The case for toning down your claims to delivering business benefits
A very short history of “features vs benefits”
To start off, I want to make clear that I think it’s excellent advice. Here’s the thinking behind it:
Traditionally, tech companies, and especially those with techie founders, tend to focus on product features in their messaging. And while features are one of the most obvious ways to differentiate from the competition, leading with them in marketing comms brings a whole raft of problems:
Budget: The only people who quickly understand (and most naturally care about!) a feature are other techies: engineers with deep domain expertise. They are not usually the people with the budget who make purchasing decisions (but they may be important influencers)
Relevance: The people who do have the budget are rarely deep subject matter experts – they need help understanding why a feature matters, and why they should care about it. They need it framed as a benefit to avoid a “so what?” reaction
Readiness: At an early stage in the sales cycle – when buyers are gathering information and educating themselves – it’s usually too early to talk differentiation on features. The problem at this stage is winning trust by showing you understand your buyers’ world, and articulating the problem you solve for them (such as delays, or error rates, and their impact on the business). Your marketing job at this stage isn’t to sell – it’s to convince the buyer that they need a solution in the first place. It’s only at a later stage that you’ll show them that your solution is different, and better.
So that’s, roughly, where this best-practice advice comes from: to help techie people frame their product as a business solution rather than a technological one. And to show why your solution matters to more people than just its techie users. That’s why, in messaging frameworks, you often see diagrams like this, that ladder up features to benefits (and align them to buyer personas):
This is a very simplified model. For complex products and organisations, you’ll often find many more steps – but it serves to illustrate my point.
The credibility issue
One of the key strengths of this approach has to do with credibility: buyers don’t generally question a vendor’s ability to deliver on a feature, but they may be highly sceptical of lofty claims to a big-ass business benefit (or BABBs, as I lovingly call them). So showing how a feature ladders up to a benefit is a good way to give substance to your claim.
But, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t have some reservations about the validity of this as universal best practice. As I said above, I don’t think this advice is for everyone.
The case for modesty
I believe that for a significant number of tech vendors and their products (and especially slick digitally-first startups that haven’t been founded by techies), it pays to be modest: first of all, because claims can be tenuous if not backed up by really solid data (eg “improved customer experience” means nothing if you don’t have the NPS score or something similar to prove it); and secondly, the higher you aim with your BABB (e.g. “Competitive Advantage”), the more abstract you become – and risk claiming everything, and therefore nothing at all. So you need to decide which sort of selling personality you want associated with your brand: data-driven or visionary (I’ll write something about this soon).
And I can think of a few concrete cases when your messaging definitely shouldn’t go all the way to C-Level benefits:
When the C-Suite isn’t part of the purchasing decision. I know many clients don’t like to hear this (everyone wants to target the CEO these days!), but be realistic: if you’re not selling mission-critical enterprise systems that can seriously claim strategic relevance, you may have to accept that the CEO will never know that you and your product exist. They may completely delegate the buying process to their IT, user, and procurement departments and ultimately only sign off on the purchase.
When you sales team can’t deliver the story: Features-to-benefits messaging is about getting the altitude right and understanding the complexity and nuances of each department involved. A really great sales person can tell the right story to each customer persona AND connect it all to a big business goal, too. It’s a rare skill and not all sales teams can deliver on it. If they can’t, aiming for something like “competitive advantage” in your messaging is likely to feel like overclaim or fluff to your prospects.
When you’re in danger of neglecting the core buyer. It’s usually not a good idea to approach an engineer with a big business vision (unless they’re the sort of ambitious go-getter every marketer hopes for but rarely encounters); just like you’re likely to bore a CEO stiff with talk about APIs. On a recent project I worked on, the core buyer was a Head of Digitalisation for HR. As I interviewed them about their challenges, I kept probing for things like “retention rates” and “employee satisfaction”, but they kept talking about inefficient processes. The lesson: If I were to try to sell anything to this person, I’d have to frame it in terms of process improvement, not something bigger and more abstract – or I’d probably lose their interest.
