitely not. Thank you.

David: So I actually wanted to get to the bottom of this idea about whether there’s less humour in B2B than they used to be ‘cause I kind of feel like all the good examples that I know apart from the apple one are kind of four or five years old. So I asked our friends on LinkedIn 69% said there’s less funny content now than there used to be. Andrew Last at Harvard says it’s definitely becoming rarer, which is a shame because it has so much impact. Andre Spiteri says they’re still some funny stuff, but sadly, again becoming rarer, while Craig Clark at Marketreach says they’re actively trying to encourage people to try it. Recently, I’ve spoken with a marketer at a B2B tech company that’s well known for its humour. And even there, they are deliberately trying to move away from it. I mean, is that a trend that you see things are more serious than they were?

Katy: I’ve definitely seen less of out in the world. I think, for me, personally, I’m in the fortunate position where I’m starting to bed into clients that I’ve worked with for four or five years, they’re trusting me a little bit to have a bit of fun. Yeah, I’m currently working on a project which is targeting UK health providers. And I think there’s a good opportunity there to tap into a little bit of their gallows humour, but not too much of it. I don’t want to be stepping on toes.

David: So if there’s less funny content, then maybe that is an opportunity. Either way, thanks to everyone who took part in the discussion, you lovely, lovely people.

Katy: Now it’s time to hear our copywriting tip of the month. Radix’s Head of Copy, Matt Godfrey is far too shy to record his actual voice. So we had to get a computer to read his tip for him.

Robo Matt: When you’ve finished writing a piece, delete your first sentence. Too much B2B content opens with unnecessary exposition, especially considering we’re typically writing for an expert audience so by deleting your first sentence, or even your first paragraph, there’s a good chance you’ll have a much stronger opening that will hook readers in rather than telling them stuff they already know.

David: Thank you for that Robo Matt. It’s good advice, especially in B2B. Katy, is that trick that works for you?

Katy: Yeah, absolutely. I think. I mean, for me, I’m a very aggressive self-editor. So it’s not just the first line or the first paragraph that goes. It’s often the first 300 words that I have written, but, yeah, it’s about acknowledging how much of your writing is working yourself up to the point that really matters, I think, and, you know, culling what is extraneous.

David: Anything that enables us to delete in today’s fast moving, competitive digital landscape, comma,

Katy: Yeah, no one needs any of that. No one.

David: Well, I’m sorry to say that is all we have time for this episode. Katy, please, would you thank this month’s contributors.

Katy: Huge thanks to Alistair Ross for asking such a thought provoking question and to Lianna for answering it so excellently. And also thanks to Matt’s robot twin for the copywriting tip, and to everyone who took part in our LinkedIn poll and discussion.

David: And thanks to you, Katy, awesome as ever, and lovely to see you in person, of course. And even if the room is a bit echoey nice to actually do this the proper way. Listener remember, it could be your question that we answer in a future episode. If you have a question for B2BQ&A to answer, email and voice memo to [email protected]. Or find us on social media. I’ll see you next month for a special B2BQ&A when we’ll be trying to answer the contentious question: what has been this year’s best B2B content? Until then, make good content and remember a day without laughter is a day wasted. If you spent the day laughing on a zoom call, well make your own mind up

David and Katy: Goodbye!

 

 

B2BQ&A 100: How can I stop clients and stakeholders meddling with my wording?

Posted on by Claire Goodfellow

It’s the 100th episode of the Radix Communications podcast… and it’s all change. New format, new sound, and a new name. So if you were expecting Good Copy, Bad Copy, don’t panic; you’re in the right place.

You’ll still hear great guests discussing B2B content and copywriting. But as the new name suggests, each episode of B2BQ&A will focus on a specific question, submitted by you. You set the agenda, and we go in search of an expert who can answer.

To kick off, we have an excellent question from marketer and content specialist Zdenka Linkova.

Zdenka asks: “How do you convince your clients to check for the factual accuracy of a content piece, like an ebook or a case study, rather than checking and changing every single word in your document – and leave the tone of voice and wording up to the copywriter?”

As our Barriers to B2B Content survey revealed, this is a perennial problem for writers and marketers alike. So we enlisted Doug Kessler, no less, to give us the definitive answer.

For this special episode, we’re also joined by a very familiar voice. Fiona Campbell-Howes returns as co-host, as we take the opportunity to reflect on the last eight and a half years of the Radix podcast, revisiting some of the wisdom from our previous contributors over the last 99 episodes.

You’ll hear from (deep breath): Emily King, Fiona Campbell-Howes, James Henry, Doug Kessler, Lorraine Williams, Pauliina Jamsa, Lasse Lund, Kate Stoodley, Maureen Blandford, Dr Andrew Bredenkamp, Harendra Kapur, Nick Mason, Shaema Katib, Matthew Harper, Alice Farnham, Angela Cattin, Mwamba Kasanda, Professor Chris Trudeau, Raine Hunt, Joel Harrison, Dr Christine Bailey, Rhiannon Blackwell, Luan Wise, Natalie Narh, Kavita Singh, Sonja Nisson, and John Espirian.

Huge thanks to you all, and to everyone else who contributed to the last 99 episodes. And huge kudos to Emily, who had the idea for the podcast (waaaay before it was cool) and kept it running for so long. You rock.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a Radix podcast without a copywriting tip of the month. Radix Copywriter Ben Clarke lets us into the secret of how to make sure your tone of voice is on brand for the client you’re writing for.

You’ll find a full transcript of our podcast at the end of this post.

So, how do you get clients to stop meddling with your wording?

A conversation with a client or stakeholder, asking them to trust that you know what you’re doing as a content creator, is never an easy prospect. But like most difficult conversations, it can be well worth it if you get the outcome you want.

Thankfully, Doug Kessler has loads of tips to make sure you raise the subject at the right time, and in the most constructive way. Here are three to get you started:

  1. ‘If it’s making the copy better, it’s not meddling.’

Whisper it quietly, but the first thing to consider is whether the client or stakeholder reviewing your work might actually be right. It’s important to remember that they have probably been in this game for a long time, like you. And they might be tweaking your copy for the better.

  1. ‘Defend your work without defensiveness.’

If you want clients and stakeholders to listen to you as an expert writer, first you have to establish credibility. And that credibility cannot be demanded – it has to be earned. Start by by standing your ground in situations where you have the expertise, but also accepting neutral things that aren’t going to change the copy that much.

  1. ‘You’ve got to brief them clearly.’

If you can be really clear in advance about which aspects of your content need feedback, you’re more likely to get constructive results. So if your work is going to a client or stakeholder for review, adding a note to say: “We’re reviewing writing style separately, but I really need you to check the technical accuracy of this piece” might make them more inclined to focus less on the wording, and more on the facts.

In this episode, you’ll find…

1:20 – We welcome our co-host Fiona Campbell-Howes and introduce B2BQ&A.

4:45 – We mark our 100th episode by revisiting clips from the last eight years.

10:50 – We put Zdenka Linkova’s question to Doug Kessler.

23:35 – We hear some more wisdom from the last 99 episodes of the Radix podcast.

29:50 – Our copywriting tip of the month from Ben Clarke.

31:20 – We listen to a final set of past contributions to the podcast.

Have you got a question for B2BQ&A?

We’re ready to asnwer you! Send us a voice memo at [email protected] And if there are any other thoughts you’d like to share, you can find us on Twitter @radixcom.

How to listen: 

Credits

  • Firstly, thank you to Fiona Campbell-Howes. It was wonderful to have you back as our co-host.
  • Thank you to Zdenka Linkova, for your brilliant question.
  • And Doug Kessler, thank you for answering it so expertly.
  • Thanks to Ben Clarke, for that excellent copywriting tip of the month.
  • And last but absolutely not least, thank you to everyone who has contributed to the last 99 episodes of the Radix podcast. We couldn’t have made it to 100 without you.

Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash

Transcript: B2BQ&A 100: How can I stop clients meddling with my wording?

How do you convince your clients to check for the factual accuracy of a content piece, like an ebook or a case study, rather than checking and changing every single word in your document and leave the tone of voice and wording up to the copywriter?

Fiona: It’s a brilliant question and I love it. Let’s ask Doug Kessler.

David: Hello, listener and welcome to B2BQ&A, the podcast where we go in search and an answer to your question about B2B content writing. This is also Episode 100 of the Radix Communications Podcast, so if you were expecting Good Copy, Bad Copy, don’t panic, you are in the right place. You’ll still hear great guests and co-hosts sharing advice on B2B copywriting – just in a shorter, more focused format. With a new sound and a new name.

Fiona: This episode, we ask Doug Kessler a question from Zdenka Linkova. How do you get clients and stakeholders to focus on checking for accuracy and let the writer handle the wording and the voice?

David: But first, where are my manners? We need some introductions. My name is David McGuire. I’m Creative Director at Radix Communications the B2B writing agency. And for this special episode, I’m joined by a suitably special guest co-host. It’s B2B technology writer, co-founder of this very podcast and my former boss, Fiona Campbell-Howes. Fiona, welcome back.

Fiona: Hello, thank you very much and thank you for having me back.

David: Oh no; anytime. How have you been?

Fiona: Good? Thank you. Yeah, surprisingly good, considering, you know, what we’ve just all been through. But yeah, the writing’s going well and I think I’ve been quite lucky in having quite a lot of clients and quite a lot of work. So I think our sector, especially, was one that survived the pandemic pretty well. Did you find the same at Radix?

David: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve never been so busy as we were over the last year or so. Which is, admittedly, a nicer set of problems to have than a lot of people have had lately. Do you feel that the market has changed at all, for B2B writing over the over the last year, 18 months?

Fiona: Well, I think what it seemed to be is, in all of the content that we wrote over the last three or four years or so it was all about digital transformation is going to happen in the future, and the future is going to be like this. And then suddenly it happened. And then every tech company suddenly had to rethink what the future is going to be. So all the content that had been produced kind of went out of date overnight. And we were called in to produce brand new content with brand new predictions about the future. So yeah, that’s pretty much how it’s gone for me.

David: Yeah, that sounds very, very familiar. And the new company, the new world post-Radix, for you is Greythorne. Is that right?

Fiona: Greythorne, yes. That’s my alias. It’s basically just me. I’ve got an unnecessarily swanky office – next door to yours.

David: It’s good to know you’re not far away.

Fiona: In the next-door building. I did move one building away. We could just about wave to each other. But we’re facing in different directions. So that’s where I am. And I’m doing pretty much what I was doing before at Radix. So it’s still B2B tech content.

David: Just without having to wrangle a team of 20 people?

Fiona: Yeah. So it’s more wrangling clients and less wrangling of people. Which does give more time to do the writing, which I actually really enjoy.

David: Well, great. Can’t criticise that at all. So anyway, Fiona, I’m sure you know, if you cast your mind back, you’ll remember how this goes. But could you please tell the listener how they can get in touch with us?

Fiona: Well, yeah, I sort of remember how this goes. But I’m wondering if maybe there’s new jingles – so I’m looking forward to finding out. So listener, if you have any comments or suggestions, you can find Radix on LinkedIn or on Twitter @radixcom. Or if you want us to answer your question, email us the voice memo, [email protected].

David: Well, I guess that answers that. In just a moment, we’ll hear from Zdenka Linkova and from Doug. But this is our 100th episode and it’s one where one podcast is turning into another. So we’re going to mark that by playing in a few clips and thanking some of the people who have contributed over the past eight and a half years.

Emily King: “Welcome to Episode One of the Radix Copycast. Here we’ll be discussing some of the current trends and issues in B2B technology copywriting.”

Fiona: “You have to show the benefit of what you’re offering to your audience. It’s no use talking about your own product or talking about your own company or saying, ‘Oh, we’ve got a webinar’, ‘we’ve got a white paper’, those don’t seem to work. It’s can you show the value of opening the email to the recipient.”

James Henry: “I’m not sure having a three-act structure automatically engages the audience. But I think the human brain is hardwired to expect stories to have a certain shape. So if your story has got three acts, in whatever kind of proportion to each other, that’s just enough for the brain to sort of click into ‘Ah, I’m hearing I’m experiencing a story here’, then what you have to do is bring the engaging kind of elements to it.”

Doug Kessler: “Structurally rich and semantically categorized content, which makes it automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable, that seems to be the characteristics of intelligent content.”

Emily King: “Hello, and welcome to the 26th episode of radix. His podcast, which we’ve renamed Good Copy, Bad Copy,” (Fiona: “Nice.”)

Lorraine Williams: “If you can write something and then leave it, even if it’s for like an hour before you go back to it, or do something different away from anything, you have a slightly different headspace. So you won’t still be in that zone. So just, if you can leave it a whole day, that’d be amazing. Because you will definitely spot things.”

Pauliina Jamsa: “Stand-up comedy is all about dealing with difficult things, and making fun out of it. So, all the videos and content that I’m doing, I always have a little glint in the eye, so to speak. So it’s done with a sense of humour which makes even serious topics much more fun.”

Lasse Lund: “The data shows our customers are really interested in getting into, like, the nitty-gritty detail of what’s going on with some of our products and stuff like that. And so they do like the other stuff, too, at certain points. But that’s just one example of that we, you know, it’s one thing to rely on gut instinct. And the longer you’re in a company that the better that will be, right? But also making sure to measure and track and pull lessons away.”

