🥊 Punching with a Velvet Glove
2021 marketing strategy, simple storytelling + building a baller blog
Hi! 👋
In The B2B Bite, I break down the most interesting marketing stories into fun-size, actionable chunks to kick off your week.
Sent every Monday AM. Best enjoyed with coffee.
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💭 What’s Been On My Mind This Week
In a year where time has lost all meaning, attention has well and truly turned to 2021 for many B2B marketers.
That’s why I was particularly interested to read this little ditty from Microsoft on how they’re adapting their B2B marketing approach next year. I’ll save you the 3 minutes and boil it down; in 2021, you need to be agile.
In my opinion, tackling each quarter (or even each month) in isolation next year will serve many businesses better than setting in stone an annual strategy that leaves no room for movement. There’s just too much unknown.
This isn’t to say you do away with the North Star of any good strategy - “what is the big question I’m trying to solve?” - but rather to give yourself and your team the permission to focus on dealing with the reality of the present.
✏️ Making Triple-Digit Slide Decks Interesting
During one of my team’s monthly ‘Inspiration Sessions’ - where we each bring a cool example of some marketing magic we’ve discovered in the wild - one of my colleagues shared this.
It’s 160+ slides from the Mine Safety Disclosures blog on how The New York Times turned around its fortunes and saved itself in the face of a digital ad onslaught from the likes of Google and Facebook.
I highly recommend you carve out some time during a coffee break and read through the whole thing.
Here’s why I love it.
Red hot storytelling. This isn’t a light subject and it’d be easy to drown in the details. The author breaks down their findings into digestible chunks, mixing the right amount of data, quotes and visuals to drive their point home.
Killer format. While the deck can be viewed as a regular SlideShare, upon first opening the page you see the document in its full glory. A quick scan down the page to see a banquet of colourful diagrams helps to whet the appetite of the eye.
If you ever needed proof that a triple-digit deck can be interesting, then this is it.
🥡 Takeaway
B2B organisations have a penchant for being a little bit… complicated. It’s not like buying a sweater, where you just need to whether you walk charcoal black or onyx midnight. Often, solutions have dozens of unique benefits to communicate with multiple different personas.
And that’s why I love this piece of content. It shows that it’s possible to present a complex story in a way a layperson could understand. It doesn’t take more than 15 minutes to read through and leaves the reader with enough, clear-cut info to impress at a (virtual) cocktail party.
So what’s the takeaway? Simplifying your story and presenting it in a digestible format is paramount when trying to speak to a customer for the first time. Ask yourself the following question before sitting down to create something:
How do I pack the biggest punch in the softest glove?
🏀 Building a Baller Blog Homepage
For anyone who works in software, Atlassian will be a familiar name. Or at least some of their products should be - Jira, Confluence, Trello, Bamboo and many more.
Beyond building tools that help teams create better products faster, the company absolutely kills content marketing. But after perusing their website a little this week, I was struck by how they structure their blog just as much as I was by the content itself.
Here’s what they’ve have nailed in their layout:
Clear hierarchy. Atlassian organises their work into four categories - Teams & Culture, Productivity, Leadership and Technology - essentially mapping content buckets against the core value proposition of their suite of products.
UX variety. Unlike the majority of blogs from B2B organisations that follow a simple three tile column with infinite scroll, Atlassian mixes up content modules to help prevent read fatigue and draw attention to specific pieces.
Consistent visual identity. From the colours to the illustration style, you’d recognise an Atlassian piece of content anywhere after spending five minutes on this blog.
🥡 Takeaway
Content is king. Or that’s what they say anyway. But if that’s the case, then design is the opulent, goose-down stuffed throne upon which it sits. Pumping a website blog with well-thought-out, SEO-rich content without giving thought to how it’s visualised on screen is the equivalent of cooking a delicious three-course meal and blending it into a smoothie - the flavours are all there but damned if you're going to eat it.
94% of first impressions relate to your site’s web design. Spending time upfront to create a simple style guide, hiring a designer to create templates to bring some cohesion to your content cover art, and investing in simple UX best practice demonstrates to your customers that you take yourself seriously - and that you’ll do the same with them.
🍴 Nibbles
Your Social Media Detox… is an awesome new newsletter from my friend Nicole Tabak that gives a frank account of what it takes to be a content creator.
Case studies are the lifeblood for many a sales team… but what if the customer doesn’t want to put their name to it? Velocity Partners have a thought.
Everyone wants it… but how do you get it? This is a brilliant breakdown of how to create great thought leadership content from Katie Parrott at Animalz.
Don’t just tell employees organisational changes are coming… explain why. If your business is about to be transformed in some way, read this article from HBR.
Design is hard… especially when you’re not a designer. But this thread from Ryan McCready over a Venngage has been written to get you started.
...and one more thing
Every two weeks I sit down with a marketing leader to lean how they hit their goals by thinking outside the box - and dig into how this can be applied to other B2B businesses. Here are a few of my most recent episodes.
Building a 10,000 Strong B2B Email List from Scratch w/ Sean Blanda
How to Use Instagram to Promote People and Culture w/ Nicole Tabak
You can also find the B2B Better on Apple Podcasts and almost all other podcast directories.
And that's it! See you next week.