Focus on your best prospect and empower them instead
In all of these cases, it’s a much better strategy to optimise your messaging for your core buyer persona (e.g. the department head) and focus on the benefits and KPIs they care about. I’d recommend having your C-level messages in the back pocket and bringing them up in one-on-one sales conversations rather than in your marketing materials.
And: it’s always a good idea to create a piece of content that enables your champions to sell internally – such as
An overview of talking points broken down by buyer group functions
A business case template
An interactive ROI calculator
Or maybe they’ll ask you for a specific format they know their decision-maker will like. Indulge them and have your marketers fix one up. Having an internal champion deliver your message in your stead to the C-Level is usually much more successful than a direct sales pitch.
I want to emphasise that modesty is different from lack of confidence: as a tech brand and product, you should definitely know where you play and confidently claim your space in your market. That includes knowing how you can drive business success for your customers.
But in many cases, the real skill is identifying the core decision-maker first (hint: it’s probably not the CEO!), then aligning your claims to their goals and KPIs. When you do that, good things will happen:
You’ll speak to their needs and pain points
You’ll credibly show how your solution makes their life easier
You’ll demonstrate how you can positively impact the KPIs they themselves are measured on
You’ll forge a more natural and credible path to the decisoino-makers
By convincing the key person thoroughly rather than doing a half-arsed job across the board, you ultimately stand a much better chance of selling. This is quiet confidence and it goes a long way.
(Don’t be put off by the teenie-looking and not very B2B app. It’s not Linkedin, but it’ll do the job).
Can’t wait to hear from you.
(Oh and if you like my content, I’d appreciate a share or a recommendation)
First question is in, and it’s brilliant:
That’s a really tough one. If there was one surefire formula, I’d be rich.
The issue is that startup founders are really hard nuts to crack, for a number of reasons:
They tend to be super smart themselves, which can make them sceptical of other people’s expertise, especially when, as founders, they’ve had to do a bit of everything – Marketing, Sales, Bookkeeping, HR… It can make them think they are experts at everything
They know their product like no one else (often because they’ve built it themselves), and don’t trust outsiders to represent it accurately
If the founder is a techie, scientist, or software engineer, they sometimes don’t fully understand the need for comms. They think their product is brilliant and assume everyone else can see that, too
In the early stages they’re often involved in Sales themselves. They may have spoken to customers and heard about their pain points. And they’ll have prepared answers for them. But often, when they scale and make that first marketing hire, they forget to share all that useful knowledge with their marketing person. And then don’t understand why other people just don’t get it.
Now I don’t know if any of the above is the case with your founders. But here are some arguments that have worked for me in the past:
1. The people in your target companies who “get the tech” are usually not the same ones who “have the money”. You need a comms specialist to translate the features of your product into benefits for non-techie budget holders
2. We need to get the narrative out of your head and onto a document so we can all be on the same page on what it is we do, who it’s for, and why they should care. If we don’t do this, our story will be inconsistent, and we won’t be able to scale our marketing efforts (eg brief copywriters who can do some of that work for us)
3. You’re biased. (This one works well with scientists). Because you’re so convinced that your product is amazing, you can be blind to the reasons why buyers may be sceptical, the workarounds they’ve learned to live with, and the internal resistance they’re facing. An outsider who understands tech buying processes and audiences, and who has experience poking holes in the story, and asking uncomfortable questions can help us make our story so much stronger.
I’m sure there’s more and I’ll update with other points when I think of them. I hope this has been helpful! (you can drop an anonymous comment to let me know).