Kate Stoodley: “It kind of has to again, come down to having social be a seat at the content planning table, and be a really collaborative approach. I think that’s really the only way that things can can really make sense. Because just because you can put something on social doesn’t mean you should.”

Maureen Blandford: “Generally what resonates with targets are their own words. If I’m selling ,particularly in a complex sale, I need marketing to behave the way in the market that great salespeople behave. So bubble up pain, ask good questions.”

Fiona: We just heard from Emily King, me, my husband James Henry, Doug (who we’re going to hear from in a minute), Lorraine Williams, Pauliina Jamsa, Lasse Lund, Kate Stoodley, and Maureen Blandford.

David: It’s always been an excuse to talk to really good people, this podcast. It’s changed a lot over the last eight and a half years. I think that’s safe to say.

Fiona: And thanks very much to all of you for being part of the podcast.

David: So lots of memories there. Fiona, when you started the podcast with Emily back in 2013, did you think it would get to 100 episodes?

Fiona: I didn’t think it would get to 10 episodes! I have to say I was a very reluctant participant at the start. So I don’t even know if I could be thought of as the co-founder of the podcast, because it was Emily. And you know, she had a lot of podcasting experience. She’s very keen that we did this and I was absolutely terrified. So if anybody’s listening, I apologise for the fact that I was so reluctant back in the day. But yeah, I thought we’d run out of topics after five or six. So the fact that it’s still going, what, eight years later, and 100 episodes. Yeah, it just shows how much there is to talk about in B2B copywriting.

David: Yeah, I mean, it’s now had three names. So for the first 25 episodes it was Radix Copycast, then it had 74 episodes as Good Copy, Bad Copy, before being B2BQ&A. And also, both of the original presenters have now left. I’m kind of wondering if it’s one of these Ship of Theseus things. At what point does it cease to be the same podcast? Although they called it the Ship of Theseus on Wandavision, but to me, I just always think of that as being Trigger’s Broom.

Fiona: Yeah, I had to look up the Ship of Theseus. You said, is it like the Ship of Theseus/Sugarbabes/Trigger’s Broom. So I was alright with the Sugarbabes and Trigger’s Broom, butt Ship of Theseus I had to look up. Well, I think you’ve had Emily back on as a guest presenter or co-host and I’m back here now. So you know, there are certain elements that recur.

So we’ll hear from some more guests later in the episode. But first the part we’re actually here for where we take our listener’s question and find an expert to answer it. Here’s Zdenka.

Zdenka: Hi, this is Zdenka Linkova. I’m a freelance content specialist from the Czech Republic. And I would like to ask for your advice on clients feedback. How do you convince your clients to check for the factual accuracy of a content piece, like an ebook or a case study, rather than checking and changing every single word in your document and leave the tone of voice and wording up to the copywriter? Thank you very much. Take care, and bye-bye.

David: Oh, this is a great question to start our new format. Although, Zdenka, if you don’t mind, we’ll take clients to include internal stakeholders, too, so that we can cover both agency people, freelancers, and in house marketers. Our research into obstacles to great B2B content shows stakeholder interference is among the biggest frustrations for B2B content marketers worldwide. 86% of respondents said it was an issue. What’s more, six out of ten think their sign off process makes their content worse. So we went right to the top for this one. Doug Kessler, creative director and co-founder of Velocity Partners. He’s known for content that’s a little outside the usual B2B comfort zone. So I asked him, How do you stop pesky clients meddling with your copy?

Doug: I do think it’s only meddling if it’s wrong, if it’s making the copy better, it’s not meddling. And so we think of it as meddling, whether it is or it’s irrelevant. And, you know, I think the core thing is you earn your credibility, you can’t just demand it, you have to earn it. And you have to deserve it. I do get prima donna writers who, the work isn’t good enough to be Prima Donna, if you know you slam-dunked it by all means defend everything to the last minute. But if you haven’t, listen and take on board stuff. Now we all know, some of that isn’t great.

But first thing is your positioning as an expert, as an expert writer, and as really good at this. And your positioning as it goes up, you get less and less of that. And, of course, there are stakeholders who come in and don’t know you and so there’s that. But your job is to earn that credibility and part of earning that is defending your work without defensiveness. Accept the neutral things that aren’t going to change it that much the things that make it better embrace, so be ready to do all that.

Whereas I do find some writers are like, every note seems to be a stain. And we’ve got to get out of that mindset. They’re not the enemy here. And so, you want feedback, we need feedback for our work, right? So you just want to focus that feedback on the person’s area of expertise, you don’t necessarily want style notes from a techie. I once got a ton of style notes. And at the end of the call, I realised this is the lawyer, they were asked to review it, because of legal reasons. And he’s given me all the style points as soon as he hung up, I pretty much crumpled it up.

But you want to try to focus it on their area of expertise, then you’ve got to brief them clearly, don’t just send them the copy. You’ve got to brief them on what is it for? What’s it not for? Who’s it for? Who’s it not for? What do you want from them, and what don’t you want? So if you are really clear and say, Look, I don’t really need you for style, I need you for accuracy – you might find that they’re, less inclined to improve your style.

So some of that actually briefing them is a big part of it. And I think maybe the last part is or a third part is don’t ask if you don’t really want the input. Now, obviously, if it’s you’re client you may not have that option, but you don’t have to ask everybody. And so there’s always that option, you know, I guess finally if it’s a chronic problem, and it’s a stakeholder you can’t get away from you got to have that difficult conversation. There’s a book called difficult conversations. I absolutely love it. It helps you have these and get them to the table to say we seem to have a working problem, let’s talk about it. So there’s that too.

David: Is this a problem that you still yourself get sometimes? Or do you get to a point where your Doug Kessler, Nobody messes with you?

Doug: Absolutely. No, there’s absolutely no, I get no points, I get kids out of college with a ‘how to write copy’ book on their desk in front of them, telling me how to fucking write copy. And so I get it all the time. And in truth, no, I was going to lie there. I said, in truth, and I was about to lie and say, it doesn’t bother me – it can really fucking bother me. But let’s face it, it’s a service business, we have to give the client what they want. But our job is to make them want the right thing. It’s not an obstacle to our job. This is our job. We’ve got to take that seriously.

If we’re failing to make them want the right thing. That’s our fucking fault. Right? We cannot cry about it and moan about it. So it’s a service business, and I’m in a service business, I don’t care if they’re right out of college, they’re the fucking client, they’re paying the bills, I will listen. But my job is to try to make them want the right thing. And if you fail over and over and over, well, you know, you got to fire that client or fire that boss by quitting. So if you really don’t, you’re just out of sync with what good is, you’re never going to please them or yourself. So find something else. Find somewhere else.

David: Thank you. So, to summarise, just in terms of tips for the listener, you were kind of saying it starts with briefing them clearly, earning it, earning the credibility, picking your battles a little bit on the feedback that you push back on, and what you won’t push back on. Anything else that I’ve missed there, or are those really the key things aligning around what good looks like?

Doug: Yeah, those things, I think, aligning up front to agree on what good looks like is a really big one. And if it’s the thing about they’re killing my mojo, like they’d systematically went through at every conversational moment, they stomped it out – you may not be aligned on what good copy is. And you need to kind of talk about it in the abstract before you talk about it for this specific piece of copy. And if you really fundamentally disagree then, well then, if you still want to please that stakeholder or client, you do it their way you don’t get to have all bitter about it. They’ve agreed they don’t want to do conversational, let’s say.

But let’s face it, some of this is: be open to being wrong. One person’s conversational is another’s cute, like, I hate cute. And I know that a lot of writers who go for conversational trip into cute very easily. I know I do it myself. There are times I think it was fine. And I read it later and think wow, that that’s horribly cute. That’s ‘Look at me’ writing and I think a lot of writers are very proud of the ‘look at me’ writing. It’s not what we’re here for. It’s not to make people say, wow, it’s so well written, it’s to change their mind and incite action and do something not to, to say Wasn’t that a cool turn of phrase. So these cool turns of phrase that we’re so proud of, might truly be jangling for the reader.

And so we should be open to being wrong. And that, our conversational and cool turn of phrase, actually didn’t serve the brief.

David: Thanks again, Zdenka, for your question. And thanks, Doug, for such a thoughtful response. Fiona, you’ve been at this writing game for a while, you must have some thoughts on this, I’m sure.

Fiona: Yeah, this is actually one of my favourite topics. Because I’m sort of jumped to the end of what Doug was saying, you know, having those difficult conversations with clients or stakeholders about them, in quote marks, ‘meddling’ with your copy is something that I’ve come to really enjoy doing. And I actually sometimes hope that stakeholders will meddle with my copy, so that I can have those conversations.

So, yeah, I really like this topic. And I really like Doug’s answers to it. Because there’s just so much wisdom in everything that Doug says, he’s like a sort of Egyptian cotton sheet.

David: I’m sorry what?

Fiona: You know how Egyptian cotton sheets have got a really high thread count? I think that with Doug, you get a really high wisdom count, a high insight count. I’ve got his interview in front of me, and I’ve just bolded all the things that I think: Yeah, he just said that really well. That’s absolutely brilliant. And it’s so true. About how you can’t demand credibility, you earn it. So very often, when stakeholders have input into your copy it is actually, right, they are actually helping to make it better.

And you can’t just, as a writer, just assume that you are the best and that everything you write is the best possible way it can be written. Because there are many people who are very good writers, and they may not be a writer for a living, but they do have some very valid suggestions to make. So, I really like that. But once you kind of earn your credibility, and part of that you actually do by having those difficult conversations with stakeholders. I find it’s much easier to earn your credibility by working in collaboration and having conversation rather than communicating with the stakeholder through the comments on a Word document.

David: So how do you actually approach those conversations, then if that’s something you particularly relish doing?

Fiona: So there has to be real reason for it. So, to give you one example. Recently, I’ve been working with a big tech company, one that you’ve heard of, I mean, not you, you’ve heard of all tech companies, but one that everybody’s heard of. And there were let’s say that about eight to ten, stakeholders for each piece that I was writing, and there was a real was a real division between one group of stakeholders who were briefing me to write something like a white paper, and another group of stakeholders who were reviewing that copy, but who wanted to see something that would read like an article in wired. And so I was caught between these two groups, and whatever I wrote for the first group would not wash with the second group, so I had to rewrite it.

And after three of four times of having to rewrite the entire thing from scratch, because it didn’t read like an article in wired, I thought, okay, we’re going to have to have that conversation. So let’s request – this was going through an agency as well, so I didn’t have direct contact with the stakeholders – let’s request a meeting with these stakeholders. And let’s just work out what it is they actually want to see? And how can we all get on the same page with what the output looks like? So how do I get brief to produce something that everybody wants to see? And that went really well.

So, those conversations were had. They weren’t confrontational conversations at all. They were really collaborative conversations. Like, we’re all working towards the same goal, we want to produce a brilliant piece of content. And since having that, I haven’t had to rewrite anything, which is brilliant for me. But also, I think they’ve got much better content out of it, as well. So the whole thing about being aligned on what good content looks like and making sure everybody knows what the end product should look like, is really, really important. And sometimes it does take a conversation like that.

David: So if you had to take one point away from what Doug said, to answer Zdenka’s question, how would you put it?

Fiona: So I think for Zdenka and for all the other hundreds and thousands of writers out there that are getting these horrible bits of feedback from clients and clients meddling in things that they shouldn’t be. I think the thing that Doug said, for me, is that we’re not enemies, it’s not us and them, it’s not the client and us and it’s a kind of war of attrition. I think the thing to know is that we are, or we should be on the same side.

It should be a collaboration. So, I’d say the way to stop stakeholders meddling is to have those conversations and to make sure that you are collaborating and not being confrontational with each other.

So in a moment, we’ll hear from Ben Clarke with his copywriting tip of the month. But first, as this is Episode 100, let’s hear some more wisdom from the last 99.

Andrew Bredenkamp: “There are, as with anything else, parts of the writing process that are very repetitive, and don’t require a very sophisticated process. And I think in those situations we’re looking at automating some of those. And so it’s really a collaborative… as in many fields, AI will not be replacing people, it will be taking away the grunt work, taking away the boring repetitive tasks and leaving the humans to do the higher end thinking and creative pieces of it.”

Harendra Kapur: “Very often, when people do research, they’re researching to collect facts. The thing I find way more interesting and way more useful, is to research for opinions. Really, the most useful thing for me is a phone call with a customer or a blog from someone with actual skin in the game, just complaining about their job, or just the category. That is so much more useful to me than ‘12% of people use this system and that system.’ ”

Nick Mason: “The reason why we are sort of anti-PDF, if you like, where we’re on that side of the of the argument, is we see it as a format that was created obviously, a long time ago; I think back as far as 1991. And really, so much has moved on since then. And PDF really, to our minds, hasn’t kept pace with that.”

Shaema Katib: “Of course, we do have a clear good standard of what good content is based on historical performance, right. So these are our safe bets; content pieces that we know, will always work. Things like case studies, we’ve we’ve always seen that many of our best performing content have that credibility factor in them, like, they have things like statistics, testimonies, customer success stories in different formats, whether it be videos, case studies, or webinars. These things have always performed the best on a global scale.”