Question #2 is about value proposition canvases
I can hear the frustration in this one. And I share it. To answer it, I’m going to have to make some assumptions:
I’m assuming you’re talking about canvases like the Strategyzer one
I’m assuming you’re talking about the absolute state they end up in after a half-day stakeholder workshop, full of bullets and buzzwords and sticky notes
And then my answer is absolutely, no, they’re not useful as value propositions. Except:
There are two purposes to a workshop like that. Only one of them is to arrive at a value proposition. The other is to get all the stakeholders into a room, get them to dedicate some brain space to the key questions every business needs to ask itself, and make them feel that they’ve been asked and have been heard. This is hugely useful. Because it gets them on board with the process and limits them in their ability to undermine your efforts further down the line (at least if they don’t want to look like an absolute tool).
The output from a value proposition workshop is not a value proposition. At least not straight away. It’s a brain dump where you’ve collected – and ideally weighted – the key issues. Now is where the real work starts. In my opinion, good value propositions are not created by committee. The issues need to be ordered, distilled, outliers weeded out, missing information (such as e.g. customer insight) researched and added. Only then do you start copywriting and polishing it.
It also helps to nominate an ultimate decision-maker with whom the buck stops. (Ideally choose someone very senior, decisive and not-too-precious). It’s their job to make the tough calls on points of disagreement, and everybody involved needs to be aware of the importance of this. Because you’re absolutely right: bloated and sad never got no leads excited.
But in summary: if you think as the workshop as at least 40% kum-ba-yah, and of its output as loose materials that give you a starting point, then that messy canvas becomes less frustrating. In my experience, anyway.
I hope my assumptions were right and this was a helpful answer.
Feel free to get in touch again if not.
Question 3 is about turning value props into content
Nice one!
My general advice would be that your best content will always come from the things that you know better than anybody else. The things you could actually teach. And that your prospects will care about. Ideally, once you’ve gone through the process of distilling what that is, that has become an essential part of your value proposition, too.
But it’s a hard one to answer in the abstract. So I’ll use an example. Let’s say you’re in the data center business, and you have a number of data centers in the UK that are equipped with such an amazing low latency network that you can reliably power edge applications. That’s already pretty cool. But say you’ve also developed water cooling technology so that your data centers do all this high-performance stuff without costing additional energy to stop your servers sweating.
Then you have that amazing intersection of
A) Something you know better than anybody else – i.e. more eco-friendly high-performance computing
B) Something your target audience cares about – meeting sustainability goals across their entire business, including in IT operations
And that intersection is where the good content is hidden.
You could now e.g. create content about “net-zero multiplayer gaming” (which combines the edge computing and sustainability themes). Ideally you’d already have a customer in that space that you could showcase, but the beauty of this is that you could even interview the CEO of that gaming company and make them the hero of a blog post or video. Even if you don’t know them. They’re not going to refuse getting to tell their story, and exchanging ideas with a like-minded business. By highlighting their good work, you’re automatically claiming that space, too – without explicitly beating your own drum.
(And then of course you do all the usual content strategy stuff of planning out your hero pieces and different formats, and the channels where your audience hangs out etc).
Thank you for this excellent question!
Question 4 is about the voice of the customer
Oh man. Love that somebody asks about this. (You may have seen me post about it on Linkedin the other day). It’s something I keep banging on about. I have worked on a ton of projects where my request to speak to an actual customer was met with blank stares or impatience.
In fact, in my experience it’s not so much the lack of resource that stands in the way of customer insight, but the fact that many marketers don’t understand the importance of it. They’re not always to blame though. In plenty of organisations it’s the salespeople who gatekeep their customers, and they won’t let marketers speak to them. It’s a big problem.
But to answer your question, speak to as many customers as you can for you positioning or value proposition or messaging project, and if you’re in-house, make it a regular ritual to interview customers, especially when things change – eg the market, or your product, or the distribution model, or the competition…
Having said that, there is a point of diminishing returns. For a project I did last year for a services org, I interviewed 10 CIOs of enterprise-sized companies across the world. And while each geography, person and industry reported unique challenges, there was a point around interview #7 where I felt a story emerge, and key elements kept repeating. But this varies from project to project and will also depend on…
The newness and complexity of your proposition
The attitudes, maturity and appetite of your customer base
The number of decision-makers who are typically involved
how challenging it is to adopt your product…and so much more.