Mat Harper: “I get the impression that marketers are always trying to justify their worth, and justify them being in the company. So to spend time on something that isn’t easily measurable, or doesn’t quickly show return on investment, is difficult.”

Alice Farnham: “It’s really about sort of bringing, I think anyway, it’s about bringing out the best of them and bringing out that sort of individuality within the orchestra. But at the same time having a sort of coherence, and the sort of vision of what you want as well.”

Angela Cattin: “So that’s the classic where a company’s using it’s own data and there’s naturally lot’s of sensitivities around that. So naturally in those instances, you want to go out there with very bold message. And there’s just a little bit of sensitivity, and you have to rein it in a little bit.”

Mwamba Kasanda: “And that is a critical differentiator. Rather than people seeing an advertisement, an email, but when they have their actual contact within the business talking to them about the campaign, it’s much more powerful and and that person can also put it into their into context, into their world, and make it relevant for where they are right now.”

Chris Trudeau: “There’s even more data now suggesting that as, you know, people know what they like. When you ask them do they want plain language, they don’t know what that means. So they tend to think as I was listening to one of your podcasts from a few months ago, that plain language is dumbing things down, but yet that’s not what it is. When you read something that’s clear, how many times have you actually said, ‘Oh, this is too clear’? You know, nobody says that.”

David: We just heard from Dr Andrew Bredenkamp, Harry Kapur, Nick Mason, Shaema Shazleen Katib, Mat Harper, Alice Farnham, Angela Cattin, Mwamba Kasanda, and Professor Chris Trudeau. We are super grateful. Now let’s get that copywriting tip.

Ben: My name is Ben and I’m a copywriter at Radix. For my copywriting tip of the month, I’m going to steal a piece of advice I learned from Fiona when I first joined the company. Every time you switch the brand you’re writing for, just take 15 minutes to read some of their work. Even if you’re already familiar with them. It could be a few blog posts, emails, or even an ebook. It will help you really capture their tone and voice, and get you in the right headspace for approaching the task at hand. It’s especially useful if you’re writing for multiple brands a day.

Fiona: Thank you very much, Ben. I’m glad to hear you found the advice helpful. I have to say, it wasn’t my advice. I nicked it from George RR Martin, who said that, because there are so many characters in his Game of Thrones books, whenever he comes to write for a character that he hasn’t written for a while, he goes back to read previous sections where that character featured so that he can get back into their voice. And I’ve always found it really useful. And I still do it now. So it’s a very good tip. Thank you.

David: I wonder which B2B tech firm is the equivalent of Hodor?

Fiona: I don’t think we should say in a public forum.

David: Well, that is very nearly all we have time for. But before we go, let’s hear one last chunk of distilled wisdom from our guests over the last 99 episodes.

Raine Hunt: “I think what people forget is, they are still consumers, in their jobs and outside. And as such, the messages must be more sophisticated than they have been to date to ensure that we are responding to the needs of those individuals. So that’s where the value proposition and what you stand for, and what makes you unique is so important for marketers in the NHS.”

Joel Harrison: “The biggest thing that’s made a difference in this industry is the understanding of the importance of emotion. And it is about understanding what drives an individual. And being able to really focus in on that, whether it’s on a granular level, or a kind of persona based level is, I think, what’s made the industry so much more of a wonderful, fulfilling place to work for everybody who’s remotely creative.”

Dr Christine Bailey: “Right now, we need certainty. It’s a very uncertain world. So we need some data points. And we’ve also been conditioned to believe that the more points of evidence we have, the more likely people are to believe us. So that’s another reason why it’s good to use data and insights in our story.”

Rhiannon Blackwell: “So that, for me, is the most critical thing about content in ABM. I think it’s really important that whatever you do produce, clients can recognise themselves in it. So not only the relevance to what they’re trying to achieve, but also the language that’s being used.”

Luan Wise: “When it comes to writing content, I think there’s best practices, whether it’s social media content, or blogs or anything else, and that’s: know who you’re writing it for, and write it for them. And to have a purpose, particularly when we’re doing it for business. Make sure you include a call to action, make it into a conversation and make it social on social media. That’s a good post.”

Natalie Narh: “It’s always, lik,e thinking about how you might perceive it and then putting yourself in the shoes of someone else to see how other parties might perceive it as well. And I think if more businesses did that, at every stage of production, they would then get to realise how the story changes over time. It sounds like a very simple thing to do, but I don’t think people question their processes enough.”

Kavita Singh: “So I would say, if you do want to do more diversity content, set a target. You know, for us we do a monthly feature or blog. And you know,  sometimes it’s around mental health, you know, I’ve done one on psychological safety in the workplace, these all contribute to different aspects of diversity.”

Sonja Nisson: “It’s an approach to market which you could coin with this mantra: ‘Help, don’t sell; talk, don’t yell; show, don’t tell.’ So it’s a different approach to marketing, and it came out of sales experience, really.”

John Espirian: “It’s even more the case these days, especially now we’re in pandemic land, the last thing we want to get is a sales message. And yet, she says, and I totally agree with this, that if you give away your information, your ideas, as generously as you can, that’s actually what gets people’s attention. So you know, valuable content is is actually being as helpful as you can to the other person. That’s what builds trust. And actually, ultimately, that’s what does business for you.”

Fiona: So we just heard from Raine Hunt, Joel Harrison, Dr Christine Bailey, Rhiannon Blackwell, Luan Wise, Natalie Narh, Kavita Singh, Sonja Nisson, and John Espirian. Thanks very much to all of you for contributing. And thanks too, to Ben Clarke to Doug Kessler and to Zdenka Linkova. I hope you feel we’ve answered your question.

David: And thanks to you, Fiona for coming back in and co-hosting. It’s been lovely. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Fiona: I have it’s taken me right. Yeah, it’s been a pleasure.

David: We don’t have the ‘pod yurt’ these days, you’re not surrounded in a cardboard box trying to—

Fiona: No, I am! I am! I’ve built one. I’ll send you a photo.

David: I look forward to it. Listener, remember, in a future episode, it could be your question we answer.

If you have a question for B2BQ&A to answer, email a voice memo to [email protected], or find us on social media.

David: I’ll see you next month for another B2Q&A. When we’ll be answering: How important is grammar, really? If you have any answers or thoughts on that please do send them our way. Until then make good content and remember, we have every right to create our own destiny, but none to interfere with someone else’s. Unless it’s to insert an Oxford comma. Goodbye!

 

Podcast 99: Why we need emotion in B2B

Posted on by Claire Goodfellow

This month’s episode of Good Copy, Bad Copy is all about bringing the emotion back into B2B content.

We’re joined by Paul Cash, CEO and Founder of Rooster Punk – and author of Humanizing B2B – for our feature interview. David and Paul talk about the human side of B2B copywriting, how the focus on the individual who is ultimately reading your content has been lost, and how and why we need to get it back.

B2B Marketing’s Propolis Hive Expert Barbara Stewart makes her co-hosting debut, chatting with David about Paul’s thoughts, and exploring them further from a sales perspective. They cover everything from a bizarre focus group on crisp varieties, to the huge and often overlooked benefit of testimonials.

And, of course, we have another superb copywriting tip for you. This time it’s from none other than last week’s co-host, George Reith, and he’s going to help you get that all-important variety into your writing.

You’ll find a full transcript of our podcast at the end of this post.

Why we should be striving to put the human back into B2B copywriting

Emotion has always been part of B2B marketing. However, as B2B and industrial marketing have moved further into the digital world – and away from in-person contact – emotion has faded into the background.

But selling products based entirely on features and benefits leaves a void where the emotional side once lived. And as B2B brands have become more and more focused on promoting a similar set of sales points, clients and customers are finding new ways to differentiate between them – and emotion is the biggest.

There is evidence to support the fact that clients and customers are increasingly giving weight to the brands that are showing up outside of their products. Brands that exist in a positive, meaningful, and authentic can connect with their clients and customers on an emotional level and create the best relationships.

So, how can you put this into action?

It’s all about inspiring a specific feeling, so establish what you want to convey, and identify the triggers you can use to evoke it. Paul Cash uses psychologist Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion, which breaks emotions down into emotional states and substates, as a planning tool when thinking about how to build that feeling-based connection.

Remember: you don’t want to talk about a feeling, but to create that feeling.

If you can be likeable as well as competent, you can gain an edge over your competition. By creating an emotional connection with your clients and customers, through taking creative risks with your marketing and setting yourself apart from other brands, you can inspire better engagement and loyalty.

In this episode, you’ll find…

00:40 – We welcome our co-host Barbara Stewart to Good Copy, Bad Copy

02:55 – Likeable, as well as competent: our interview with Paul Cash.

16:45 – Barbara and David discuss the interview, Barbara’s experiences with emotion in B2B, and how the buying journey has changed.

30:35 – Copywriting tip of the month: How to keep your writing varied.

Anything you loved in this episode? 

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Tweet us at @radixcom or pop us a message on [email protected]. Or, if you fancy your chances of appearing on the podcast, send a voice memo our way.

How to listen: 

Transcript: Good Copy Bad Copy 99: Why we need emotion in B2B

Speakers:

Paul (clip): We’re really cool. You can be cool too. Come and buy our product.

David: Hello listener and thank you for joining us for Episode 99 of Good Copy Bad Copy the B2B copywriting podcast. It’s so good to have you with us.

Barbara: This month we’re talking about using emotions in your B2B content. And Paul Cash will be telling us why it’s not enough for your B2B brand to be competent. It needs to be likeable too.

David: My name is David McGuire. I’m creative director at Radix Communications which is a B2B tech copywriting agency. And I really am delighted to be joined by a brand-new guest co-host for this episode. It’s B2B marketing’s Propolis Hive Expert for CX, which is easy for me to say. It’s Barbara Stewart. Barbara, welcome.

Barbara: Thanks, David. Thanks so much for having me. I’m very excited too. It’s a topic that’s very much at the heart of my passion. So, thank you.

David: Oh, no, thank you for coming in and agreeing to do it. So, you’re a Propolis Hive Expert, what’s one of them?

Barbara: I am indeed I lead the CX Hive. So, my role is very much to help. There’s approximately 100 currently, different B2B marketers that are in my hive, and they have a multitude of needs and advice and support. And I get to basically, every month, host events to help them understand frameworks, different methodologies, that they can be using such as CX metrics, or how to get buy-in from CEOs. And it’s very much focused on giving them practical advice or listening to each other and learning from each other. So, it’s a lot of fun.

David: How does it feel having to introduce yourself as an expert?

Barbara: I do not like it. I refer to myself as a practitioner. So, I do from strategy to deployment. So, the word expert it’s… yeah, it’s always unsettling. I like to avoid it.

David: They called me an expert. I didn’t say that.

Barbara: Yeah, I didn’t ask for it.

David: I believe you. Thousands wouldn’t.

So, could you please perform your first official duty as co-host? And tell the listener how they can get in touch with us?

Barbara: I certainly can. So, listener if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, you can contact the show by email: [email protected] or on Twitter: @Radixcom. Apologies because in Northern Irish, the word Twitter is hard to hear in my accent.

Our guest this month has a lot to say about emotions in B2B marketing, doesn’t he?

David: Yeah, he absolutely does. Paul Cash from Rooster Punk. He’s the author of Humanizing B2B with a Z. And when I saw him speak at Ignite on the importance of likability for B2B brands, I just thought he’d be really ideal for this episode. So, I was delighted when he agreed to chat. And I started by asking him: Well, hasn’t emotion always been part of B2B? What’s changed now?

Paul: So, I don’t think it’s new for sure. But it’s always been on the fringes of B2B marketing – was, as you say, hiding in the background. I think it’s more of a question of how and where it appears, that has changed. So much of historical B2B or industrial marketing was heavily reliant on emotional selling. The good old-fashioned sales rep with his expensive cameras and his company car would win deals based on his ability to charm, win over, and schmooze the traditional B2B buyer. And B2B was a relationship game. And emotion was the primary technique to get a foot in the door and expand from there.

So, I think obviously, the internet SaaS business models, the shift away from sales, obviously trying to cut out costs from the process, the digital customer journey now being everything. Actually, the emotion has gone out of the process, and brands haven’t necessarily filled that void. Instead, they’re doing what they always do, which is sell product, lead on features and benefits, and expect everything to be rosy.

And that, to me, is where the opportunity is. And that’s where we’re seeing this kind of change, as far as I’m concerned.

David: So, what kind of emotional responses does marketing need to pick up with now, that sales would have provided, what kind of emotions do we need to key into?

Paul: Yeah, so I think generally speaking evidence exists to support the fact that brands that show up in a positive, meaningful, and authentic way are the most liked brands. Having a positive outlook, I think, is key. But I think desire, appeal, kudos, stature, confidence, control are all emotional states that B2B buyers and decision-makers are either consciously or subconsciously influenced by.

And on the flip of that, you’ve got fear, which is another powerful emotion that is prevalent in the buyer journey, specifically for B2B. So, you’ve got fear of missing out, the whole FOMO thing; you’ve got fear of being irrelevant as a brand, or even as a marketeer; you’ve got fear of making the wrong decision, you know, the whole loss aversion bias that Rory Sutherland talks about. So, my take is, it’s more about the feeling that I’m trying to induce in a prospect, rather than just an emotion, and I think feelings have a greater context, but they are both the same side of the queen.