But as a general rule, if you’re a strategist and you’re told you can’t speak to a customer, raise the alarm with the person who hired you for the job.
Look, you probably don’t need another hot take on whether marketers should be using AI-generated marketing content, by a marketing strategist, but here it is anyway:
I rarely hear anybody talk about the key assumption behind this tedious debate: the assumption that it’s a marketer’s job to produce a lot of content.
When in fact, it’s the job of marketing to produce good content: ideally genuinely new ideas, presented in a fresh way, that resonate with the people you’re targeting.
From what I’ve seen so far, that’s the opposite of what AI does.
What, actually, is the job of Marketing?
ChatGPT regurgitates things that already exist out there, in ways that already exist out there. Assembling words with the highest likelihood of being used in collocation by the highest number of people. Sometimes, the writing is tolerable. Often, it presents utter shite with a level of confidence I can only aspire to. (George over at Radix has written a fine blog about “AI eating itself” with much more nuance than I can muster).
The output from this exercise is the definition of middling. The literary world’s equivalent of brown. If that’s what you think your marketers’ job is, then go ahead.
In my mind then, you have a completely different problem: that you don’t understand the de-familiarising power of unique words (or images, if you’re using AI for visuals) to help us see well-known things in a new light, or the function they have in engaging audiences, or the blank-everything-else-out effect that a genuinely new idea can have, or the responsibility you have as a brand that targets people to not bore them stiff. And yes, your responsibility to hire and train marketers that understand these things. Who can tell a good headline from bad, who know what a differentiator is, who can brief in and feed back on copy.
If you do understand these things, and still use ChatGPT, then you know that getting the prompts right takes such a level of customisation and tweaking that you might as well use that time to write the damn thing.
A ChatGPT experiment
So far, there’s only one use case I can see where ChatGPT being genuinely helpful, and that’s for functional content that follows a clear template. Invites, sign-up forms, things that have a formula. I’ll give you an example of an instance where ChatGPT has impressed me (and, in red, the bits I loved and the ones where I think it falls flat):
Prompt:
Write a sales email to a prospect in which I invite them to sign up to our webinar on the topic of best practice in Modular ERP. [simply because I had a chat about AI-generated content with an ERP client of mine last week]
What ChatGPT came up with:
Subject: Invitation to Webinar: Best Practices in Modular ERP
Dear [Prospect’s Name],
[it’s great that it signals all the core bits of information that need to be there, such as subject lines and placeholders for names, dates and times. You wouldn’t believe how many emails go out with the essentials missing. Wish it had given me a preview snippet for the email as well, and maybe a second subject line for A/B testing, but it’s pretty good.]
I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to reach out to you because I believe you would find great value in our upcoming webinar on “Best Practices in Modular ERP.”
[“Find great value” is terribly generic. Why/ why for me/what’s the value? Similarly, “finds you well” is tired language, plus double use of “find”. A good editor would spot that.]
In today’s fast-paced business environment, having a flexible and scalable ERP system is crucial for optimizing operations and staying competitive.
[“Today’s fast-paced environment”. I couldn’t believe it went there. The most telling sign of lazy writing. It says you should care but I don’t. It claims urgency without proving it. Absolute no-go. I actually have a voodoo doll in the likeness of that phrase that I stick pins in at night. But: I was impressed that it hit a crucial business benefit of modular ERP. Optimising operations is indeed something a well set up ERP does and I hadn’t briefed that in. I assume that means it’s what everyone says, though. “Staying competitive” is the same as “fast-paced environment”: it’s so generic a benefit – duh – that you should step away from it].
Our webinar will delve into the benefits and strategies of implementing a modular ERP approach, allowing businesses like yours to tailor their systems to meet specific needs and scale efficiently.
[My main issue with this paragraph is that it sounds good at first reading, and then you realise it doesn’t actually say anything. Meet specific needs indeed].
During the webinar, our expert speakers will cover:
The advantages of modular ERP over traditional monolithic systems [Loved that word. I suspect everyone uses it or it wouldn’t have made its way into this]
Key considerations for selecting and implementing modular ERP solutions
Real-world case studies highlighting successful implementations
Strategies for maximizing ROI and long-term sustainability [Great work if you can get it, but I hadn’t briefed that in and I’d want to check that I can actually deliver on case studies and ROI before I send this out]
Date: [Insert Date] Time: [Insert Time] Duration: [Insert Duration] [thanks for the reminders, this is useful!]
This webinar presents a unique opportunity to gain valuable insights and actionable strategies directly from industry experts. Plus, it’s completely free to attend. [Love all these AI-generated case studies and experts I don’t have, that really makes my job a lot easier. Wait, what do you mean, free. IT’S NOT FREE. by which I mean, you really gotta check the content of this stuff]
To secure your spot, simply click the link below to register: [Insert Registration Link]
If you have any questions or would like more information, feel free to reach out to me directly. We’re here to support you on your journey towards optimizing your ERP system.
[Switching between “I” and “We” is not a great look, but I do it on this website as well, so I’ll let it go]
We look forward to having you join us for this informative session. [the rule is “Show don’t tell”. That’s for them to find out, not for you to claim.]
I found it too long and generic, but part of that was down to the minimal briefing. If you’re writing a generic format like an invite, my take is you could save yourself a lot of time by getting ChatGPT to write it for you. But only if you then invest the effort into making it good, and importantly, yours. Saying things that are different and new, and unique to your brand. Also maybe injecting a bit of personality into that voice.
What it alerted me to was this: whenever it came up with bits that sounded industry-specific, but were actually too high-level to say anything much, that was a red flag for me: the way the technology works means that it can only have pulled this from existing content about modular ERP and these things must have been the safest common denominator. They’re the most generic things you could possibly say about the topic, and from my marketer’s POV, therefore useless. They don’t contain any differentiators or value propositions, or product features or audience insight – none of the elements that make marketing good, and specific to you. So I guess you could use it as a tool to establish the absolute minimum baseline of what others in your industry are saying. Then pivot the shit away from that.
My TL;DR point though is this:
It’s Marketing’s job to figure out what to say and to whom
…and ChatGPT can’t solve that for you (not yet anyway).
The real problem is that most companies considering ChatGPT have got the job of the marketer all wrong. They burden in-house marketers with producing all this formulaic crap that nobody reads, and they don’t challenge them to make it good, or give them the time to develop genuine differentiators. They literally think they’re in the business of producing words. If, at a time, where formulaic content production cost has hit quite literally zero, they can’t pivot away from that and start seriously re-considering the job of the marketer, I can only hope the market will punish them.
If, however, it makes them realise that the marketer’s job is to think about all the hard things – what we’ve got to say, why we should be saying it, and why people should care – then I, for one, welcome our LLM-powered artificial overlords with open arms.
A few essential B2B Marketing terms everyone uses but nobody ever defines
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Except for the shortest-ever stint with an in-house team (where I learnt the hard way that I’m not made for days of back-to-back meetings), I’ve spent my entire career to date either agency-side or running my own B2B Marketing consultancy.
And I’ve had a few experiences with clients recently that made me realise that we marketers are guilty of the very same thing we tell our clients to stop doing: and that’s going heavy on the jargon when it comes to your own expertise. It’s the first rule of B2B tech (insert other niche as appropriate) marketing club. It’s simple: when you’re trying to sell people something, you should make it easy for them to understand your message, not make them learn a whole new language.
Owning up to jargon guilt
And yet, we marketers do the same thing when we talk about our own work.