So, for example, if the feeling I want to create is, how do I make a prospect feel 10 feet tall? What emotional triggers do I need to use to induce that feeling? And there’s a brilliant tool by a famous psychologist called Robert Plutchik. And he has this wheel of emotion. And on this wheel of emotion, you’ve got all the main eight states and all these sub emotions. And they’re actually just really good planning tools to think about how you build that emotional and feeling-based connection.

David: By what you’re saying, it’s definitely about invoking the feeling, rather than talking about the feeling, right? From the point of view of when we’re creating the content – we often talk about ‘show don’t tell’.

Paul: Yeah, it’s the subtlety of marketing. Obviously, we’re not in a market stall. We’re not just shouting out: Yeah, we’re really cool. You can be cool too. Come and buy our products. You’ve got to earn the right to talk about products, you’ve got to influence and persuade people. All the usual rules of B2C marketing that, we have this conversation about, are they applicable to B2B? etc.

There’s a lot of really good stuff that B2C have done in their journey that we’re absolutely leveraging, which are really powerful ways to do that: the power of word; video is a fairly new medium in the world of B2B. And so, for the first time ever, we’re able to convey emotion through the power of video or words and music and we’ve only just touched the surface as far as I’m concerned.

David: And so, with the book, the whole concept of humanizing B2B, humanizing with a Z listener, if you want to find the book.

Paul: Yeah, trying to capture the American market.

David: Quite right too. So, what does that actually look like in practice? What does a more human approach to B2B marketing or B2B content look like?

Paul: Yes, I think it’s important to say that when I talk about humanizing B2B, at its heart, I see it as a modern-day philosophy, that actually promotes the human side of marketing as much as the functional side. So, we’re not trying to take away all the good stuff that B2B is known for, we’re just trying to add something to it. And most B2B brands are built on this single dimension of what I call competency.

For example, you make a good product, you scale it, you use automation tools, you’re operationally savvy, you build demand engine, and so forth. And all this comes with the territory of being professional, talking in jargon, using the colour blue, being ordinary, looking like everybody else in your category looks. And hopefully, if you’ve got all that right, you can be the trusted advisor. And all that stuff is so cookie-cutter, playbook-driven, every brand in every category – most of the companies look and feel and talk the same way. And so, it’s definitely lost its edge.

And I think that when I talk about the dimension of likability, as well as the dimension of competency, and I don’t mean likeability as it relates to people, there’s lots of conversation and narrative about that. I’m talking about likability in the absence of people. So, as you mentioned, through your brand, your content, your emails, your website, and so forth, the language, the way you speak, the way you come across, all those things are incredibly important. And that is this digital likeability. And that, to me, is where the game is won or lost.

And with so many buyers whether they’re 60%, 70%, 80%, or 90%, through the buying cycle, before they speak to a sales rep or some form of expert. The opportunity, therefore, to influence people is absolutely huge. And most brands don’t do anything, they still do the tired old, same old stuff. They’re not thinking about how to influence people in that digital journey from an emotional point of view. And I think that’s why B2B is an incredibly exciting place to be right now.

David: So, if the listener is nodding away, thinking great I could definitely want to take a step into this territory with my brand with my content? What kind of tips could you give them, to make their content more emotional, or more human? What can they practically do? And how can they sell that to their stakeholders too?

Paul: I’d look, first of all, at what other B2B brands are doing, not necessarily in your category but generally, which are the brands out there that have taken a decision to try and put a bit more emotion into their brand.

I would also say that I think most B2B agencies are just aching to do more interesting, more creative, more imaginative stuff, you’ve got to take some calculated risks. We are marketeers at the end of the day, we have to balance the demand engine bit, with actually pushing our business and our brands forward. So there needs to be some calculated risk that goes with it all.

And we did a campaign for Sage Pay last year. And it was incredibly difficult to understand the way that the marketing team had been set up and the way they’d conventionally done things. And we had to really shift their mindset to take a very subtle, emotional approach with this campaign called your business, your baby, but seven months after the campaign ad ran, we literally doubled all the marketing KPIs that they’d done the previous year.

So, there’s proof that this stuff works from just a marketing KPI point of view. But again, we did a campaign for KPMG, where the ask of us as an agency was, how do we dial the emotion in our campaign, and we did this pretty big content piece, it was a £1 million investment that KPMG spent, but they saw a £58 million return of close business opportunity off the back of this changing features campaign.

So, if you need a reason to go tell your commercial stakeholders, why you want to experiment and push it – because the growth metrics, increased all the value, increase lifetime value, increase margins, and so forth, are there to be had for the people brave enough to go and make a decision to push on this door. And the book is full of examples of these facts and data points and everything else

David: You mentioned to look at people maybe in other parts of B2B that are doing it well and taking inspiration from them. Apart from the couple that you’ve mentioned, is there anyone else in the space that you see and go, yeah, they’re doing it well, you can take some inspiration there?

Paul: I will say that I’ve always looked at SAP. So, from an enterprise point of view, I think SAP have always done a really good job of being able to humanise what they do. They made a decision to use consumer tactics like employing Clive Owen as being almost like that character, an ambassador for their brand and being able to use him to narrate their story and build that familiarity and likability.

I know that Hewlett Packard have used Christian Slater, again with his wolf campaign. So again, very B2C tactics driven in B2B. But on a lower scale, we’ve worked with brands like Crowdcube, who I think have taken to this whole humanizing notion brilliantly well, and again have seen significant business results off the back of it.

But there’s a brilliant commercial on YouTube for a company called Waze which is using these inflatable signpost dolls that signpost things across America – and it’s just hilarious. It’s a brilliant piece of storytelling, it gets the message across in a really interesting, engaging way.

So, I think there’s loads of good stuff happening in different pockets. And I guess you’re just trying to make it more mainstream. I think that’s the journey we’re on, as B2B marketeers is just for this not to be on the fringes anymore, but to be more mainstream, and the more we see, the more we experiment, the more data points say this stuff works, the more it’ll happen.

David: So why do you think this is so relevant right now, it certainly seems like it’s having a moment. Why do you think it is?

Paul: So, you’re absolutely right, David. It is having a moment. I think B2B marketing in its modern form is on an incredible learning curve. We are 50 years behind B2C in terms of leveraging emotion and positioning brands beyond the functional nature of what they do. But the good news is, we’re catching up fast. Emotion is catching people’s attention it feels like there’s a bit of a perfect storm of opportunity, which is brewing.

And I say that because I think, customers are less loyal than ever. The pandemic has meant people are more open-minded to exploring different vendors, etc. I think marketers are fed up with doing same old, same old, that speeds or feeds marketing, so they’re crying out for some kind of change. They’re also fed up with chasing technology or product differentiators as strategy when it’s easier sometimes to differentiate emotionally.

I think grabbing keeping people’s attention is harder than it has ever been. And we talk about storytelling being something new. But storytellers have got to compete with storytellers these days. It’s incredibly difficult. It’s not just about telling a story; you’ve got to tell a bloody good story.

I think business buyers and decision-makers have generally become a bit more compassionate. I think we’ve seen the millennial buyer. And definitely, as we see senior buyers eek past the age of 40, we tend to be more value-driven less about ourselves more conscious about the planet, and family and life and all those kinds of things like that.

And, finally alongside the fact that COVID is jolted people’s thinking, and this fear of being irrelevant in a post-pandemic world is actually scaring people into wanting to look at their brand and do things differently. We’ve also got all this amazing research from Binet and Field and the B2B LinkedIn institute that actually put in some numbers and metrics down. So, I think if you put all that stuff into the mixer, it feels like there’s real momentum, and that moment is happening.

David: If the listener wants to find out more, they want to get in touch with you and ask you stuff, they want to buy the book. Where can they do things like that?

Paul: So, the book is available on Amazon and all good bookstores. I can’t get enough of saying that – it’s my thing.

David: It really is, like you’re actually in shops.

Paul: Exactly. And if £16 is too much, you can get the Kindle version for a bargain busting 99p. You can track me down on LinkedIn, you can go to the agency website, which is roosterpunk.com. There is a specific HumanizingB2B.com website. And if you’re waiting for the audiobook, because I’m a big audio fan, that’s probably another nine months away I’m afraid. Or connect with me on LinkedIn, there’s loads of places to find me.

David: Thank you, Paul, you’ve given us a lot to think about there. And the book plug was expertly done, I must say, we’ll include a link to it in the show notes for you.

Barbara, I know you’re a big advocate of using emotions in B2B. So, what stood out there for you?

Barbara: I think, for me, listening to Paul, it really resonated. Very often when we’re communicating with our B2B potential customers or customers, we tend to see a job title and see that first and foremost, and actually, we’re all just human beings, we all have needs, we don’t differentiate ourselves, we don’t take off one cap and put on another at different moments. So, we are irrational, we are emotional people. Even people in procurement, that’s what they are. They’re emotional. We might not always think that, but they are.

And I think the reality is, we very much have to work out what type of mission that they’re on, how we can support them, and what is the way they want to be supported? Or do they want encouragement to do they want support and understanding that will help us understand how we are best partnering with them.

With B2B and digital, it’s got so complex, we’ve got so many buzzwords now. And I think for a lot of people, they’re still clinging to the past. And digital’s scary, they have this fear that digital stops the relationships that were so valuable. They think that sales reps are going to be eradicated because of automation and digital channels. Sales Reps will always be needed, they are incredibly valuable.

You basically need to focus on crafting the messaging that you can automate in the moments that should be service messaging, and let the sales reps, that the salespeople who are incredibly good at developing relationships, be in those moments that really matter. Driving deeper relationships and understanding how to add value to the customer. For me, that’s the opportunity for B2B marketing. And that was the overriding message the whole way. Listening to Paul, it was like, yes, finally, I’m hearing the magic words.

David: Absolutely. So, do you think the buying journey in B2B has been changing quite a bit? I know people have been saying, for a long time, people are doing more and more and more of their research before they engage with a salesperson.

And I guess COVID has probably kicked that percentage even higher because you can’t go out to events and meet people. So, although, of course, a lot of the time people will buy a product, because they like the salesperson and the salesperson recommended it and that’s the end of it. But do you think there’s an extent to which content is taking over some of the lifting as far as that rapport building, or not so much.

Barbara: I think content has such an important role. I think what content allows us to do is start having a conversation earlier. And start really making sure that what we have to offer and what solutions we can provide our customers with, they’re able to do some of the research beforehand. There is nothing worse than when you’re at the start of a potential journey when you’re doing the awareness and consideration and suddenly someone is telling you the solution when you haven’t worked out what the problem is.

For me content is the opportunity for whenever I’m being a B2B buyer, I’m having to work out exactly what I need, not what someone’s telling me I need and what someone’s gadgets and gizmos and features are telling me but what is the best resolution. And for me, I always go to referrals, I always go and ask people who I know have had a similar problem, or I get into Google fast, and I want to read articles, I want to read the features and functionality. And I want to read people’s blogs and understand how they’re helping customers just like me to solve problems.

So, for me, it’s giving me my automation process, I’m unwilling to speak to a salesperson at that moment. I don’t want to have a demo. I want to just do the research. When I’m ready, and I’m shortlisted, then I want to have a demo, but don’t try and sell to me before I’m ready and content is perfect for doing the pre-sale.

David: And that shortlisting process? Is it fair to say that’s maybe, in B2B, a bit less rational than people give it credit for, a lot of that’s down to how you feel about the company? Right? How you feel about the brand?

Barbara: Absolutely. I think a lot of times we forget how much brand purpose actually plays in in all of this, and especially in B2B. Brand purpose is very, very important in CX and in marketing. And the reality is, sometimes you have a gut feeling about a brand, or a product, or a service and it’s not rational. But that gut feeling is dictating and it’s not price led, it’s not, I have made some decisions where I was like, I really don’t know why I made that decision – but it felt right at the time. And these are not small decisions. And these are B2B purchases on a grand scale.

So, for me, we have to understand that people, when they are coming to consider your solution for what they need, they don’t always understand it. So don’t go and do lots of focus groups. And don’t spend lots of time asking people why they do things and then replicating content for that. What you need to do is understand what’s the job to be done? What are the products and features that they really need to not what you want to sell? And help them understand how your solution solves their problem via testimonials. To me, I don’t understand why everybody runs away from testimonials. I’m like, get them out there. let everybody see how you solve that.

David: Yeah, absolutely. Because a lot of it is testimonials, you’ve got the social proof. It’s a lot about helping people to feel comfortable and to feel safe a lot of the time in B2B. You’re a big fan of behavioural economics. I know. And you gave a really good webinar with Steve Kemish on Propolis. And that plays into that, doesn’t it? The different ways that people make decisions, and whether you make a slow decision or whether you make a snap decision. And actually, a lot of the time in B2B, we might assume it’s one. But really, it’s, it’s the other, right?

Barbara: Absolutely. It’s so easy to get stuck in making assumptions about how people purchase your products. And I think that is so true in B2B, it’s even true in B2C let’s be honest. We dictate we create these journeys and say this is how someone exactly behaves, and it’s not. There are so many intricacies for how we behave. What people forget very frequently, which I love, is as soon as you purchase something there’s social permissibility – you are now at risk of making the wrong decision.