There’s two reasons we make this mistake. The first is that a lot of the key concepts in marketing don’t feel like jargon. Positioning, messaging, content – these aren’t exactly terms that sound like you’re talking about the inside of a hadron collider (though we’ve got our share of those too).
The second is the same reason techies and other experts do it. We’re talking about our world, and it’s become second nature to us. Just like little kids, we struggle to understand that other people don’t know the exact same things we do.
I recently worked with a client who didn’t know the difference between messaging and copy. I’m going to admit that I did an inner eye-roll (not a real one as that would have been visible on zoom) first. But then I realised that I can’t assume that everyone I work with has the same experience I do. You might be working client-side, or maybe you’re an agency newbie, or you’re a non-marketer who’s been pulled into a project you haven’t signed up for. And you might find it helpful to understand a few concepts nobody ever defines because they sound so obvious.
This is the spirit in which I’ve put together this little FAQ – not to teach any of you marketing grandmothers to suck eggs (though, tbh, you all stink at egg-sucking) – but to actually hold ourselves accountable to what we promise to deliver, maybe challenge some assumptions, and hopefully, also invite some debate or pushback. So, here goes:
Positioning
This is where you define the position of your company or product in the market, i.e. the field you want to play, to use one of those sports metaphors we all love so much. You take into account things like
Your geography and any laws and regulations that might apply there (eg EMEA)
Your category (e.g. rebate management software) – if it already exists. If it doesn’t, many companies want to create their own. (This is incredibly hard to do though and I might explain why in a future post sometime)
Your target audiences (eg CIOs and COOs of small and medium enterprises)
Their pain points/the problem you solve for them (e.g data is so siloed that it can’t be used by the entire organisation)
What outcomes your product delivers for each target (e.g. deal velocity, error-free automated processes)
What outcomes your product delivers for the entire business (e.g. faster time-to-market than their competitors)
What you’re selling against, ie your direct competitors and the alternatives your prospects have to your offer (e.g. they could continue to use spreadsheets)
Attitudes like misconceptions, fears, obstacles (eg “we bought a solution like this ten years ago and it didn’t integrate and compromised all our data”)
What they stand to lose by not buying it (e.g. they’ll leave money on the table)
Your look and feel, eg does your UX blow your competitors out of the water? Is your tone of voice edgier than the incumbent’s? Are you the app store favourite?
A few other things like your price point and/or pricing model, or delivery model
Arriving at a positioning is usually a lengthy exercise that should involve at the very least competitor research, as well as stakeholder, subject matter expert, and customer interviews. It should also take into account past marketing efforts (if available) such as old messaging and performance data. Positioning is hard and gnarly and full moments of doubt and I absolutely love it. It’s my favourite marketing project to do.
A strong positioning is hugely important for both marketing and sales. First of all, it creates agreement on what your story is (though many lone wolf salespeople still make up their own), and who your best prospects are. Without positioning you can’t really create proper messaging or define a targeting strategy (eg who is a “Marketing qualified lead” or MQL; do we target them at a conference or on Linkedin?) or know where best to allocate your always-too-small budget. And it’s closely related to product development and roadmaps, too.
Having said that, you wouldn’t believe how many businesses don’t actually have a formalised positioning that’s written down and agreed on. Instead, a CEO or Chief Product Officer might have an idea of where they play and answers to all of the above, but they’ve never actually made the effort of spelling it out and sharing it with their marketing and product teams. Big mistake. Huge. Because it leads to uncertainty, misunderstanding, lack of direction, wasted budgets, and also: not enough good bloody leads. And also, it means nobody can challenge or update these ideas, and that’s never good.
Messaging and the messaging house
Positioning and messaging work hand in hand. If you’ve done your positioning work thoroughly, your messaging will fall out of that. It’ll include your key value proposition, the benefits for your audience, what that looks like, and ideally some proof points, too.