So, you are actually naturally trying to do a natural referral programme with anybody else that you can because the more people that you can sell this exact same product to – it means you were right. So, we actually are at our highest advocacy and referral as soon as you handed money over not once you’ve got the product. You’re actually in a risk pattern, and you want to take that risk away from you, so you want to diversify that risk, which nobody uses referral straightaway.

David: Yeah, and because I suppose the features and benefits, they have their role to play, but again it’s almost post-rationalisation, right? There’s always this thing that the heart is the Oval Office, and the head is the Press Office. And it’s like, you’ve made your mind up and then you have to justify the decision that you’ve already made – to yourself, or to your buying unit, and to the rest of your organisation in B2B.

And I think it probably has a lot more in common with – oh, I bought this more expensive car because they’re more reliable, that’s a better-known brand or something like that – rather than just, I wanted one. But I think a lot of the time it’s the same thing in B2B, it’s in Thinking Fast and Slow, right? It’s type one and type two decision making, is that right?

Barbara: Absolutely. A lot of people, we don’t know why we think certain things. Now, there aren’t many decisions that are absolutely set in stone, especially when it comes to purchases that you will not change. These are big decisions that impact who you are at your absolute core. The rest, you’re actually making up why you’ve done a lot of it.

I’ve spent a lot of time doing focus groups, which I find highly entertaining. And I remember a very long time ago, doing one for Aldi, understanding new crisp variants, and I literally sat in a room, listening to people post-rationalise why they buy crisps. And I was just like, this is crazy, you walk down an aisle, right? Like, come on, there wasn’t that much to this. And I think from that moment on, I was like, we as human beings don’t always know why we make decisions, a lot of our decisions can be flipped incredibly fast.

And we can do a huge amount of research; we can absolutely be believing that we have the right solution. And then suddenly, either someone can influence us, or somebody can just land with an incredibly simple, valuable value proposition in the last moments, and convert us at rapid pace. And I think everybody’s experienced that – where suddenly you’re almost at the purchasing, and you put something down and lift something up really fast. And then what? And that’s it. That’s it on this tiny little scale, where it’s just the: Oh, there I go.

And I think a lot of times, it’s everybody, with behavioural economics. I’m really interested in the fact that, behavioural economics and CX are fascinating because everybody’s trying to manage and own the whole journey. Let’s plot out the whole journey. Let’s own all these key moments of truth. And I don’t worry about all the key moments, there’s actually probably two or three that are actually the key moments work out what they are, and be in those moments, spend your money where your competitors spreading themselves too thin. And you can hijack the brain and get it to be you as the last decision, because it’s usually the first and the last that are the pieces, all the stuff in between – you can change your mind incredibly rationally.

David: So, in a B2B buying process, what would that look like?

Barbara: Oh, now you’re asking me that the big questions, I think it’s making sure a lot of times when we create content for websites and looking at the sales reps, and the onboarding stage as well, we ensure we spend so much time in that top of funnel. But as we’re coming down, we get lesser and lesser content and less pointed, less sticky. We’ll just start throwing blogs in, we may do a white paper, but actually it’s that bottom funnel. That’s the real key.

Spend your time thinking about: What content do they need in the tiniest of bite sizes? And what are the messages that they need at that final moment? What can you tell them that’s better about the services or the products or what’s going to solve their problems more in those moments? Because that’s the key magic, that absolute top awareness. And for me, bottom funnel, getting those exactly right, focused on what their actual needs are, what their expectations are, show them in those moments how easy the onboarding is because that’s usually the biggest fear. Whoever’s buying, it is nervous that whoever is going to use it isn’t going to use it.

So, show from testimonials from users not from buyers, at that moment show how easy it is. Tell them that the onboarding was automated, and it only took X amount of time, and it saved X amount of money. And then show someone who actually went through the onboarding. I think very often we keep talking about ourselves, instead of showing our customers people just like them, and why they made those decisions.

Before we finish this month’s episode, it’s time for our copywriting tip of the month. This time, it’s from Radix, consultant writer, and last month’s guest co-host, George Reith.

George: My name’s George, I’m a senior copywriter and consultant at Radix. And my favourite copywriting tip is to keep a running record of phrases that you use a lot in your copy. Whether you choose to do that on a piece of paper, digitally, or on lots of post-it notes stuck to your monitor and desk, I find having that list of phrases you use a lot means you can avoid using them too much. I find that helps me keep my copy a bit more varied.

David: Thanks, George. If there’s anybody that I would take advice from on how not to be boring, it’s you. Barbara, does that one resonates with you?

Barbara: Honestly, I love that. I’m going to start doing it and actually understand what my buzzwords are. Because I’m sure my clients are going mad with the number of times I say, certain words that I’m not aware of. So, thank you very much, George, I’m going to let you know how I get on.

David: I want to know what’s on your list.

Barbara: I’m scared, I’m scared.

David: I’m afraid that is about all we have time for this month. Now, listener, it might not have escaped your attention. That next time is our 100th episode. And I have to tell you, it is going to be all change.

We have a slightly new format coming, a shorter running time and a new name for the podcast. So, look out for that. We will still have great guests. We’re starting with Doug Kessler next time. And we’ll keep the same focus on helping you get the most out of your B2B content.

So, if you’re a subscriber and you see a new B2B content podcast appear in September, don’t worry. It’s just us, just a new name and a new theme tune. I really can’t wait for you to hear it. Before then, though. Barbara, could you thank our contributors for this episode and also remind the listener where they can get in touch.

Barbara: Of course, thanks again to Paul Cash for helping us put the human back into B2B. And thanks, George for that wonderful copywriting tip. But most importantly, thank you, the listener for joining us, it’s been a lot of fun. And don’t forget, if you’d like to contact the show, you can do that on email: [email protected] or on Twitter: @Radixcom. And if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, a review would be marvellous.

David: And thank you Barbara for co-hosting. I do hope you’ve enjoyed it. Has it been alright?

Barbara: It’s been wonderful. So much fun.

David: That’s kind of you. Listener, we’ll see you next time with a fresh new format, new name, and Doug Kessler. But until then, remember, science has discovered 27 distinct human emotions, but nobody has ever experienced the desire to enable website notifications.

David and Barbara: Bye.

Acknowledgements and thanks

  • Firstly, a huge Radix thank you to Barbara Stewart. It was wonderful to have you as our co-host for the first time – hopefully, it won’t be the last.
  • Thanks also to Paul Cash, for reminding us about the human side of B2B copy in that fantastic interview. And, of course, showing us all how it’s done with that smooth book plug.
  • And George, thank you for that brilliant copywriting tip of the month.

And for the eagle ‘eared’ listener…

Yes, this was Episode 99 of Good Copy, Bad Copy, which can only mean one thing. Next month we are celebrating our 100th episode! And we’re celebrating in style – with a slightly new format, a shorter running time, and a new name.

So, watch out for that next month, and when you subscribe and see that brand new B2B content podcast appear in September, know that it’s still us – and get ready to hear our exciting new sound.

Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash

Podcast 98: How to make your B2B content more readable and accessible

Posted on by The Radix Team

In this month’s episode of Good Copy, Bad Copy, we’re talking about how to make your B2B content readable and accessible for the widest possible audience.

And who better to talk to on this subject than Sarah Winters, founder of Content Design London? In our feature interview, David and Sarah discuss how our readers really take in information… and how we can make our B2B content accessible and clear, even when writing about technical subjects.

Radix consultant writer George Reith is co-hosting, and talks to David about using contractions in B2B copy. Can they be a shortcut to friendlier sounding B2B content? And when are they best avoided to boost readability?

And as always, we’re sharing another tip from our own team of experienced copywriters. This month Consultant Copywriter Kieran Haynes is on hand with a counterintuitive way to beat the clock when you’re on deadline.

You’ll find a full transcript of our podcast at the end of this post.

What steps can B2B Marketers take to make their content clear and accessible? 

Between 2010 and 2014, Sarah Winters and her team at the Government Digital Service invented the discipline of Content Design, applying new techniques that shifted the focused to user-centred content.

According to Sarah, a lot of people approach writing B2B content differently to content created for consumer markets. Sarah shared some simple things to keep in mind that will boost accessibility and readability for your B2B reader.

Remember your reader is human… just like you

Essentially, readability is about talking to the human; the fact your user is representing a business shouldn’t change that. So, think about the way people take in information. Then, consider what they’re trying to achieve – whether that’s registering for your latest webinar, or gaining a deeper understanding of a technical subject in an eBook. Finally, serve them the information they need to complete their task, in the clearest way you can.

User researchers are your new best friends

It goes without saying that strong user research makes for better B2B content and streamlined online journeys. But it also eases the content sign-off process with stakeholders. You’ll find challenges and push-backs are resolved more easily when you can show your content decisions are insight-led and backed by research.

Some jargon is good (yes, we really mean that)

B2B has a bit of a bad rep for loving a buzzword. We’re still not fans of those. But sometimes a specialist term is really the right word to use for your audience. Sarah suggests the best approach to technical language and jargon is to offer an explanation the first time you use it on a page, and make sure that the words around it act as markers that offer context.

Tiny changes can make a big difference to accessibility

If your content is not accessible, it’s not useful. To boost accessibility in your B2B content, Sarah suggests thinking about language first. Small changes to sentence structure and length are an easy place to start. And will make all the difference to everyone who reads your content.

At Content Design London, Sarah’s team don’t talk about Plain English, which sounds boring and makes people switch off. Instead they champion Clear English. And being clear is all-important for frictionless B2B marketing content. Making content easy to read is a great starting point for making it accessible to more of your target audience.

Sarah shares many more insights and examples with us in the interview, so have a listen… and if you’d like to know more, it’s worth diving into the Readability Guidelines wiki and Sarah’s game-changing book, “Content Design”.

In the rest of the podcast, you’ll also hear an insightful conversation into the best use of contractions in B2B copy between David and George. Spoiler alert: if you find yourself writing shouldn’t’ve, you’re doing it all wrong.

In this episode, you’ll find…

00:57 – A warm welcome for our Radix guest co-host, George Reith.

02:18 – David talks about accessibility and readability with Sarah Winters.

17:15 – George and David discuss jargon, the best use of contractions in B2B writing, and the apps and algorithms that can help boost readability scores in your writing.

35:10 – We announce the winners on our Content Design London resource packs, and hear their winning tips for making B2B content readable and accessible. Thanks to everyone who entered and shared their advice with us.

41:00 – Kieran’s copywriting tip of the month: how to plan your writing time.

Was this your favourite episode yet?

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Tweet us at @radixcom on Twitter or pop us a message on [email protected]. (Or, if you fancy your chances of appearing on the podcast, send a voice memo our way.)

How to listen:

Transcript: Good Copy Bad Copy 98: Readability and Accessibility

Speakers:

  • Sarah Winters, Founder at Content Design London
  • David McGuire, Creative Director at Radix
  • George Reith, Consultant Writer at Radix
  • Kieran Haynes, Consultant Writer at Radix

Sarah Winters: The people who are the most well read, don’t want to marvel at your GCSE English skills…

David McGuire: Hello listener and thank you for joining us for episode 98 of Good Copy, Bad Copy, the B2B copywriting podcast. We’re really very grateful for your company.

George Reith: And this month we’re going to be talking about how to make your B2B content readable and accessible to the widest possible audience. And we have an in-depth interview with an expert on that very subject: Sarah Winters from Content Design London.

David: My name is David McGuire, I’m Creative Director at Radix Communications, which is a B2B tech copywriting agency, and I’m delighted to be joined by a familiar guest co-host for this episode. It’s the smooth sounds of Radix consultant writer, George Reith. George, welcome.

George: Hi David, and hi listener, thank you both for letting me come back again.

David: It’s always a pleasure to have you here apart from that you made me sound bad.

George: I was just going to say it’s sad that you’ve given me such a warm welcome. I wish I got this kind of welcome everywhere I went really.

David: I can’t speculate why that might not be the case. So speaking of going places, I think by the time this is broadcast, or podcast. The Freedom Day will have come and gone. Are you feeling the freedom yet?

George: David, I’d ask you know, are any of us ever truly free? Even when Freedom Day comes and goes, I’ll still be bound by the meat cage that is my body, and pinned by the weight of existential dread, so…

David: Okay so moving swiftly on. George, I’m sure you know the drill by now please can you tell the listener, how they can get in touch with us.

George: Sure thing. Listener, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions you can get in touch with us via email – [email protected]. Or on Twitter – @radixcom

David: Thank you very much.

George: So David, you’ve wanted to get this month’s guest onto the podcast for quite a while, haven’t you?

David: Yeah that is absolutely true, actually. So, when I saw Sarah Winters speak at The Copywriting Conference, it completely changed how I thought about those conversations that you have with stakeholders about making content clear and readable. I mean, she’s genuinely just one of the best speakers I’ve ever seen.

Sarah is the founder of Content Design London, and she’s the author of one of my favourite books, and she was really fundamental in making gov.uk an accessible site. So she knows a thing or two about that awkward chat where you get accused of dumbing things down. I was obviously really delighted when she agreed to talk about making B2B content clear and accessible. So I started by asking her, “Why should a B2B marketer care about readability anyway?”

Sarah Winters: It’s interesting because a lot of people will pull B2B away from any other market and it’s daft, because there are humans in businesses, there are humans that run businesses. So essentially readability is about talking to the human. The fact that they represent a business is neither here nor there, really.

The way that we take in information and the way that we process it in our brains goes one way, regardless of your language, regardless of your culture, regardless of where you’re sitting on a neurobiological level, it goes in one way. If you have a cognitive challenge or you have a disability, then of course your other senses, or the other ways that you take in information, will do their funky thing but essentially it’s still processed the same way, unless you’ve had like a lesion on the brain from when you were born.

So I find it really odd that people care about readability, depending on the way that you define it, in their day-to-day lives. But they completely divorce it when it comes to business. They’re like, in my day to day life I want you to get to the point, I want you to be amusing or engaging, or, you know, funny. I want you to be tearful, I want you to be, whatever. But I want to essentially complete your task, but when I’m at work I want something completely different.

That doesn’t happen. Never happens. You are a human and you bring everything with you, all the time. You do change slightly when you go to work, and you will maybe introduce specialist terms, or jargon, and that’s fine. There are ways of getting around that so that you’re inclusive and specific. But readability, depends on how you define it, and why you don’t care about it, rather than why you should care about it, if you see what I mean.

David: Yeah, so, how would you define, are there ways of defining that you think are particularly helpful?

Sarah: For us, we just term everything as accessible and inclusive.

David: Right.

Sarah: A lot of people will talk about plain English, and we tend not to. We changed it a little while ago, we’ll now talk about clear English, because if it’s plain, people think boring. And if people think readable, they think, boring. And that’s not the case at all. It just means that you’re being clear, and I think though a lot of people, particularly in a B2B setting, they need to be clear because there’s competition for everything. Right? If you’re not frictionless. If you’re not able to get people through a process, or into your sphere to become your brand champions, whatever it is, if you can’t do that in an easy clear way your competitors will. And you will have lost out.

David: I think one of the things I guess that comes into it, is where you talked about the technical specifics and the jargon that people need to use. Is that something that you find in the clients that you’ve worked with?

Sarah: Yeah, it’s stupid things. Nuances, like, “I’d like a 72 word sentence please with all high punctuation”. It’s like: “Why? You know that you’re going to dump 90% of your audience once you start hitting 14 to 19 words, don’t you? And it’s just about why are you losing so many people?” That’s my kind of question. But you could do really easy things with your content to make it open and inclusive.

David: So, what sort of things would you suggest?

Sarah: So, one is actually to know your user journey. And I don’t mean the sales funnel, I mean the user journey. Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking a brand new idea, you’ve got seven to nine, or seven to twelve, unconscious thoughts before you can make a conscious decision about anything. That language is coming from somewhere. And is it the specialised language or not?

So by understanding the journey that people go through to get to you, and what language they’re bringing with them, and what preconceived ideas that they have, you can actually work out where those specialist terms should be.

So, if you work from a user-centred perspective, you would have, I don’t know, social media and mainstream media and all of these things that kind of inform the way that you think about something. And you can use more lay terms there, and introduce specialist terms.

The way to introduce specialist term is to just introduce it the first time you use on a page. That’s it. But often people will pull things that should be two or three steps down the line, up-front. And that’s where they lose people. And nobody by the way, is using terms like “synergy”, or whatever it is that you’re using. You know what I mean, you can use them, but know where it is in the journey. That’s the crux of it.

If you’re introducing a term, like I say, use it the first time you use it on the page, and work out all the words around it, so you’ve got context markers throughout a paragraph. Any paragraph, doesn’t matter how big or small, you will have context markers. So your brain is kind of telling you something about the content before it happens. If those are too heavy. You will get people switching off.

And again, they’re going to go to your competitors, they’re not going to stay with you. So you need to work out how much emphasis you want to put on your jargon and on your specialist terms. And what it’s going to cost you.

So if you have a 72 word sentence, loaded with jargon, loaded with buzzwords, you can do eye tracking, you can get eye trackers really cheaply now, and watch people skim through the middle of it, get to the end and either bounce out or carry on. But where they trust you less, because you can test for that as well, or that they’re disengaging with you.

So you’ve really got to have that conversation with stakeholders, I normally term it as, “Do you want them to read it, or do you want them to act on it?” Because often, those can be two different things.

David: Sure.

Sarah: And then with the reading thing, “Do you want them to read it, or do you want them to engage?” Because those are two different things. And so you have to have that balance because if you get boring the brain shuts down and then that’s that.

David: Because people will say, our audience are very, very, very, very smart, they’re very, very educated. If it doesn’t sound like a PhD thesis, no one’s going to read it. But that’s not true.

Sarah: That’s not remotely true. There was a study, I’m trying to think of it off the top of my head, where somebody was saying, the most intelligent people on the planet are the most well-read. And the people that are the most well-read. Don’t want to marvel at your GCSE English skills.

David: True.

Sarah: They want to get what you have to say, and apply it to their own lives, to their own context because they’ve got a lot of reading to do, they’ve got a lot to get through. And it’s not to wade through your sentence structure. And often readability, accessibility, usability has nothing to do with intelligence. It has more to do with boredom, Are you boring me, because you’ve got a long sentence, you’re not getting to the point fast enough, you are not engaged.

I’m not talking about funny cat GIFs, or whatever, shoving those everywhere, not that. People come with a task, again, knowing your user journey. Where’s the task ? Where am I able to be amused? Where am I able to be engaged? And where do I want to do a task? And then reflecting that journey back to them. That is the most effective way of getting to people.

David: I’ve noticed that one of the things that you’ve researched is the impact of contractions on readability and accessibility. I think as copywriters, particularly in B2B, you know, people want the copy to sound friendly, they want it to sound conversational, like you’re talking to a human being. Contractions are a huge go-to. It’s like, yes, use them, you know, please. It’s not as simple as that, is it? There’s another side to it.

Sarah: Yeah, there is. Jo Schofield did a Medium post. She was working for Co-Op or DWP at the time, and they did some testing on contractions. English as a second language, particularly, find contractions very difficult. And other people are looking for the word, ‘not’.

So, when we read, you have three eye fixation zones and the third one is where your brain says, “Do I need to read that word or not?”. Now the word ‘not’ could be the only thing that turns that sentence or that paragraph from positive to negative.

And when people have that in mind because they are task orientated rather than engagement orientated, and they miss it, they could literally read a piece, think it’s positive, and it won’t be. It’ll be negative, because it’s literally hanging off an apostrophe.

So you need to be careful. Of course, if you go, “would not, could not…” Well that has a tone, but remember, it’s only one contraction into two words, that’s it. The rest of your piece can handle it. So if you think that your, your entire work is hanging off a contraction, then I would probably look at all the things that are going on in the page.

But, just be aware that particularly negative contractions can be difficult for English as a second language, and people with learning disabilities. There’s 1.4 million people in this country with a learning disability. They have jobs. They will be on the other end of the business that you are trying to engage with, so just, is it worth it? That is the question.

David: That seems like a good way to segue into making things accessible for people with disabilities of one kind or another. Readability and accessibility are quite closely linked, in that sense.

Sarah: I think they should be. If it’s not accessible, then it’s not useful. Basically, there’s 13.9 million registered disabled people in this country. That’s not even including temporary disabilities like migraines, stress – which a lot of people in this country will understand now.

David: So, I mean in a B2B context, when people are making content for B2B marketing, what are the main things they should be thinking of from an accessibility point of view?

Sarah: Probably, language first. What languages and where. Sentence structure and length. These are all tiny things that just make such a massive difference. And it is that jargon, it’s that jargon. There is a stack of research out there, that people can use to kind of bash their stakeholders with.

And even in this country, a B2B example will be the Health Regulatory Authority took the government to court, because their website was legally signed off by lawyers, it was 100% legally compliant, but it was confusing because there was too much content on the pages.

So a High Court judge declared it in favour of the defendant – in this case, Richmond Pharmaceutical Company. And so the government had to pay loads of money, and loads of charges, and all this sort of thing. Because the website was confusing. So a High Court judge set a precedent in this country: you can be legally correct. If you’re confusing, you can be taken to court for it.

David: Where can the listener find out more about you, and more about the resources that you share?

Sarah: So everything is on Content Design.London. We have a Readability Guidelines Wiki – it’s in the book as well. It’s in a free wiki that you can just go and see. And it’s everything that I’ve talked about, has research backing this up. And so when you go into a conversation, you can pretty much stay quiet and say, “You see this research, you see this research, you see this research, what you want to do?”. So if you have a look at Content Design London, or we’re on Twitter, which is @contentdesignln. And we put a lot of our research out there as well, so everything that we say is backed up by usability.

David: You said this was a market you really wanted to talk to. So, what did you really want to say to B2B marketers, while you have their ear.

Sarah: I see you. I know how difficult it can be. We’ve done it as well, so I know how difficult it can be to explain to stakeholders that they do not need to have all the marketing, and all the jargon, and put out everything that they’ve ever thought, ever, onto the internet. There is research out there and your best friend will be a trained user researcher. Because they can go out and get videos, really quickly, of people failing and getting bored, which you may not be able to get from your analytics, but you will be not grabbing them to convert. So, your best friend will be a user researcher.

David: Thank you so much, Sarah, it’s great to finally hear from you on the podcast, and so much practical advice for our listener. George, what stood out there for you?

George: So what stood out for me, is that I think Sarah has somehow dived into my brain, or at least my copy, and is personally calling me out for my use of contractions. In all seriousness, a lot of really interesting points here and things that I sort of, I think, take for granted sometimes. Maybe just do by default, and suddenly listening to that I’m now starting to interrogate that a little bit more.

Because to me, I’m just, like, contractions all the time. Obviously it makes things sound more casual, it’s like a free way to kind of get a bit more flow in your copy, and especially when you’re writing about something quite dense and technical and abstract and complicated. Having that kind of free, easy way in the copy make things a little smoother, a little easier to read, to a native English speaker, of course, that’s the default for me.

But obviously I’ve foolishly not really considered how it might read for somebody who doesn’t have English as their native language and might be using it as a second language, and therefore contractions suddenly reduce readability. That was an interesting one for me.

David: Yeah, I mean because you’ve got the whole thing with English as a second language, or you’ve got whether they’re reading on, say, a mobile device, which adds a whole bunch of cognitive load anyway. I get it ,but still, at the same time, from a voice and tone point of view, if you don’t use contractions at least some of the time, your brand can sound like a pompous ass.

So, I think there’s a balance. Our colleague John actually wrote a really good blog post about this, he had a dive into the research. I think, you know, the bit that Sarah was saying about the negative contractions, in particular, I think those are the ones that are particularly important.

I think, some kind of simple positive contractions are fine. But then there are ones that are either excessively complicated or they’re negative. You know, if you find yourself writing ‘shouldn’t’ve’, or something like that, then maybe think twice about it. But I think there’s a balance, I think maybe some contraction use is okay.

Are you one for being very standard within the client’s brand, copy, about which words you will contract, and which words you won’t? Because I tend to feel like, again in the spirit of writing as you’d speak, I wouldn’t always contract, or not contract, certain words. And, so I mean, I’m actually deliberately inconsistent about it in the content that I write, but I don’t know if that would just really wind people up.

George: Yeah, it’s interesting, actually, because I, I think I’m alarmingly consistent at just contracting absolutely any word, where it’s appropriate, and probably some where it’s inappropriate to be consistent.

David: You’re just alarmingly consistent in general.

George: If you say so. But I’m a big ‘contraction-er’, I don’t know if that’s a term. I’m going to make it one.

David: You are now.

George: So yeah, but this is really interesting. The idea that some stuff adds more cognitive load when it’s contracted than others. So the negative element is a really valuable point. Especially, Like Sarah said, when the only thing that signifies you’re talking about negative is the contraction.

But then it’s also easy to miss if you’re skimming through a document. So I guess there must be a line there right of sort of where it seems inconsistent versus where actually you’re doing the reader a favour, and I think finding that line is going to be an interesting one and I guess it will depend massively on what you’re writing.

I suppose, like if it’s, you know, quite short, to the point important message about what a reader should do about something, like a practical guide, maybe you don’t want to contract as much. But if it’s a much longer piece maybe contractions would be okay, because you’ve got more text to kind of work around and show when you’re switching to a negative.

Although, that’s contradicting myself straight away, maybe a longer piece you can get away with less contractions. Because it’s such a long piece, there’s already a lot of cognitive load associated with it. Does that make sense?

David: I think so. Yeah I think so. I think some of it is about where you are in the document and what you’re trying to do. I think sometimes you can be at a part of the document where you want to slow things down, and be really serious. You know, like I said, sometimes in an email, you know, you might want to say, “we won’t bother with so and so…”  or in another sense you might say, “we will not do this”.

George: Yeah, I just wanted to say about how refreshing it was to hear somebody talking about B2B content, and saying hey, a little bit of jargon is fine. And that’s nice because whenever I attend a copywriting conference, someone always goes like, “jargon is the worst thing you got to get rid of all of it, that’s the main culprit of overly complex writing in B2B.”

And I sort of get where they’re coming from and obviously some jargon is less helpful than others but you know. Yeah, it’s nice to hear somebody really knows what they’re talking about saying hey, you know, jargon is how people understand their industry. And sometimes it’s fine. Assuming you can get the rest of the sentence to be pretty straightforward, having specific terms that apply to that industry is important and useful. Those terms do mean something. And it’d be silly not to use them.