While you might work with variations of your messaging for different targets (e.g. you’ll want to prioritise messages around ROI for a CFO or COO, but go all in on the fluffier benefits and employee experience when you’re targeting HR or the actual users of your product), you should have a core overall messaging framework defined for your offer. These frameworks come in different forms, from a simple Why/What/How, to the Why change/Why us/Why now model. One of the most common ones that you’ll probably come across is the “messaging house”. I’ve always found it a little naff to squeeze all that hard, grown-up, big-girl work into a template that looks like it should come with crayons, but it’s not a bad way to present a lot of information succinctly. I can’t share any of the ones I’ve created for my clients because I work under NDA. But if you image-search “messaging house” you’ll find plenty of examples (of varying quality) online.
One of the key misconceptions I come across is that people equate messaging and copy.
Messaging is not copy. It’s a framework for agreeing on the key messages that you want to get across to your audience. It’s usually short (often bullet points, maybe all on one slide) and hasn’t been given the copywriter treatment. That means it doesn’t have all those beautiful headlines, examples, use cases and tone of voice that bring your brand to life. Very few people outside your marketing department will ever see your messaging. They will, hopefully though, see and read your copy.
So why do it at all? Again, it’s about getting everyone to sing from the same hymn sheet, and achieving internal agreement on what your story is first. It’s also useful for briefing creatives (copywriters, for instance) and approaching partners for joint value propositions.
Copy
Copy is what you create when you translate your messaging into a (usually client-facing) asset. This is where you expand on your messaging and fill in the details – the angles, the different applications, the secondary benefits, and infuse your copy with your brand tone of voice. This could be in headlines, social media posts, blog posts, ebooks etc
Here’s an example: Let’s say your product helps hospitals work more efficiently. Then one of your messaging pillars might be around cost savings, another around the patient experience and a third one about analytics on operations data. This messaging could be translated into headlines for an ad or subject lines for email (e.g. “Say goodbye to gaps in the staff roster”; “Optimise your hospital laundry schedule”); into thought leadership blog posts (e.g. “Why hospital efficiency isn’t just a funding issue: The measurable impact of optimised staff rotas on the patient experience”); into an ebook that demonstrates your authority on the subject (e.g. “7 metrics every hospital administrator should be tracking”) – you get the idea. Or if you wanted to go all in disruptor-style and coin a new industry standard, you could try and go for something like “Staff rosters don’t work. Why it’s time to embrace the continuous care operations model” (I hope that’s not a thing btw, I just made it up).
The point is, your copy will contain your messaging, but it does more than that: it will also deliver on other crucial elements of your marketing, like empathise with your audience’s situation; demonstrate domain expertise with the right industry terminology; make it easy, fun and engaging to read; and express your brand personality.
Content
Email, social media and blog posts, ebooks etc which mentioned above are all content formats. There are loads more of course, such as websites, videos and infographics, and Turtls and scroll-sites (and that mysterious thing Sales teams often demand from Marketing, the “two-pager”). All of your content should probably be copy-written (except for maybe some dry technical data where you might get away with just facts). Your content is your chance to demonstrate to your market what you know better than anyone else. While your messaging contains your key talking and selling points, content is where you expand on the claims you make in your messaging. It shows your expertise, and your belief in how to do things better. It’s where you deliver the goods.
Creating good content, that is, the sort your expert target audience won’t dismiss as “marketing fluff” is actually pretty hard, and if you’re in B2B tech should always be done using the insights (though not necessarily the writing skills) of subject matter experts.
While some stakeholders may want you to crank up the sales pitches in your content, I strongly advise against it. Fill it with valuable, actionable advice as much as you can and avoid claiming that there is only one solution to the problem you’ve identified and it’s – surprise! – yours. B2B decision-makers are being sold to morning till evening and they smell a sales pitch or thinly veiled pseudo-tips from a mile off. Content is your place to demonstrate your expertise, not just claim it.
If you’re still confused by content, don’t fret. The term ‘content’ has, over the past 15 years or so, been stretched to its limits to include everything under the sun. I would say that IRL most marketers use ‘content’ to refer to higher-investment (not just money but stakeholder and writing time, too), and longer-form pieces, such as blog posts and ebooks and video case studies. In some agencies, you’ll also find “copywriters” (for the conceptual, short-form bits such as ads and headlines and brandy, moody copy) vs “content writers” (who work on blog posts, ebooks and whitepapers). Classifying writers like that doesn’t really work for me, really, but I’m sure they have their reasons.
The funnel
One more thing to mention in connection with content is the funnel model. It’s unfashionable and outdated by now, and lots of people have (rightly) criticised the metaphor, but it’s still a concept you should at least have heard of when discussing content. The idea is that a prospect’s interest in what you have to say increases if you give them valuable content that’s relevant to their situation. But it also means you need to hook them first, and ideally with something short, snappy and sexy, before you expect them to actually read all of your longer-form stuff. You earn their attention over time.
So when you hear people talking about “top of the funnel” (or TOFU) content, they mean something attention-grabbing and relatively quick to consume, that’s interesting enough for the prospect to want to learn more (and click through to more, or leave an email address). Maybe a short video, or a manifesto. Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) content is typically longer-form (eg an ebook) and substantiates the bold claims you made in your TOFU pieces. Bottom-of-the-funnel (you guessed it, BOFU) content usually delivers proof points (eg case studies, which we’ll talk about shortly). The reason it’s the bottom of the marketing funnel is because the idea is that by that point, if your prospects are still engaged, they’re ready to talk to a human, ie a sales rep. They’ve become a Sales qualified lead (or SQL) and can be handed over to that department.
Unfortunately, the real world isn’t quite as neat and logical as this, and I wouldn’t hammer the funnel metaphor too far, but the model is still quite useful when you’re thinking about your content strategy, ie the content you should be offering to your prospects, where your biggest gaps are, which of your low-performing pieces to tweak first, etc.
Case study
Case studies, sometimes called customer stories or client success stories, are pieces of content where you tell the real-life story of your product or company improving another business. They’re hugely important in B2B, because that’s where your marketing rubber hits the credibility road. You use actual customers to substantiate your claims and give their verbatim testimonials. This is huge because few things hold more weight than a product endorsement from a peer. Common formats are pdfs (yawn) and talking heads videos.
I believe that case studies are often wrongly given the step-child treatment and created as an afterthought, with not enough production value, when really, they’re some of the most hard-working content you’re likely to produce. Many years ago I wrote a blog post about the boringnesss of B2B case studies, which, if you’re interested, you can read here.
Use case
One of the reasons I wanted to include case studies in this FAQ is because people tend to get them confused with “use cases”. It makes me feel petty to have to insist on the correct usage, but we’re talking about completely different things here. A use case is one of several applications for your product. A digital twin for instance, might be used to optimise the placement of wind turbines in the North sea, or to do predictive maintenance on a supermarket freezer, or to monitor drilling operations on an offshore oil rig, or to simulate the performance of a prosthetic limb before you actually build it. They are different applications of the same core product that often need explaining because just saying “it’s a digital twin” won’t make that obvious to everyone. If yor create a piece of content that explains each of these applications, you could call that a “use case”, I guess. And you could, of course, always create a case study or two for each of those use cases.
2500 words and we’ve barely even scratched the surface
That’s enough for today. Marketing has loads more terms in dire need of explaining, but for now, I’ve focused on some of the areas I know best. There are loads of obscure (also to me) terms in some areas of marketing where I’m not an expert (such as Demand Gen and Measurement) so I’ll leave it to others to identify and define the key concepts. But for now, I’d love to hear your thoughts – has this been helpful at all? What did you miss? Do let me know on the usual channels (and here) and I’ll be happy to update this to keep it alive, kicking and – hopefully – useful.
Update: if you’d like to ask me an anonymous, marketing-related question, you can do it here:
Say What? 