David: It’s all about speaking the language isn’t it. It’s all about speaking their language that they actually use. I think the issue that we have, particularly in B2B writing and B2B tech writing, is that people have come to, I don’t want to say misunderstand what jargon means but certainly the meaning of the word jargon has expanded, the accepted meaning. So, strictly speaking, it is that the terminology of your industry.

So we’re both copywriters, I can talk about an Oxford comma and you’ll know what an Oxford comma is. Now, it has kind of expanded to when people talk about jargon to include all of the kind of business bullshit terms that go in. You know, “oh it’s innovative solutioneering”

George: Synergistic! I actually don’t think ‘synergistic’ has actually been used by people for like, what 15 years at least. That used to be the standard, okay here’s you know, business BS right here.

David: Yeah, “Let’s leverage our solutions”, all that stuff. But, you know, I think that because there still is a certain element of technical specificity, which is hard for me to say, on a Friday.

If you think about it, what I like to do is think about the water cooler or the break room where your audience works.

And if you think about two engineers or two technical people. Two experts, you know, they’re not going to say, “the big machine’s broken again, the red light is flashing. It’s hurting. Can someone make it less sad? Can they come and make it all better?” They’re going to talk about the specifics.

But neither are they going to say, “Ah! The Flugelbinder is operating at sub-optimal efficiency once again, this is a most inconvenient turn of events. We should arrange for a Maintenance Solution to leverage his expertise forthwith.”

George: I’ve never written about a Flugelbinder before, but I really want to now. It sounds quite exciting.

David: I’m going to have to invent it. So that you can. See, there’s a bit in between, where we use technical specifics but in short, easy to understand sentences.

Because when you talk about talking their language in a B2B tech context, you talk about technical specifics but presented in a simple way.

George: Yeah absolutely and I think as well, if he tried too hard to simplify something, and avoid those terms that that people are actually using, I think it just sounds weird, you know. Like an engineer would look at it and be like, “Why aren’t you talking about these things?”. “What are you talking about? You’re not using any of the terms I would expect to see in a document about, I don’t know whatever it would be, DevOps or what have you…” I don’t think there’s any point avoiding it for the sake of it, right?

David: It’s all about the context. It’s all about the audience and speaking their authentic language. I think when you’re talking with jargon, a lot of complexity gets dragged in. And so, it was a while ago now, but you did look into readability and things for us and you wrote that fabulous blog that has sections of different Flesh Kincaid grade levels, and that kind of thing. I mean, do you find yourself ever kind of looking to algorithms and things just to kind of give you a steer if your content is in the right kind of area readability wise?

George: Yeah I did try to. I do, but in a quite a gentle way. I mean, you know I’ve been doing this a fair few years now. So, more often than not, on a default job I’ll kind of just assume the stuff I write is at least mostly readable, like you’d like to think after eight years I can at least do that, right?

But, if there are special requirements, if I’m writing something that’s definitely going to be translated into other languages, then I suddenly think, okay, well, the burden of readability here is going to be greater, because you know there’s a lot of stuff that will translate quite poorly. Or make the translators job the hell on earth and I don’t want to do that.

I’ll run through stuff, just to make sure I’m certain that nothing is really going to throw a spanner in the works. I do find them useful as well in general, just every now and then, just to make sure things are on track, but I think I get a bit frustrated sometimes with how they’re used in other organisations.

So I’ve only had a few clients before that have said, “Right, this piece of writing, it’s got to hit 9 on the Flesh Kincaid grade, anything above a 9 we won’t accept.”  And you know, I’m looking at how that algorithm works and I’m like, yeah, but you know the whole blog is about DevOps solutions and the single phrase ‘DevOps solutions’ spikes that algorithm by like a point in whatever sentence it’s in.

That’s a bad example but you know you get these terms that are quite long quite complicated terms. You can’t not use them because that’s what the blog is about, and you’re sat there arguing with somebody. “I know you said you needed a 9, but I’ve got, got it as a 9.2 Is that okay?”

And as long as people are willing to flex a little bit here and there, I think it’s fine to ask a writer to do that sort of thing. I’ve had some awkward conversations about, no, no, it’s got to be below nine, it has to be. And I’m sat there thinking, I don’t think it’s possible when you’re talking about server virtualisation. there’s too many syllables in that word, I cannot get this down further.

And I appreciate I’m going places about this, I have way more thoughts about this topic than I thought, David, you’ve awakened something within me. One more thing I found as well is that I’ve noticed recently I’ve had quite a few clients ask me to run this stuff through the Hemingway app.

David: Oh yes?

George: And I think the thing that I find interesting about that is, I did a lot of stuff in the Flesh Kincaid reading score. I quite like that, as a readability metric to aim for, because it’s very transparent what it’s calculating. You can look it up, it’s a known thing online. And it’s just sort of the amount of words in a sentence,

David: It’s words and syllables.

George: Exactly. So that’s great because I can look at it and if my score is crazy high, I know what to do to fix that, I need to go back and reduce the amount of words, reduce the amount of syllables in the words, and I’ll start getting somewhere.

Some of these algorithms though, like the Hemmingway app, it didn’t feel quite as obvious or transparent to me. Now I haven’t done a lot of work in it, maybe there is a really obvious algorithm that I just don’t know about yet.

But it’s when I don’t know what it’s looking for, I’m there like, how do I start reducing this number? What do I need to do to make this more readable according to this specific app? So I think that’s a bit of a danger there, I prefer something that’s less of a black box, but there we are.

David: And you’re a kind of expert on Grammarly at Radix, as well…

George: Well, I wouldn’t call myself an expert I think I’m just by default the guy that was left holding the bag, when people went, “Right, someone needs to train everyone on Grammarly and everyone ran away, and it was just me left standing there.”

David: As most technical person in the organisation. With Grammarly you’ve got different flavours, it asks you to suggest which kind of flavour of copy you would like.

George: Yeah I’m quite impressed with Grammarly on that front actually. Because I hadn’t used it for a while, and you know I remember seeing early reviews of it, it sounded like it was all quite general. But seeing they’ve now implemented these things, I don’t know how long this has been in there, but now I’ve started using it again. You know, you have these radio buttons, you can dial in, “How technical is the person you’re writing for?’ That kind of thing. “Is this for business, or consumer stuff?”

That’s really cool to be able to narrow that down, but again I do sort of feel sometimes, it’s very simple to use, which is great, but as a result they don’t give you a huge amount of info on all these different things.

So I’ve set mine to obviously be for a business context of writing. And then I’ve set it to be for professionals. But I could set it to be for academic people. And I’m like, what would it pick up for academic people that it won’t pick up for professional people? Where’s the line there for Grammarly?

I’m sure there’s all sorts of complex rules in place to make a distinct way of writing for both of those people and give you different suggestions. I haven’t played around with it enough yet, but I would love just to have a list of things that I could look at on Grammarly’s website, or a wiki somewhere, or something, so I know what kind of things it’s going to be looking out for.

Because, who knows maybe ‘academic’ would be more suitable for some jobs? I don’t know yet. And I can’t find out unless I start playing around with it. Maybe it’ll be homework for me I don’t know.

David: Sarah also talked a bit about making content accessible, as well as readable, to make sure that people with different  abilities, and visual impairments and things, can access your content. Are we seeing our clients doing anything new or different? Or giving us anything kind of standard in the style guide and things? I mean, some things we just, you know, have been left I think in some cases to work out for ourselves as writers.

George: Yeah, I mean, you know what I still feel that’s what’s happening. I mean you know I would really love to have been able to give you a great answer here of, look at all these clients they’ve been doing all these amazing things, really putting it front and centre.

I’m not quite seeing that myself just yet. I may have been unlucky, or maybe I just haven’t asked enough questions for them to talk to me about accessibility thoughts they’ve been having in their content.

But you know, I know there are some specific elements of copy though that a lot of people have been talking about industrywide for a while. I know CTAs have kind of been the big one for a while, particularly. I think, there seemed to be an era, about five or six years ago, where every CTA button was “Get it now” or “Learn more”, or something like quite high level and vague.

And then I feel like we had a bit of a turning point, where a lot of people picked up that this is awful for screen readers. They’re like, get more info on what get what. And so you’re seeing a lot more specific CTA buttons. Text that says, you know, download the eBook, get the ‘name of the report’. So I was sort of seeing small nudges towards accessibility like that.

But for me, it tends to come from like other writers, rather than clients pushing it from the top down. Which is fine, I think, but it’s a shame. I think if more clients started thinking about it and telling their contractors, their writers, their employees, to push these things we might see change happen faster, so I’d love for that.

David: Yeah and it might be something that actually we need to get a style guide together and push on it, because it’s not right that people just can’t access your stuff. I mean, from a moral and a business point of view.

George: Obviously accessibility is mega important for people who, you know, can’t listen to things because of a hearing impairment. But also just in terms of usability for somebody who can hear, it’s a great thing too. Because you know, if you’re on a crowded bus and you haven’t got any headphones, brilliant. I mean, I used to have that thing, ads are getting smarter about this now, I’m sure you’ve had it where you’re scrolling Facebook or Reddit, or what have you, and you see an ad pop up, and it’s got audio, and no subtitles.

And I might actually be quite interested in what this ad is promoting, but at the moment there’s no audio. I’m sat on a bus, I’m not going to turn on audio for an ad and blast that out of out my speakers on this bus, right? No chance, I’m skipping that. But if you’ve got subtitles, I might look and go like, “Oh look this man’s waiting for a call from someone, but his phone’s waterproof, so it doesn’t matter he dropped it in a puddle”. But, no subtitles? No chance, I’m not buying it.

David: I’m chuckling about this elaborate bus story, when actually you’re talking about browsing Facebook in the office. aren’t you?

George: Oh yeah, I mean, to be clear I haven’t ridden the bus since the beginning of the pandemic. So yeah I tried to make myself sound really down to earth, “Yeah, I get on the bus too, you know, I do the public transport”. No. I’ve just been a hermit for ages, so no bus and no advert about people dropping phones and puddles. But you can see it happening, right? That that wasn’t a terrible example.

David: So I think that one of the things that we said is that it’s good to have guidelines and to get some stuff in place. And actually we’ve got an opportunity for some people to win some  guidelines. So let’s hand them out, shall we?

George: So David, are you telling me we have honest to God prizes to hand out this month?

David: Unbelievably, that is true. After we finished recording, Sarah generously offered us three prize bundles to give away. Each of them, comprises the Content Design London readability guidelines and a copy of Sarah’s book Content Design, which I highly recommend.

So, I took to social media and asked the audience. I said, “What is your best tip for making B2B content readable and accessible?” And we picked out three favourites, and we’ll send each of you a pack. George, do you want to know what they are? He said, rustling his papers.

George: Yes, I do.

David: Okay, he said, having destroyed some trees. Okay so we have some great responses. And the ones that we picked as our favourites are in no particular order… Livi Cracknell, who’s a Digital Content Strategist at Accenture Interactive, responded to us on LinkedIn.

She said, “I would approach it from a strategic point of view to ensure consistency and longevity. So first establish the guidelines that content must meet to be deemed clear and accessible. And when does it fall short? Group these into categories. Translate this into a framework, or a scorecard, or a checklist that could be used to govern the content creation process. And run all the content through this framework during the production cycle.”

Jennifer Law, who’s a Digital Marketing Manager at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, responded on the B2B Marketing Propolis hive for content and brand strategy, and she says, “Some of the things we do within my team are,” (There’s a bunch of these, but they’re all good – I said that, she didn’t). “Attend accessibility forums, held with various user groups in our organization to understand barriers, and then take these learnings back to see how we can apply them to our content.

“Number two, my team holds monthly accessibility meetings to agree on outcomes we are trying to achieve, to improve accessibility within our remit, We look at things like images, documents, page content, etc, and choose which ones to tackle next.

“Number three, we create short guides and ‘lunch and learns’ to educate stakeholders and business units involved in content creation, and to educate the agencies we use on our requirements.

“Number four, we regularly take time and read up on accessibility to understand more about this topic and discuss our meetings and agree on the next steps.

“Number five, we use Semrush and SiteImprove to run audits on our content. If we don’t own the content we talk to the business owners, about our findings and discuss potential changes we can make.

“And number six, we regularly conduct SEO audits to understand questions and the language people use to make sure that our content is readable and resonates with the needs of our audiences. PS, we have also recently completed an accessibility audit on some of our websites, and we are about to do the same on some of our downloadable content to understand how accessible they are.”

Wow, there’s a whole load there from Jennifer, who has more than earned a prize bundle, I think. And we didn’t just need, you know, reams and reams of suggestions. We also, on LinkedIn, had a response from Chomparani Ali who’s a content specialist in Germany. I think she’s in Germany. She says, “Clearly structure content with subheadings and bullet points, a lot of B2B blog posts ramble on with long sentences and paragraphs”. Amen to that.

George: I was going to say, we’ve all seen that. Fair play.

David: A wall of practical, usable advice and I think that they’ve all, earned themselves prize bundles, so we’ll be in touch to get your addresses and send those out to you. Well done to you, and thanks to everyone else who took the time to engage and sent tips. Obviously we can’t read all of them.

George: Okay, well, now it’s time for our copywriting for the month. This time it’s from Radix Consultant Writer, and International Man of Mystery, Kieran Haynes.

Kieran Haynes: Hi, I’m Kieran, I’m a Consultant Writer at Radix. My favourite copywriting tip is: don’t start writing before you’re ready. When I first began working as a copywriter, I can’t have spent more than twenty percent of my time planning what I was going to write. I would rush to get some words on the page, to protect me against the ever approaching deadline.

Then I’d edit, I’d rethink, I’d freak out, I’d unpick and I would restructure. It wasn’t a fun or effective way to work. Today I probably spend the majority of my time planning. I set out a narrative flow. I know what all my references and proof points are, and where I’m going to use them. I trust in my writing process even as the clock is ticking down, and my work has is much better as a result.

David: He does sound like an international man of mystery in that piece.

George:  If anyone in this business was going to turn out to actually be a spy or assassin, that I never knew about, I think it would be Kieran. Don’t tell him I said that, I don’t want him to get too big for his boots. But I could see him just going, “Yeah, I’m just going to Switzerland for a week”. And I would just be like, I know what you’re doing, you’re not going skiing.

David: I don’t know I think that Kieran would be too obvious.

George: I thought you were going to compliment him and say, “He’d be too nice. But no, too obvious…”

David: He’s too cool, He’s too cool. But yeah, as ever, Kieran, making the rest of us look bad, with his sheer thought process and discipline there. Do you agree with him, George?

George: You know, we were talking about this just earlier today, David. I mean, you know, I have an immense amount of respect for Kieran, because I see him as like, my polar opposite in how he approaches work. You know I feel I’m quite workman-like when it comes to approaching copy, but Kieran is ever the artiste. He is a man who accepts nothing less than perfection, and his planning process is in and of itself a work of art. I think he really commits to it and it produces really great content, so I can’t argue with the results, also unfortunately it couldn’t be me, I just dive straight in and get going and pick it apart like a sculpture.

David: I’m afraid that is all we have time for this month. Listener, join us again next time, when we’ll be talking to Paul Cash about emotion in B2B. In the meantime, George, would you thank our contributors and remind the listener, where they can get in touch, please.

George: Sure thing. So thanks again to Sarah Winters for such an informative discussion. Thanks to Kieran for his copywriting tip and continuing to make me look bad. And thanks and congratulations to our three prize winners, but most importantly, thank you listener for your company.

And please don’t forget, if you’d like to contact show you can do so on email: [email protected], or on Twitter: @radixcom. And if you’re listening on Apple podcasts, please leave us a review; it would be great.

David: And thank you George for co-hosting, have you enjoyed it.

George: I always enjoy it, David. It’s always pleasure.

David: You never look like you’re enjoying it.

George: I’m one of these people, I’m cursed with everything I say sounds sarcastic, And it gets me in a lot of trouble. I’ll be talking to one of the guys in the office, and say, “That’s a really good piece of work, I guess”. And somehow they like think I’m making fun of them. I’m not, I genuinely mean it.

David: I’m one of the few people that’s old enough to remember that guy on The Mary Whitehouse Experience but, you know, none of the audience, none of the listeners, none of our colleagues will know who that is. So I will move on. Until next time, listener, remember, nobody will ever complain that you made something too easy to understand. Well, except for that one stakeholder. You know the one. Sorry.

David and George: Goodbye!

Acknowledgements and thanks

Thanks once again to Sarah Winters; it was great to finally hear from you on the podcast, and we hope you’ll come back soon.

Thanks also to George for co-hosting so smoothly, to Kieran the international superspy for making us all look bad with your copywriting tip. And thanks and congratulations to our brilliant competition winners: Livi, Jennifer, and Chomparani (who is indeed in Germany, it turns out).

Hello to Jason Isaacs.

And last but not least, thanks to Bang and Smash for mad podcast production skills.

Podcast 97: how to write valuable B2B content

Posted on by The Radix Team

In this month’s episode of Good Copy, Bad Copy, we’re talking about creating content with real value for the reader. More specifically, writing content that reflects your customers’ priorities and furthers your business goals.

In our feature interview, we get a lesson from the two inspirational voices behind The School of Valuable Content: Sonja Nisson and Sharon Tanton. We dive deep to discuss what prompted them to get the band back together, how they help marketers find that content sweet spot, and why client input is always the most vital part of content creation.

Guest co-host John Espirian – influential B2B tech copywriter, Master of LinkedIn and author of Content DNA – joins us to talk through his own experiences, and discuss how to create content that’s “relentlessly helpful”.

And to top it all off, you’ll catch another tip from our own team of experienced copywriters. This month’s words of wisdom are delivered to you by our very talented (and very wise) consultant copywriter Steve George.

A (super-quick) checklist for creating valuable content

As a brand, creating standout content is one of the best ways to attract your ideal customers, and build your reputation as an expert in your field. But it can be hard knowing what to write, or if your content has any real value (to your customer, or your business).

Sonja and Sharon suggest asking three quick questions:

Does your content help you meet your business goals?

According to Sonja and Sharon, this is the first question you have to answer. There’s no point writing content if it doesn’t further your cause in some way. Maybe you want to showcase your unique expertise. Maybe you want to share a success story. Or maybe you’re targeting a specific client. Whatever the reason, it’s important to know why you’re writing.

Is it (really, actually) helpful for your (real world) clients?

To create value for your clients, you need to answer a real challenge, and provide a solution your customers genuinely crave. But to do that, your content should be written with a real end-user in mind. According to Sonja and Sharon, a good litmus test is asking whether you (or your sales team) would be motivated to share it with a specific individual.

Does it add to the story you’re telling – without repeating yourself?

It’s hard to create truly insightful, original content all the time. Looking at a story from different angles is perfectly fine. But to make people want to keep reading, you have to ensure that you’re not just repeating content – and that every piece you write takes the story a step further.

Of course, there’s much more in the interview itself, so have a listen… and if you’d like to know more, maybe enrol in the School of Valuable Content yourself.

In the rest of the podcast, you’ll also hear a wealth of insights from David and John, including the importance of writing to specific reader profiles (or, as John calls them, “Pen Portraits”), and why you should never refer a “Salesy Douche Canoe”.

In this episode, you’ll find…

01.03 – A warm welcome for our latest guest co-host: John Espirian

04:25 – David talks valuable content with Sonja Nisson and Sharon Tanton

19:08 – John and David discuss how consistently valuable content, written for a specific audience, can build trust

34:22 – Our online community weighs in with valuable content obstacles and tips

41:00 – Steve George’s copywriting tip of the month

Was this your favourite episode yet?

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Tweet us at @radixcom on Twitter or pop us a message on [email protected] Or, if you fancy your chances of appearing on the podcast, send a voice memo our way.

How to listen 

Credits 

  • Firstly, a very big Radix thank you to John Espirian. You’re as skilled at co-hosting as you are at copywriting, LinkedIn, and frankly everything else.
  • Thanks also to Sonja Nisson and Sharon Tanton; it’s great to have you back! I think we all learned a lot from that fantastic interview – your students are lucky people.
  • We’re grateful to the awesome folk who answered our questions on social media: Fiona, Scott, Maureen, and Joe.
  • And Steve, thank you for providing an excellent copywriting tip of the month.

Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash

Podcast 96: how to make sure your B2B content is inclusive and diverse

Posted on by The Radix Team

In this month’s Good Copy, Bad Copy, we’re getting serious about diversity and inclusion in B2B marketing content.

Guest co-host Kavita Singh, Assistant Editor at B2B Marketing, joins David to share her experiences starting in the UK’s B2B sector as both an American and a woman of colour – and to lay bare the societal shifts we’ve lived through this past year.

We’re also thrilled to interview Natalie Narh, Content Creative at Ogilvy and Vice-Chair of Ogilvy Roots UK, about the importance of deliberation when approaching inclusivity in your B2B content.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the same without a copywriting tip of the month – this time shared by our *newly promoted* not-junior copywriter (woohoo!), Lizzie Cresswell.

Diversity and inclusivity: what can we do better in B2B?

As Natalie puts it so well in our interview, the content we create (even in B2B) is a “mirror to society” – and it’s up to us to include more people in that reflection.

You may well be thinking about what you could possibly do to be more diverse and inclusive in a piece of content about, say, SaaS platforms. But as Natalie explains, there are small, positive changes we can all make to address unconscious biases and practices that can marginalise and exclude minority audiences.

For example, we can put empathy first and ask ourselves questions like:

  • Who will approve this content before it goes live – and why?
  • How might somebody who isn’t “the standard” perceive this content?
  • Are we relying too much on the minorities within our business to drive the positive changes we want to see?

It’s a thought-provoking discussion that I think many of us could learn from. And as Natalie, Kavita and David explore in the podcast: not everyone always gets things right, so if called out, the trick is not to lash back – but to learn and move forwards.

It’s time we got comfortable with being uncomfortable.

You can find Natalie on Instagram and Twitter. The research sources she recommends in the discussion are Robin Walker and A Tribe Called Progress.

In this episode, you’ll find…

01.09 – Introducing this episode’s co-host, Kavita Singh

04:30 – Natalie Narh talks intentional inclusivity in B2B content – and what it means for marketers

19:00 – Kavita discusses the impact of Black Lives Matter and her experiences entering the UK’s B2B sector as a woman of colour

39:00 – Copywriting tip of the month by our own Lizzie Cresswell

Anything you loved in this episode?

(Or really didn’t? That’s fine…)

Tweet us at @radixcom on Twitter or pop us a message on [email protected].

Or, if you want to feature on the podcast itself, send us a voice memo our way.

How to listen 

  • You can download the episode here (right-click and select “Save As” to download)
  • Or you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts
  • Alternatively, add our RSS to your preferred podcast player
  • And don’t forget you can follow us on Spotify

Credits 

  • Huge thanks are due to Natalie Narh for your time and insight. It’s safe to say we’ve all learnt something important.
  • And of course, thank you Kavita Singh for agreeing to co-host with our David – it was great hearing you work together.
  • Finally, thank you Lizzie for the copywriting tip of the month.

Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash

Podcast 95: how to write B2B social media content

Posted on by The Radix Team

In this month’s Good Copy, Bad Copy, we’re talking about writing social media copy for B2B brands – how to write it, what tactics work well, and what B2B marketing experts think great social content looks like.

Guest co-host Lorraine Williams, founder of Lighthouse Proofreading (and undisputed Queen of PDF Proofing), joins David to chat about the wonderful world of LinkedIn and the challenges of writing engaging content for a B2B audience.

You’ll also catch an interview with social media marketing guru Luan Wise. An independent marketing consultant and trainer, Luan knows all there is to know about social media marketing (she even runs courses for LinkedIn). Tune in to hear her best writing advice for B2B social content – as well as her recent research study about social media and how it’s changed in the pandemic.

Plus, three top B2B marketers share their favourite examples of great social content – and our very own Ben Philpott provides the copywriting tip of the month.

B2B social content: a sneak peek at Luan’s “what not to do” list

As Luan points out in her interview, social media marketing follows similar rules to any other kind of content – and anything you post needs to adhere to your brand and messaging. That means ensuring your voice is still clear and recognisable, and that you’re writing towards the right audience.

But along with these tips, Luan shares a few mistakes you should be careful to avoid:

  • Don’t forget your call to action: You’re posting on social media to be social – so don’t forget to involve your reader in some way.
  • Don’t go silent for weeks on end: Being consistently present is key to being great at B2B social media – so don’t just leave all your posting for a quiet month.
  • Don’t publish clickbait or fake headlines: The clearer you are, the more your readers will care about what you have to say.
  • Don’t overthink it: Plan out your social media strategy, then make posting a habit.

You can absorb more of Luan’s wisdom by (you guessed it) listening to the podcast, where you’ll also catch David and Lorraine talking about their own tips and tricks.

And be sure to check out Luan’s website for info on all the courses she runs, and a ton of free resources.

In this episode, you’ll find…

00.50 – (Enter stage left) Introducing this week’s co-host, Lorraine Williams

02.44 – Luan Wise spills the secrets of writing great social media content for B2B

22.31 – David and Lorraine chat about the joys and perils of writing for LinkedIn

35:35 – Three B2B experts share their favourite social media content

43:13 – Copywriting tip of the month, by our own Ben P

Anything you love or hate about this podcast? 

We’d love to chat about it. You can contact us through @radixcom on Twitter or [email protected]. Or, if you’re feeling fancy, just send us a voice memo with what you want to say – we might even feature it next month.

As ever, if you’d like to leave us a review on your listening platform of choice, that’s always a bonus.

How to listen 

Credits 

  • A massive thank you to Luan Wise for letting us pick your brain about all things social media. We really appreciate your time and insights.
  • Thanks also to everyone who joined in the discussion about B2B social content on Propolis and LinkedIn – especially this month’s featured commenters: Dan Smith, Kate Roe, and Yvonne Deegan. Y’all rock.
  • Thanks to Ben for the copywriting tip of the month, and of course a big thanks to Lorraine for being an awesome co-host, and an exceptional LinkedIn-er. It was great to hear your social media secrets (btw, here at Radix we’re firmly camp Hula Hoop).
  • Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash.