i

PRAISE FOR POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

‘An in-depth examination of how B2B brands can build trusted

­relationships in today’s volatile information environment. Required
reading for communicators and marketers across the world, with
plenty of invaluable insight from some of the world’s top B2B players.’
Arun Sudhaman, CEO and Editor-in-Chief, The Holmes Report

‘Many B2B brands today publish more material in a week than Time
magazine did during its heyday. Yet embarking on brand journalism
is fraught with perils and pitfalls. What constitutes a good story?
How can compelling content be created not just once, but continu-
ally and indefinitely? And how, in the era of fake news, can brands
engender and earn the trust of their audiences? This book tells you
how, both with practical advice and scores of real world examples.
It’s a must for the B2B content marketer.’
Rebecca Lieb, analyst and author of Content: The Atomic Particle of Marketing

‘This book is a comprehensive review of how B2B brands can build

the most important aspect of sales and marketing today: trust. It’s
filled with real-world, applicable examples that can help marketers
become a trusted source.’
Robert Rose, Founder, The Content Advisory

‘This book provides a fresh look at the role of brand journalism in

successful brand building. Rich in examples, frameworks and models,
Powerful B2B Content provides a very hands-on analysis, exploring
the careful balance between creating compelling digital content that
actively engages audiences throughout the customer journey and
brand positioning that is authentic. A top read for brand experts and
business leaders alike.’
Christine Diamente, Head of Brand, Nokia
ii

‘The only way to acquire new customers today is through stories that
generate trust. In Powerful B2B Content, Gay Flashman shows us
not just why, but also how to generate trust that leads to new customer
relationships and business growth. All business leaders need to pick
up a copy of this book today.’
Michael Brenner, CEO, speaker and bestselling author of Mean People Suck
and The Content Formula

‘A richly illustrated guide to how businesses can create their own

media brands.’
Mark Jones, Head of Digital Content, World Economic Forum

‘I was lucky enough to work with and learn from Gay Flashman in
the newsroom in the late 1990s. Journalism and marketing have
undergone a revolution since then, and Gay has been riding that roll-
ercoaster all along – there is no one better placed to help you take
control of your business’s narrative, own your story and use it to
connect with your customers beyond the level of mere transaction.’
Julian March, CEO, Made by Many

‘For many companies in the B2B sphere, the first point of interaction
with clients, on a multi-touch point journey, is through content, be it
digital or above the line. To entice customers a brand must convey an
enduring narrative that resonates with their target industries. This
book provides insights from leading industry experts and acts as a
guide on the production of powerful content with purpose. It is a
must-read for B2B marketers aiming to create engaging content that
portrays their client’s story.’
Georgia Halston, Founder, Halston Marketing

‘In this comprehensive guide, Gay Flashman explains why journalis-

tic thinking, newsroom practices and editorial values underpin
successful brand journalism. Easy to say, difficult to do, but here’s
someone who has walked the walk in some of the world’s busiest
newsrooms and knows a thing or two about engaging storytelling
and how to deliver it. Read and learn.’
Gary Rogers, Editor-in-Chief, RADAR AI
 iii

‘Storytelling helps B2B brands to cut through the noise and helps in
winning the hearts and minds of buyers. Gay Flashman shares her
insights on how purpose-driven storytelling can help marketers
engage with their audiences and create lasting and meaningful
­relationships.’
Ashish Babu, CMO (Europe and UK), Tata Consultancy Services

‘If content is still going to be king then great storytelling is how we

must cut through the noise to deliver that content. But this in itself
won’t be enough for businesses to win in this complex world. Gay
Flashman tells us that building trust and relationships are essential to
not only winning but keeping new customers. A great resource for all
B2B marketers.’
Howard Krais, President, International Association of Business
Communicators (IABC), UK and Ireland

‘If you’re a brand looking to create a content practice, Powerful B2B

Content provides a detailed roadmap for setting up shop.’
Melanie Deziel, Founder, StoryFuel

‘Every business must be engaging and inspiring if it wants to remain

relevant and reach new customers. This handbook is chock full of
dos and don’ts from brand journalism leaders shaping the craft. They
explain why authentic storytelling is essential for business success,
and how to do it right.’
Ken Kaplan, Editorial Director, Nutanix

‘A must-read for anyone working in the B2B sector. If you are a busi-
ness leader, read and be inspired. If you are a communications expert,
read and discover best-in-class practices to build your business case.
If you’re an expert or a beginner in corporate communications, read
it and save yourself the headache of starting from scratch. Stories are
the fabric of our world. With this text Gay Flashman cracks open the
art and science of becoming a master storytelling company.’
Casilda Malagon, global communications professional and Co-Founder,
Archetypical
iv

‘In this compelling narrative, Gay Flashman practises what she

preaches: she awakens our interest, informs us fully and engagingly,
and leaves us converted to the critical importance of building and
nurturing our brand stories. Vital reading for boards and the C-Suite.’
Piers Cumberlege, Chair, Straightview International
 v

Powerful B2B Content

Using brand journalism to create compelling
and authentic storytelling

Gay Flashman
vi

Publisher’s note
Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book is
accurate at the time of going to press, and the publishers and author cannot accept
responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused. No responsibility for loss or
damage occasioned to any person acting, or refraining from action, as a result of the material
in this publication can be accepted by the editor, the publisher or the author.

First published in Great Britain and the United States in 2020 by Kogan Page Limited

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as
permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be
reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in
writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms
and licences issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be
sent to the publishers at the undermentioned addresses:

2nd Floor, 45 Gee Street 122 W 27th St, 10th Floor 4737/23 Ansari Road
London New York, NY 10001 Daryaganj
EC1V 3RS USA New Delhi 110002
United Kingdom India

www.koganpage.com

© Gay Flashman, 2020

The right of Gay Flashman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBNs

Hardback 978 1 78966 101 9

Paperback 978 1 78966 099 9
Ebook 978 1 78966 100 2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Flashman, Gay, author.

Title: Powerful B2B content : using brand journalism to create compelling
and authentic storytelling / Gay Flashman.
Description: London, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Kogan Page, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019047562 (print) | LCCN 2019047563 (ebook) | ISBN
9781789661019 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789660999 (paperback) | ISBN
9781789661002 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Industrial marketing. | Branding (Marketing) |
Storytelling.
Classification: LCC HF5415.1263 .F595 2020 (print) | LCC HF5415.1263
(ebook) | DDC 658.8/04–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047562
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047563

Typeset by Integra Software Services, Pondicherry

Print production managed by Jellyfish
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
 vii

For Dad
viii

THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

 ix

CONTENTS

List of figures and tables xiii

About the author xv
Foreword xvii
Acknowledgements xix

01 Why use brand journalism as part of your content

marketing mix? 1
Making your brand a contender 2
A crisis of trust 5
The opportunity: brand purpose 8
The complex path to a sale 10
Finding ways to connect 12
The rise of brand purpose 13
Notes 17

02 A newsroom approach: defining brand journalism

for the B2B marketer 21
Brand journalism: a definition 21
How to create brand journalism 23
Approaches to story creation 33
Notes 38

03 Building your storytelling strategy 39

Creating your approach 39
Define your goals and outcomes 40
Map your audience 46
Agree your style and tone 49
Find your rhythm 51
Develop a commissioning process 58
Notes 60
x Contents

04 Finding the narrative: telling the stories that matter 63

Sourcing stories with impact 63
Which stories should your organization create? 67
Finding stories that resonate 69
Planet: Researching the conversation ecosystem 70
Purpose: Leading with your values 71
People: Demonstrating your human side 73
Process: Researching your business or industry
environment 74
Product: Your business making a difference 76
Don’t forget ‘the brand’ 77
Notes 79

05 Story mining: uncovering your powerful brand journalism 81

Establishing your process 81
Building a range of story types 90
Sense-checking with an editorial board 93
Know your rivals 93
Notes 97

06 Choosing your format: audience needs and the

power of text 99
Planning your approach 99
How to start writing great content 102
Choosing the right approach 103
Arresting the scroll with your content 117
Notes 121

07 Choosing your format: developing visual, video

and audio content 125
Video delivering brand journalism 127
Short-form social videos 129
Interview video 133
Live video coverage 135
Using imagery for your complex storytelling 137
 Contents xi

Audio: the rise of podcasting 140

Notes 144

08 Content hubs: finding a home for your stories 147

Taking the blog to the next level 148
The standalone brand name 149
Find the right stories 153
Create a clear structure 158
Notes 158

09 Distribution and amplification: growing loyal audiences 161

Optimize organic distribution 162
Integrate search 166
Max out on social media 168
Build with paid distribution 169
Other paid strategies 172
Other paid approaches 177
Notes 178

10 Thought leadership: insight from your people 179

Establish your vision and outcomes 180
Developing your talent pool 181
Employees hold the key 182
Thought leadership inspiration 183
Content success factors 186
Ideation and creation support 190
Notes 191

11 Measuring impact: building a metrics framework 193

Investing for the long term 194
Measurement throughout the customer journey 198
Stretching the value 203
Notes 206
xii Contents

12 Bringing your newsroom to life 207

Finding the smarts 207
Outsourcing of content 208
The perfect team 209
Reflecting the newsroom structure 209
Notes 216

Index 217
 xiii

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES
1.1 Finding the content sweet spot 13
1.2 Shifting the focus of content 15
2.1 Shifting attention to trust and advocacy 26
3.1 Story publication: an ongoing process 40
3.2 Building a content strategy 41
3.3 Understanding your audiences 48
3.4 Drumbeat content at the heart of regular output 53
3.5 The content theme bundle 54
3.6 An indicative publication schedule 56
4.1 A messaging framework 66
4.2 Raincatcher content: engaging audiences before the start of
the sales funnel 68
5.1 The story-mining process 82
6.1 Formats for use in B2B brand journalism: text 100
7.1 Formats for use in B2B brand journalism: video, visual,
audio 126
7.2 Creating short-form video 131
8.1 Approaches to story hub structure 149
9.1 Distributing your content 162
9.2 The content distribution flow 168
11.1 The business value of content strategy 202
11.2 Content supporting wider communications and sales
outreach 204
12.1 Outline newsroom structure 210
xiv List of Figures and Tables

TABLES
3.1 The evolution of brand journalism at different stages of the
customer journey 43
3.2 Content sourcing options 59
5.1 Four different approaches to story mining 89
5.2 The content audit process 95
6.1 Text format overview 104
7.1 Different video formats and their benefits 130
9.1 Key platforms for organic and paid B2B growth 170
10.1 A process for thought leadership content 190
11.1 Measurement throughout the customer journey 199
12.1 Brand journalism technology tools 215
 xv

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gay Flashman is a pioneer of brand journalism, blending her experi-

ence as a senior journalist, communications professional and digital
marketer to create compelling content strategies for some of the
world’s leading brands.
Gay is the founder of Formative Content, a global content market-
ing agency that works with clients such as the World Economic
Forum, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Standard Chartered, Mitsubishi
Heavy Industries and Tata Consultancy Services, creating powerful
B2B content ranging from social media and blog content to thought
leadership and white papers.
Starting in newspapers, Gay built a career at the BBC and ITN in
TV news journalism, culminating in her position as Managing Editor
at Channel 4 News and Channel 5 News. Following a move to
Sydney, she worked as a management consultant at both ABC News
and SBS in Australia before founding Formative Content.
Gay is a frequent public speaker on topics relating to content, digi-
tal marketing and media.
xvi

THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

 xvii

FOREWORD

This is a book about a hidden power: the power of storytelling.

It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of
marketing. It’s not about the hard sell. It’s about finding the human
stories that pulse beneath the surface of big corporations and that
connect all of us, in all of our hopes and dreams and fears. It is about
building trust.
Genuinely impactful, disintermediated content lets brands amplify
the issues and the topics that matter to them, and talk directly to the
people they want to engage with.
That is the power that this book uncovers. Not marketing adverto-
rial, but genuine editorial. At its best, it delivers substance over
slogans, and insights over earworms.
I cannot think of a better person to explain the value of story-
driven content marketing than Gay Flashman. She has been around
content and journalism all her working life, as a journalist, as a tele-
vision executive, and as a founder and CEO. She’s created the
strategies to deploy meaningful content and the material to make it
real for some of the planet’s most progressive businesses.
In Powerful B2B Content, Gay Flashman shows how to use content
to develop an organizational voice, to give shape and meaning to
business issues, to encourage knowledge to slip the bonds of jargon
and make the effort to be discoverable, discussable, and shareable.
There are three big changes taking place in this century’s work-
place. People, young and old, expect more from employers. Yes, they
want careers, but they also want causes they can believe in and a
community they can belong to. Progress, purpose and values. These
are frightening things when you are conditioned to talking to share-
holders who want profit, dividend and predictability.
People expect to share their experiences through social media. Not
just the experiences of their leisure time either; they also want to
xviii FOREWORD

share insights and knowledge on professional and personal networks

such as LinkedIn or Pinterest. They want to share things their fami-
lies care about on networks such as Facebook, WeChat or TikTok.
Sharing has taken the place of magazines and newspapers, paperback
bookshelves and photograph albums in people’s online spaces.
People consume media differently. That means the old gatekeepers
have lost their power. Remember these forces apply not just to some
faceless global audience or valued target demographic, they apply to
an organization’s people: its staff, its employees, its stakeholders.
These are the future advocates and ambassadors of first resort.
If you are not in people’s headphones, or on their screens – if you
do not have a route into their attention, then where are you?
What Gay lays out in the chapters ahead is how to get there, prac-
tically and purposefully. It’s a journey that can benefit anyone, from
the smallest start-up to the biggest corporate behemoth. You could
not have a better guide.

Adrian Monck
Managing Director
The World Economic Forum
 xix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Without the support, contribution and guidance of many people, this

book would not have seen the light of day. To all of those who leant
their skills, their insight, guidance and support – a heartfelt thank you.
It’s been quite a journey from the newsrooms of ITN, the BBC and
Sky to running an international content agency, and the experience
and knowledge gained in those pressurised, dynamic and utterly
stimulating newsrooms has stood me in good stead for the work that
was to follow.
To Adrian Monck, thank you for the vision and dogged pursuance
of the goal of innovator in brand publishing.
Thanks to my clients, many of whom offered their precious time
for interviews, making themselves available and trusting their
thoughts to me; many others shared their knowledge through the
work we have developed together. Special thanks to Mark Jones,
Abhinav Kumar, Ashish Babu, Dan Lochmann, Jim Cox and Laura
Price.
To all the marketing thinkers, writers and consultants who gave
their time and their enthusiasm, and whose books and blogs I have
read over the years, thank you. Special mention to those interviewed
for the book, including Mark Schaefer, Melanie Deziel, Lisa Moretti,
Michael Brenner, Neal Schaffer, Rebecca Lieb, Rob Blackie, Robert
Rose, Amy Hatch, Sarah Goodall, Tom Foremski, Luke Kintigh, Ken
Kaplan, Krista Ruhe and Laura Hamlyn.
The expertise I have developed over the last five years has been built
on the hard work of a dedicated team at our agency, Formative Content.
Ongoing gratitude to the senior leadership team, writers, senior content
editors, client services team, web team and operations team busy in our
Beaconsfield newsroom. You have all contributed over the last five
years to much of the output and insight referenced here.
xx ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Alex Weller and the Above Digital team – thank you all for your
ongoing support and web smarts. To videographer and editor Mike
Sedgwick and PR guru Wendy Richmond – thanks for the fun times,
your relentless professionalism and years of friendship.
Thanks to Jenny Volich and the team at Kogan Page.
For the strategic messaging guidance, for all the years of friend-
ship, laughs and ongoing reassurance, a huge thank you to Deborah
Turness and Charlotte Hume. Thanks also to Brian, for his unstinting
and generous support.
Selina Swift deserves a special mention for being the voice of calm,
and a force of positive energy, helping with all referencing, lay-out
and outreach for which I had neither the skills, the time, nor the
patience. Peter Crush, thank you for the help in knocking some of
these words into better shape; years writing TV intros and headlines
did not prepare me for the challenge of writing a book.
The path from a business of two people in a room to a team of
more than fifty has been in equal measure an eventful and challeng-
ing one. Guidance from Neil Backwith, Piers Cumberlege, Damon
Clark, Natalie Richer and Brian Harris has been invaluable.
To Paul Muggeridge. I am so grateful that our worlds collided. I
could not have asked for a more impressive, dynamic and ridicu-
lously focused partner with whom to have shared this journey. Here’s
to the future and all it brings.
Sorry to my boys, Joe and Sam, for all those lost evenings and
weekends.
And for his unfailing patience, love and support, eternal gratitude
to John Wilson.
 1

01

Why use brand journalism as part of

your content marketing mix?

The lens through which we view our B2B communications and market-
ing materials is becoming increasingly blurred. Not only have the last
few years witnessed an explosion in the sheer number of channels that
didn’t exist before, but the amount and complexity of information
that these channels contain is reaching almost unfathomable levels.
It’s staggering to think that today an extra 2.5 quintillion bytes
of data will be created, and will continue to be created, each and
every day. To put this into some sort of perspective, 90 per cent of
the data that’s ever been created in the history of mankind was
created in the last two years.1
Unsurprisingly, this explosion of channels means brands – whether
they occupy the B2B or B2C space – have an increasingly hard task
when it comes to reaching customers and audiences. With the number
of stakeholders multiplying and the touchpoints with which they
connect also proliferating, buying cycles have become much more
complicated. It’s no longer enough for brands to start engaging their
target audience at the top of the traditional sales journey. What they
need now is some sort of ‘brand warm-up’. B2B brands must find a
way to build a presence before the buyer even reaches the top of the
sales funnel. As content marketing expert Robert Rose puts it: ‘The
remit of marketing these days is to have a very large part of the top
of funnel experience/pre-customer phase.’2
2 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

What does this really mean? What’s often forgotten is that selling
a product is actually a human-to-human experience; it’s about telling
stories that resonate about your brand in a broader sense, or which
align your brand with a particular way of thinking. It’s about creat-
ing stories that support marketing efforts even before potential buyers
start on the journey to purchase. If created well, and in a way that
occupies the various networks your audiences engage with, these
journalistic stories can deliver solid reputational impact.

Making your brand a contender

In other words, success in our multi-channel world is about establish-
ing your brand as a ‘contender’ – one that consumers will consider, at
the point they (or an influencer of a buyer) decide they have a need.
Brands must establish themselves in a more considered and strategic
way, using editorial content, in the places and spaces audiences are
inhabiting – even before they exhibit a product or service need.

Volume of information
Grabbing the attention of any customer, whether B2B or B2C, is
growing more challenging every day.
In recent years there has been an almost exponential rise in the number
of news and information outlets delivering articles, blogs, so-called news
and other forms of content in all its guises. Some of this content origi-
nates from traditional or recognized news sources, but a rising proportion
is from personal bloggers and previously unknown publishers.
But the quality of much of this output is questionable. Eighty per
cent of blog writers do all their writing themselves without any outsourc-
ing for fact checking (according to data from SEO Tribunal3). It’s well
reported that many posts are ill thought out, only loosely researched
and often not substantiated, and yet they appear in many people’s social
feeds and inboxes. Add to this the content that is simply duplicated
across outlets, cut and pasted and shared, and it’s not difficult to see
that there is a wave of mediocre information swamping all of us.
 WHY USE BRAND JOURNALISM? 3

But as well as an ever-growing total volume of information, it is

the sheer quantity of outlets and voices competing for our attention
that is also reaching staggering proportions.
As the internet has democratized audience reach, there has been
massive growth in niche news outlets and sites delivering the ‘long
tail’ of views and positioning – often representing the less mainstream
and minority thinking. Some see this as a welcome sign of diversifica-
tion. But not only do some argue this is a breeding ground for ‘fake
news’, other media commentators are worried about the impact these
new sources of information – more often than not from social media
sites – are having. Many audiences are now abandoning traditional
and trusted news outlets for those that are more often than not echo
chambers for their beliefs.
If this wasn’t challenging enough, not all content we see (primarily
in our social feeds) is even written, generated or shared by humans.
Some is being generated in troll farms4 creating, distributing and
sharing content aimed at manipulating political thinking, or under-
mining fact-based insight in healthcare, or the economy.
The impact of all this cannot be underestimated. We live in a time
where some people are veering towards content or phony stories that
support their beliefs, while others are being turned off by traditional
media. All-told, trust and credibility of news sources has never been
so highly questioned. As the Pew Research Centre recently found, the
growth in content has been such that only around one in five
Americans said they trusted what was shared to them by news organ-
izations, family or friends. Social media was trusted by even fewer.
Only 4 per cent of web-using adults said they trusted what they saw
and read, no matter who shared it. Audiences are now ever more
aware that the information that is delivered to them is biased – almost
three-quarters of those surveyed agreed with this.5

Legislation limiting marketing

As well as the marketing profession’s own efforts to stop people being
deluged by too many untargeted messages, governments are also legis-
lating to stop the rising wave of spam and unwanted push engagement.
4 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules have applied in

the European Union since May 2018, and they limit the way compa-
nies can use, share and store data about individuals. Personal data
can’t be used without the consent of the person concerned, and it
can’t be forwarded to others or re-used in any way.
While it’s challenging to find data on the true impact of GDPR on
email marketing and telemarketing, Facebook reported that a tempo-
rary fall in user registrations, and a decline in ad revenue in early
2018, was linked to the legislation. Why? More and more consumers
now value the importance of privacy. Research has found that almost
70 per cent of US adults aren’t comfortable with companies sharing
and selling their data and online activity – and more than half of
these report taking specific action to limit data collection when
they’re using apps and websites. Many will even stop using the
company altogether if need be.6
Against this background, it’s perhaps unsurprising that research
group Forrester noted that the number of Fortune 100 firms explain-
ing their commitment to consumers’ privacy as part of their corporate
social responsibility grew from 21 in 2017 to 28 a year later.7 With
the number of GDPR-prompted complaints growing, it’s no wonder
areas outside Europe – including California, Brazil, Japan and India –
are also debating introducing similar regulation.8

Buyers doing their own research

In the recent past there were only a limited number of ways vendors
could engage with buyers, and much of this engagement was one to
one, or face to face. There was also only a limited extent to which
buyers could gather information to inform their buying decision.
Today, however, B2B buying decisions are characterized and influ-
enced by a variety of factors – and a lot of these take place before
customers even contact a company to find out about a product. The
decision about whether to engage with a brand and purchase its
products might start and finish completely at the online research
stage – research shows that almost half of all B2B buyers will touch
 WHY USE BRAND JOURNALISM? 5

or engage with three to five pieces of content before they contact a

salesperson.9
In fact, the business consumer is now so digitally sophisticated,
that according to Lori Wizdo at Forrester Research:10
●●
more than two-thirds (68 per cent) of B2B buyers say they prefer
to research on their own, and online;
●●
62 per cent of B2B buyers say they now develop their selection
criteria or finalize a vendor shortlist based solely on digital content;
●●
some 60 per cent of B2B buyers prefer not to contact a sales rep as
the primary source of information.

The message here couldn’t be clearer: brands that don’t have the right
type of digital content – that is content which is engaging and appeal-
ing to decision makers – have lost their sale before it’s even begun.

A crisis of trust
B2B brands that have managed to ‘cut through the noise’, get their
audience’s attention and get themselves noticed still don’t have an
easy ride of it. As I have already indicated, trust is the last big domi-
nant issue. Build trust, and relationships are forged and fostered. As
we know, though, audiences don’t appreciate push messages; they
want to feel an affinity with the brands that they are dealing with.
Accenture puts it neatly in one of its recent research reports:

The heightened transparency inherent in our digital world means trust

is a highly flammable, ever-present concern… companies need to very
intentionally create a culture of building, maintaining and preserving
trust, and bake it into their DNA, strategy and day-to-day operations.11

Trust is important because it impacts your buyers, your investors,

your partners and your employees. It’s not only important to rein-
force and measure, but also to communicate to your stakeholders
and audiences. Failure of trust is more pervasive in young people in
6 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Western societies, according to research by Deloitte.12 In fact, opti-

mism is at an all-time low amongst young people. Overall, millennials
are less trusting across the board – whether it’s of religious leaders,
politicians or the mainstream media. Millennials and Gen Zs are
more likely to patronize and support companies who share their own
values.
The good news is that emerging research indicates buyers are more
ready to accept that vendor content is trustworthy.13 Better vendor
trust is creating what Forrester’s Laura Ramos calls a ‘B2B content
arms race’, with B2B firms ‘trying to achieve competitive advantage
by producing any possible content that any possible buyer could
possibly need at any possible time.14
However, before looking at this in more detail, it’s worth examin-
ing just how trust levels currently differ across channels.

Challenges to mainstream media

Trust in traditional media, and all media generally, has declined, but
there is a growing ‘trust gap’ between broadcast and new media.
According to the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project, Britons in
2019 are the least trusting of social media, out of people in 22 nations
including France, Germany and the United States.15 It found just 12
per cent trusted information from social media, while 83 per cent
had little or no trust in platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Just
two sources of information were trusted by a majority of Britons:
national TV news channels (61 per cent) and local news organiza-
tions (54 per cent).
While traditional news brands (NBC, ABC, the BBC), have seen
the new kids on the block (BuzzFeed, NowThis and the like) telling
stories that capture young people’s attention in much more engaging
ways, there’s still confusion between what is fake and what isn’t. This
hasn’t been helped by the failure of social media platforms them-
selves – which have been widely condemned for helping to propagate
much of the fake news.
The corrosive influence of fake news is such that Edelman’s Trust
Barometer 2019 found that while there has been a rise in people
 WHY USE BRAND JOURNALISM? 7

consuming news, more than 70 per cent worry about fake news or
false information being ‘used as a weapon’.16 The net result is that
audiences – being fed a diet of trash from all sides and from all chan-
nels – often struggle to discern fact from fiction.

Advertising concerns
In parallel with confusion about what parts of the news we should
believe in, is the very real concern that exists about the integrity of
the advertising industry as a whole. Even though trust in advertising
has been falling for the last few decades, more recently trust has
been melting at an accelerating pace, with consumer ‘belief’ in the
sector now at a record low (of 25 per cent). It is, so research says,
due to the huge volume of ads, their repetition, their obtrusiveness
and irrelevance.17
As Lord Puttnam, one of the greats of the UK media industry,
recently put it:

Every one of us has a colossal job on our hands in the process

of recreating trust – not in the system, which in many ways has
only discredited itself, but in some kind of a system which we feel
comfortable to gather around and support. Building trust is a human
activity, and is very unlikely to be achieved solely through the use of
analytics and algorithms. Simply looked at from the fairly narrow
perspective of advertising – our role is all about building ‘trust’ – trust
in brands, trust in our message, trust in each other.18

Society wants new spokespeople.

It’s not just the media and the advertising industries that are strug-
gling to maintain trust in the eyes of outsiders and of audiences.
Perhaps top of the list in many Western countries is the demise in
respect for politicians. Democratic governments around the world
are now mistrusted more than ever before, by as much as 80 per cent
in some countries, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
Whether it’s from the handling of Brexit in the UK, to the rise of
8 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

conflict and confrontation politics in the United States, or the emer-

gence of populist groups such as yellow vests (les gilets jaunes) in
France, there’s been a shift in deference that has seen politicians lose
much of the respect they had in the post-war era.

The opportunity: brand purpose

With threat arguably comes opportunity. The trust vacuum left by
media, advertising, politicians, and by falling respect for the broader
establishment opens up opportunities for senior business leaders and
thinkers to demonstrate their credentials through sensible, consid-
ered thought leadership.
Organizations have earned their right to step into that space, to
talk about the areas that they know and understand. They can do this
safe in the knowledge audiences can filter and curate their own narra-
tives – which (in an ideal world) are taken from a range of sources
rather than an echo chamber of their own making.
In our interview, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of The
Content Advisory, Robert Rose, described the importance of earning
not only our audience’s attention but also its trust.

Attention is not hard to get. You can get attention. You can buy
attention. But that attention is fleeting. It’s easy to grab somebody’s
attention for 10 seconds. All you have to do is be controversial or
pay for it, and you can get something in front of someone to get their
attention. But it’s holding that attention that’s the hard part; it’s holding
it for any length of time and deepening the trust so that they want to do
things that favour you. That is the difficult part.
That’s where the power of content marketing truly comes in, by
delivering value before you’ve even asked for anything, in other words,
before you’ve asked for their name, or their registration, or their email
address, or any kind of transaction. You’re treating them as if they were
a customer already. You’re treating them as if they were a valuable
relationship to you by delivering value without them even asking for it.
And that, to me, makes all the other elements of trust easier.
 WHY USE BRAND JOURNALISM? 9

Your brand conversations should reflect:

●●
Honesty – ensure any stories you develop on behalf of your company
exhibit honesty and clarity on the thoughts, views and opinions of the
organization.
●●
Connection – build case studies and human examples from within your
organization to develop empathy and build relationships.
●●
Value – offer insight that taps into the needs of the customer.
●●
Reliability – don’t start the conversation unless you can maintain it.

The power of thoughtfully told stories

It’s not just employers and audiences who believe in the power of
thought leadership. Employees also believe more than ever that
their organization should take the lead on change in the broader
environment and the world around them. According to Edelman’s
Trust Barometer, in 2019 more than 70 per cent felt that a company
ought to act in a way that enables it to both increase profits and
improve economic and social conditions in the markets in which it
operates.19
So, what better way to demonstrate you are doing than through
your own thoughtfully told stories? Telling your audience what
you believe in (and why) should today be considered a vital part
of your brand-building strategy. As David Roman explains below,
flogging products no longer works. Today there’s an expectation
brands will share the same beliefs as their consumers – and this is
equally relevant in B2B. With data showing that more than half of
consumers will boycott brands that don’t share their beliefs,
there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be true of the B2B space too.20
It’s B2B brands especially that have seen the customer journey
evolve and become more complex with a proliferation of touch-
points, platforms and even the number of people involved in a
sale/purchase.
10 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

CASE STUDY
Lenovo takes the brand beyond tech innovation

‘Now we have become a $50 billion company, Lenovo has to be tighter in terms
of what we stand for and what we represent’, said David Roman, senior VP and
CMO of Lenovo, recently interviewed in the Drum. ‘When you look at people
buying technology today, especially millennials, they expect to have a
relationship with the brand. They expect to know about the company. They want
the company to share their values. There’s a broader set of things than just the
technology itself, especially now as we move into cloud-based solutions. There’s
an expectation of trust and how the company is going to maintain privacy and
security.’21

The complex path to a sale

It was in 1898 that travelling salesman Elias St Elmo Lewis first
coined his famous ‘journey to sale’ concept – neatly summarized by
his AIDA acronym (Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action).
To this day, the basic premise behind what creates sales largely
remains unchanged. It could also be argued the sales funnel he first
described differs little – it simply has more outlets, touchpoints and
platforms through which customers can be engaged. As marketing
commentator, professor and strategist Mark Ritson writes:

The sales funnel precedes the invention of television, direct mail,

telemarketing, cinema ads, the internet and smartphones. Each and
every one of these technologies has changed the tactical options
available to marketers, but the essential challenge of marketing strategy
and the enduring value of a properly derived sales funnel remain
undimmed.22

The rise of digital communications means there are even more touch-
points along the customer journey, and each of those might be
delivered on a different platform. According to McKinsey, ‘the aver-
age B2B customer now uses six different channels over the course of
their decision-making journey’.23 The new challenge is complexity of
engagement. And it’s this complexity of engagement at different
 WHY USE BRAND JOURNALISM? 11

stages of the buyer journey that sits against the backdrop of increased
complexity of communication and a growing mistrust in our tradi-
tional media, advertising and marketing. As marketing guru Seth
Godin writes:

… the newly empowered consumer has discovered that what looks

like clutter to the marketer feels like choice. They’ve come to realize
that there are an infinite number of choices, an endless parade of
alternatives. For the marketer, it’s like trying to sell sand in a desert.24

Without a profile or some sort of digital relationship, organizations

wanting to be included in the procurement process can lose a sale
before any formal Request for Proposal (RFP) process has even been
started. As a McKinsey & Co report concluded, when getting atten-
tion becomes harder, it’s all the more important to build brand
awareness and engagement:

Faced with a plethora of choices and communications, consumers tend

to fall back on the limited set of brands that have made it through the
wilderness of messages. Brand awareness matters: brands in the initial
consideration set can be up to three times more likely to be purchased
eventually than brands that aren’t in it.25

Key to success is to ‘interrupt’ the decision-making process with your

brand message in as appealing a way as possible. If you can push
through the noise – be clever with your messaging, not just shout the
loudest – there is scope for brands to use storytelling and brand jour-
nalism to gain awareness and start the journey to a trust position.
Marketing expert and author Michael Brenner explains in an inter-
view for this book that the issue is not that audiences don’t want
content, it’s that they are not served the content that they need:

Research shows that buyers are actually quite open and are looking for
more content from brands that is educational. I don’t think audiences
are completely jaded. They are, increasingly, open to brands providing
expert-level thought leadership or brand journalism (whatever your
preferred term) – they are just disappointed at how few brands are
providing it.
12 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

The issue is that the natural instinct of the business is to promote itself –
this is true in marketing, with the C-suite, and it’s certainly true for sales
teams. Everybody thinks that their job is to talk about how great their
products are and how great the company is. In plain terms, it’s the desire
to promote that gets in the way.

Finding ways to connect

If storytelling and brand journalism is the answer, the challenge for
companies using it is how to connect with their audiences in this
fragmented environment. How do organizations cut through with
their messaging and engage audiences? How can connections with
B2B buyers be made within an ever more complex, emotional and
extending sales journey?
Adrian Monck is Managing Director at the World Economic
Forum. Interviewed about the Forum’s approach to publishing, he
explained his belief that an organization could drive its own coverage
by disintermediating traditional media:

We took as our starting point the idea that an organization could use
stories to tell the world more about its own mission and its own passion
and its own concerns, and then bring that same storytelling approach to
people in its organization and in its stakeholder group. The people you
engage with, the people you work with, all of those are your audiences
as well as the world at large, and telling stories is the most powerful
way we know to touch people.

How do you bring that approach to your own organization or your

own business with authenticity and integrity? In my case, the path went
from being a professor and thinking about journalism, to realizing that
organizations could also embrace some of the values of journalism and
be part of the future of what journalism is becoming.

One of the most important things for any organization, any journalism
organization, is having those values – editorial integrity and telling
stories respectfully. To do that you have to recognize your organization’s
 WHY USE BRAND JOURNALISM? 13

boundaries, in terms of its ability to speak to issues, and you have

to make sure that within those boundaries it can communicate with
integrity and with authenticity.

The rise of brand purpose

Brands are increasingly expected to stand up for what they believe,
and tell stories that align to those beliefs, to demonstrate their brand
purpose more pervasively than ever before.
Bill Theofilou, a senior managing director in Accenture Strategy,
puts it this way: ‘A brand must solve a problem or meet a need. How
well it does that, and how well it creates loyalty, affinity and connec-
tions with its customers determines the winners from the losers.’26
Accenture’s own research refers to the ‘rise of the purpose-led
brand’ – stating that its survey of more than 2,000 US consumers
found that more than 60 per cent want companies to take a stand on
broadly relevant issues such as transparency, fair employment and
sustainability. They want to do business with companies that broadly
align with their own values.

FIGURE 1.1 Finding the content sweet spot

The zone of mutual

interest and engagement

Your brand Your target

beliefs,values and audience’s belief
ethos system and value set
14 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Finding your purpose

According to research commissioned by Waggoner Edstrom and
Quartz, the need for businesses to have true and authentic purpose is
now ‘table stakes’ and there is an ‘inextricable link between social
issues and business strategy’. It adds: ‘Companies can no longer oper-
ate in a vacuum. As 84 per cent of our respondents say, customers
will demand greater transparency and assurance that the brands they
support have a positive impact on society.’27
You don’t need to go far to find those that are really embracing
this. Multinational consumer goods company Unilever has shaped its
brand in recent years with purpose at the heart of its offer. The
company has even created a website and mission to support others to
do the same thing, called Selling with Purpose.28
But this isn’t the full extent to which communicating purpose now
goes. Brands and business are now expected to have strong views
(and associated action) on social issues such as the environment,
equality and politics. Satya Nadella (CEO, Microsoft), Marc Benioff
(CEO, Salesforce), and Anne Boden (CEO, Starling Bank, behind its
#makemoneyequal campaign), are some of the leading exponents of
this.
The new challenge for companies might be ascertaining just how
comfortable they are straying into potentially tricky, but also poten-
tially beneficial areas. However, in his annual Letter to Investors
entitled Purpose and Profit,29 Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of
BlackRock, was unambiguous:

Unnerved by fundamental economic changes and the failure of

government to provide lasting solutions, society is increasingly looking
to companies, both public and private, to address pressing social and
economic issues. These issues range from protecting the environment to
retirement to gender and racial inequality, among others. Purpose is not
a mere tagline or marketing campaign; it is a company’s fundamental
reason for being – what it does every day to create value for its
stakeholders. Purpose is not the sole pursuit of profits but the animating
force for achieving them.
 WHY USE BRAND JOURNALISM? 15

Brand purpose driving value

At a time where trust in news brands is reduced, what Fink et al are
saying is simple. Why not turn to corporates and established special-
ist brands – alongside other, traditional outlets and news sources – for
information and insight?
Often procurement teams will want to understand commitment to
targets around equality, gender balance, access, supply chain viability
and commercial approach, whilst governments are legislating changes
and approaches to how businesses work. Increasingly there is a focus
on sustainable and ethical procurement and standards. Integrating
these narratives into your public-facing assets – website, blog site,
social media channels – is just one key part of building reputation
and trust online and offline.

Remember… it’s emotional

B2B brands aren’t just expected to demonstrate purpose, they’re also
expected to dig even deeper into their touchy-feely sides. IBM, in an
overview of general marketing trends, referred to this move as the
shift from the attention economy to the emotion economy.30
This needn’t be the big leap it appears to be. Emotion, at some
level, has always sat at the heart of great marketing and advertising.
Perhaps what IBM is talking about is making this much more explicit,

FIGURE 1.2 Shifting the focus of content

From To

Product-focused content Values-focused output

Company message content Outcomes-focused content

Push campaigns Authentic engagement

Focused on gain and sale Trust building

Transaction focus Building a relationship

Profit alone Profit with purpose

16 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

as articulated emotion rather than a ‘sense’ or a ‘feeling’ of what a

brand believes in or represents. As data from Google’s own market-
ing team reveals, on average, B2B customers are significantly more
emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers than
consumers.31 Of the hundreds of B2C brands studied, most had
emotional connections with between 1 and 40 per cent of consumers.
Meanwhile, of the nine B2B brands studied, seven surpassed the 50
per cent mark.
Heidi Taylor, in her book B2B Marketing Strategy, discusses the
changing shape of customer engagement:

I now look at the customer buying journey in B2B as an engagement

continuum, where there are multiple potential touchpoints for both
traditional and new marketing activity. Because if our customers no
longer want to be sold to, we have to completely change our perspective
and think not only about where along the buying journey we need to
have a presence, but how we can engage with our customers before
their buying journey even begins.32

Cross-team collaboration
If it’s not already abundantly clear, the need for great brand storytell-
ing has never been more important. The context of our storytelling is
a world where we, and our potential clients and customers, are
deluged with information and messaging.
Success will henceforth be all about understanding the techniques
that can be leveraged to get true attention and build meaningful rela-
tionships based on a shared vision and purpose.
Success will also be about greater cross-functional collaboration. If
nothing else, effective brand storytelling and brand journalism is a
collaborative effort, especially now sales engagement is no longer a
linear process. Because buyers will often move from digital content
back to sales teams before moving closer to purchase, it’s important
the various teams involved recognize their own responsibilities and
the way they need to collaborate with other teams:
 WHY USE BRAND JOURNALISM? 17

Marketing: the marketing team guide and support commissioners

and editors to create content that will align with current campaigns
and business/product priorities, ensuring activity is laddering up to
key marketing goals.
Communications: communications teams articulate brand messaging
and re-work that into engaging messages that will appeal to target
audiences and personas; the communications team will also
develop tone-of-voice guidance that will underpin how stories are
created and what stories you choose to tell as a brand.
Sales: communication with sales teams enables content marketers to
understand the concerns of customers – what do they need to know
and understand, or what are their pain points? Ideally sales would
be a close partner of any editorial team developing brand journalism.
Brand stories can be used as door openers and relationship starters
for the sales teams themselves, as well as the basis of future
collateral or lead generation collateral.

As audiences and buyers wrestle with the complex nature of our

communications and marketing environment there has never been a
better time to cut through with your own stories. Not only that, we
are now enabled with a full range of tools to give us the ability to
scope, deliver and measure every aspect of the brand stories we create
and deliver. Next is to understand the facets of the newsroom you
can appropriate and learn from to build a successful brand journal-
ism strategy and production operation.

Notes
1 IBM (2017) 10 Key Marketing Trends for 2017, IBM Marketing Cloud,
3rd February. Available from: http://comsense.consulting/wp-content/uploads/
2017/03/10_Key_Marketing_Trends_for_2017_and_Ideas_for_Exceeding_
Customer_Expectations.pdf. (archived at https://perma.cc/3NAJ-HVZ7)
2 Dzamic, L and Kirby, J (2018) The Definitive Guide to Strategic Content
Marketing: Perspectives, issues, challenges and solutions, Kogan Page Publishers,
p 50
18 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

3 SEO Tribunal (2019) 58 amazing blogging statistics for 2019, SEO Tribunal, 7
February. Available from: https://seotribunal.com/blog/blogging-statistics/
(archived at https://perma.cc/B6S6-VH7L)
4 BBC (2019) Facebook tackles Russians making fake news stories, BBC News,
17 January. Available from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46904935
(archived at https://perma.cc/F2QR-QAZZ)
5 Barthel, M et al (2016) Trust, Facts and Democracy, Pew Research Centre, 7
July. Available from: https://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/trust-and-
accuracy/ (archived at https://perma.cc/X9HK-TLTU)
6 Iannopollo, E (2019) Happy data privacy day: five lessons learned on
regulatory enforcement, Forrester, 28 January. Available from: https://go.
forrester.com/blogs/happy-data-privacy-day-five-lessons-learned-on-regulatory-
enforcement/ (archived at https://perma.cc/UU3C-M3XB)
7 Iannopollo, E (2018) Embrace privacy as your corporate social responsibility,
Forrester, 19 October. Available from: https://go.forrester.com/blogs/embrace-
privacy-as-your-corporate-social-responsibility-csr/ (archived at https://perma.
cc/DHJ5-FT6D)
8 Iannopollo, E (2019) Happy data privacy day: five lessons learned on
regulatory enforcement, Forrester, 28 January. Available from: https://go.
forrester.com/blogs/happy-data-privacy-day-five-lessons-learned-on-regulatory-
enforcement/ (archived at https://perma.cc/UU3C-M3XB)
9 Demand Gen Report (2016) Content Preferences Survey: B2B buyers value
content that offers data and analysis, Demand Gen Report, Hasbrouck
Heights, NJ. Available from: https://www.demandgenreport.com/resources/
research/2016-content-preferences-survey-b2b-buyers-value-content-that-
offers-data-and-analysis (archived at https://perma.cc/S9YX-JLTP)
10 Wizdo, L (2017) The ways and means of B2B buyer journey maps: we’re going
deep at Forrester’s B2B forum, Forrester, 21 August. Available from: https://
go.forrester.com/blogs/the-ways-and-means-of-b2b-buyer-journey-maps-were-
going-deep-at-forresters-b2b-forum/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
NZR2-QTTE)
11 Long, J, Roark, C and Theofilou, B (2018) The bottom line on trust,
Accenture, 30 October. Available from: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/
insights/strategy/trust-in-business (archived at https://perma.cc/D7WC-JFU4)
12 Deloitte (2019) The Deloitte Global Millennial Survey 2019, Deloitte, 20
May. Available from: https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/about-
deloitte/articles/millennialsurvey.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
YGL4-EJJF)
13 Demand Gen Report (2016) Content Preferences Survey: B2B buyers value
content that offers data and analysis, Demand Gen Report, Hasbrouck
Heights, NJ. Available from: https://www.demandgenreport.com/resources/
 WHY USE BRAND JOURNALISM? 19

research/2016-content-preferences-survey-b2b-buyers-value-content-that-
offers-data-and-analysis (archived at https://perma.cc/S9YX-JLTP)
14 Camuso, M and Ramos, L (2017) ‘Crap’ content continues to describe B2B
marketing: don’t let it describe yours, Forrester, 7 December. Available from:
https://go.forrester.com/blogs/crap-content-continues-to-describe-b2b-
marketing-dont-let-it-describe-yours/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
WHX7-MK7P)
15 Smith, M (2019) Britons least likely of 22 nations to trust information on
social media, YouGov. Available from: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/technology/
articles-reports/2019/05/07/britons-least-likely-22-nations-trust-information-
(archived at https://perma.cc/W9R7-JXUC)
16 Edelman (2019) 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer: Global Report, Edelman, 20
January, p 19. Available from: https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/
aatuss191/files/2019-02/2019_Edelman_Trust_Barometer_Global_Report.pdf
(archived at https://perma.cc/68U8-P5YD)
17 Spanier, G (2019) The good, the bad and the troubling: trust in advertising hits
record low, Campaign, 30 January. Available from: https://www.campaignlive.
co.uk/article/good-bad-troubling-trust-advertising-hits-record-low/1524250
(archived at https://perma.cc/9K8E-D347)
18 Oakes, O (2017) Lord Puttnam warns ad industry: trust is the most urgent task
ahead, Campaign, 9 March. Available from: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/
article/lord-puttnam-warns-ad-industry-trust-urgent-task-ahead/1426792
(archived at https://perma.cc/HXE8-Y83C)
19 Edelman (2019) 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer: Global Report, Edelman, 20
January, p 34. Available from: https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/
aatuss191/files/2019-02/2019_Edelman_Trust_Barometer_Global_Report.pdf
(archived at https://perma.cc/68U8-P5YD)
20 Edelman (2017) Earned Brand Report, Edelman, 18 June. Available from:
https://www.edelman.com/research/earned-brand-2017 (archived at https://
perma.cc/CJ67-HNJE)
21 O’Brien, K (2017) How Lenovo is taking its brand beyond tech innovation,
The Drum, 11 January. Available from: https://www.thedrum.com/
news/2017/01/11/how-lenovo-taking-its-brand-beyond-tech-innovation
(archived at https://perma.cc/W76H-RZY3)
22 Ritson, M (2016) If you think the sales funnel is dead, you’ve mistaken tactics
for strategy, Marketing Week, 6 April. Available from: https://www.
marketingweek.com/2016/04/06/mark-ritson-if-you-think-the-sales-funnel-is-
dead-youve-mistaken-tactics-for-strategy/?nocache=true&login_
errors%5B0%5D=invalidcombo&_lsnonce=f0c28e9876&rememberme=
1&adfesuccess=1 (archived at https://perma.cc/RDS7-TQD9)
20 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

23 Catlin, T et al (2016) How B2B digital leaders drive five times more revenue
growth than their peers, McKinsey, October 2016. Available from: https://
www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/
how-b2b-digital-leaders-drive-five-times-more-revenue-growth-than-their-peers
(archived at https://perma.cc/ML9A-N3RA)
24 Godin, S (2018) This is Marketing: You can’t be seen until you learn to see,
Portfolio, p 53
25 Court, D et al (2009) The consumer decision journey, McKinsey, June 2009.
Available from: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-
sales/our-insights/the-consumer-decision-journey (archived at https://perma.cc/
G4VL-4G7Z)
26 Fromm, J (2019) Purpose series: a purpose-driven brand is a successful brand,
Forbes, 16 January. Available from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/
jefffromm/2019/01/16/purpose-series-a-purpose-driven-brand-is-a-successful-
brand/#714fc7e6437d (archived at https://perma.cc/G89T-3QZ2)
27 Quartz Insights & WE (2019) Leading with purpose in an age defined by it,
Quartz Insights & WE, May. Available from: https://we-worldwide-
arhxo0vh6d1oh9i0c.stackpathdns.com/media/445720/we_purposeleader-
190509-final.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/ESP7-9L85)
28 Unilever (2019) Selling with Purpose, Unilever, 2019. Available from https://
sellingwithpurpose.unilever.com/?p=252 (archived at https://perma.cc/
K2HF-7UGY)
29 Fink, L (2019) Purpose & Profit, Blackrock. Available from: https://www.
blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter (archived at
https://perma.cc/7DYW-C4SC)
30 IBM (2018) 2019 Marketing Trends, IBM, December 2018. Available from:
https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/RKXVLYBO (archived at https://perma.cc/
7UV8-WCYU)
31 Nathan, S and Schmidt, K (2013) From promotion to emotion: connecting
B2B customers to brands, Think with Google, October. Available from: https://
www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-resources/promotion-emotion-b2b/
(archived at https://perma.cc/7KTU-KBN3)
32 Taylor, H (2017) B2B Marketing Strategy: Differentiate, develop and deliver
lasting customer engagement, Kogan Page Publishers, p 12
 21

02

A newsroom approach: defining

brand journalism for the B2B
marketer

Brand journalism: a definition

There is a wide and varied selection of definitions of ‘brand journal-
ism’ and the phrase divides marketers and communicators based on
where they are from, whether they have been a journalist and what
their exposure is to the world of content marketing. The nature of
brand journalism is such that it is most obviously not about inde-
pendence from power. It is, by its very nature, supported by and paid
for by brands themselves. Brand journalists are not writing stealth
content that buries a brand message and purports to be news. Instead,
they are creating truly interesting stories for brands, corporates and
organizations; stories that communicate a broad brand message, or
value(s), but do not explicitly try to sell.
Whilst content and digital marketing has moved on markedly since
he wrote about it in 2013, Andy Bull encapsulates the key attributes
of what brand journalism still is today in his book, aptly titled Brand
Journalism:

Brand journalism is a hybrid form of traditional journalism, marketing

and public relations. Brand journalism is a response to the fact that any
organization can now use journalistic techniques to tell its story direct
to the public.
22 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Brand journalism’s hybrid nature also sees it incorporate core elements

from strategic public relations (PR) and marketing communications:
visionary planning, research, incisive messages, a defined purpose, and a
requirement to quantify what has been achieved through it. The result is
an integrated brand journalism-driven communications strategy.1

For the purposes of this book, my definition is narrower, and reflects

primarily sourcing and creation of top-of-funnel awareness content
that does not explicitly focus or labour a brand name in any way. For
me, brand journalism is, therefore:

The creation of multi-format content, the themes of which are driven by the
broad cultural, societal and business landscape, brand values and corporate
purpose. Stories created are information-rich, relevant or of real value to
the target audience and are created using the sensibilities, skills, tools and
processes of journalism. This content is primarily uploaded on a brand’s
own publishing and amplification channels.

Melanie Deziel is a former journalist who founded StoryFuel, an

agency supporting organizations to tell better stories. She tells me:

I see brand journalism as a subset of all of a brand’s content efforts,

that lives up to the same standards of quality that we usually see in
a newsroom. These standards vary widely, of course, but broadly
speaking, brand journalism has a few common characteristics for me:
it’s content that uses reliable sources to add credibility, truly takes a
unique angle or has some new perspective on a topic, and leverages
some element of tension or stakes to focus on what the audience
actually cares about.

Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of ‘brand journalism’;

amongst them is Jim Cox, a former journalist and now VP of
Communications and Content at global supply chain company,
Agility, who told me:

I spent 27 years in newsrooms before leaping into corporate

communications and marketing. I’m still not comfortable with the term
‘brand journalism’, but I don’t have a better label to offer. Journalism
 A NEWSROOM APPROACH 23

as I think of the term involves reporting – collecting, assembling and

presenting the facts with some degree of objectivity – on matters of
public interest. There’s nothing preventing businesses and brands from
doing the same, whether they do so on matters of broad public interest,
such as climate change, or more narrowly in areas of interest to their
customers and other stakeholder groups. But businesses and brands
exist to sell goods and services and to maximize shareholder value, and
it would be naive to think that any journalism they do isn’t coloured
by those underpinnings of their existence and by the marketplace
imperatives that guide them.

Frictionless sharing
A feature of brand journalism is the very real likelihood that the major-
ity of its readers will never actually be buyers. It might be they are
simply part of the network that will engage with, or share, the stories,
blogs or articles. That’s not to underestimate them though. These people
might well be the important first link in the dissemination chain – the
people that start the process of sharing to a similar but broader network,
and in doing so help content to be shared more widely.
The ‘nodes’ on this sharing network might be large (a major influ-
encer, or a major organization), they might be small (a micro influencer
perhaps), or they might be simple and linear (a click or share from an
individual). But in an ideal world brands will create stories and narra-
tives that have low friction and maximum engagement. They will
arrest the scroll (see ‘Approaches to story creation’ later in this chap-
ter), by gaining the attention of a meaningful audience and content
will be shared in a frictionless fashion.

How to create brand journalism

1. Think like a journalist
While it may sound obvious to say the key requirement of writing/
commissioning brand journalism is to think like a journalist, it’s not
always something that comes easily to all people. This mindset
24 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

requires looking for stories within your organization – stories that

you can re-tell that will excite or engage your audience.
What you can do is train yourself to start asking questions that a
journalist would. Even the most junior beat reporter learns to ask the
what, why, when, how? of a story. As a communicator or marketer in
your organization you can start doing the same.
As Larry Light wrote in his 2014 article on brand journalism:2

Underlying brand journalism is the idea that a brand is not merely

a simple word; it is a complex, multi-dimensional idea that includes
differentiating features, functional and emotional benefits as well as a
distinctive brand character. In this digital, mobile marketing world, no
single communication can possibly relate a standardized brand message
to every customer that is relevant at the right time for the right reasons.
The concept is to think like a journalist.

Former Forbes journalist Dan Lyons famously wrote a warts-and-all

book of his time as an inbound marketer and brand journalist at
software company Hubspot – an organization that encourages its
customers to use content marketing approaches to drive audience
engagement. Whilst in the role, Lyons wrote a short treatise on the
power of corporate storytelling entitled ‘The CMO’s Guide to Brand
Storytelling’. As he so succinctly puts it: ‘The media is overwhelmed
and simply can’t keep up. The best way to be part of the story is
simply to become a journalist yourself.’3
If thinking like a journalist doesn’t come easily, you might also
want to trying building a network of other interested or engaged
storytellers or evangelists in your organization. These can become
key people you can turn to for more stories and insight.
Thinking like a journalist inevitably means you’ll start to behave
like one – including doing what all good journalists do to succeed:
look out for stories in the everyday, cultivate contacts, and regularly
ask around for updates on previous stories. Once you become known
as the go-to person, you will invariably be approached by colleagues
interested in writing for the company. While it’s important not to
dampen this enthusiasm, at this point it might be worth looking on
your company’s social media channels to see who has the knack of
delivering insight and interest or thought leadership. The key message
 A NEWSROOM APPROACH 25

is to use these internal team members to become your first evangelists,

to be your first writers or publishers and to promote the content cause.

2. Appropriate newsroom values

No-one is claiming that the type of brand journalism we are discuss-
ing here is akin to the exclusive news journalism and foreign reporting
of reporters and editors at the BBC, Channel 4 News, the Washington
Post or The Times. That said, what we do want is to take the best
aspects and approaches of the newsroom and use those tenets and
characteristics to tell great brand stories.
Any newsroom, whether for television news, newspaper or digital
content, has a culture and sense of itself that will vary depending on
the title, the programme and the people within it. But most news-
rooms share certain values that influence the behaviours within that
space.
The best journalists are, by their very nature, curious and inter-
ested people. They are interested in the world around them and the
people that make the world tick. Journalists generally pride them-
selves on telling the news honestly as they see it, and can supplement
that with context, insight and evidence for the story they are telling.

3. Don’t sell, just tell

The ultimate outcome we are striving for from our brand journalism
is to achieve authority and influence, deliver on specific brand
messages and, in the longer term, grow sales or improve relationships
with key stakeholders. In this sense, content – be it articles, blogs,
videos, social media posts – needs to be uploaded and shared to
owned channels.
True brand journalism is about creating and delivering stories of
value to your audience, with a view to what their issues and chal-
lenges are. Your aim should be turning the focus on them, and away
from your company or brand. This is how brand journalism critically
differs from PR. It’s about influence at the very top of, or before the
start of, the sales journey – with content to be consumed at the atten-
tion and recognition stages.
26 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

FIGURE 2.1 Shifting attention to trust and advocacy

Catch
attention
Build
recognition
Reinforce
reputation
Build trust
Deliver
sales Encourage
advocacy

From awareness, through recognition to trust, sales and advocacy

Some brands find it challenging to move away from constantly sell-

ing and pitching their own news and offerings. Mark Jones is Head
of Digital Content at the World Economic Forum, and has helped
to pioneer volume publishing at this international organization.
He spoke to me about the Forum’s success with content develop-
ment and specifically about the lack of ‘pure’ promotion in story
content.

The brand does get ‘mentioned’. Every story produced by the World
Economic Forum goes out on a page with a World Economic Forum
logo. It’s on a website where the logo is on it. If it’s in video format, it’s
got the World Economic Forum’s logo on it. What it doesn’t generally
have is a great big ‘sell’ within it. It is getting across an idea of the
Forum, showing that it is actively involved in a particular area. It’s
giving readers a view that there are constructed answers to some of the
world’s biggest problems. It’s a subtle message, but one that’s there.
My point is simply that if you try to push a message too hard, it’ll be
counterproductive, especially in a world where you depend on people
to share your content. They’ll share it if it’s interesting. They’ll share it
if they found it changed their point of view. They’ll share it if it serves
a wider purpose or if they’re trying to make the world a better place
themselves, but if they feel that they’re being used, it’s very, very hard to
get people to share.
 A NEWSROOM APPROACH 27

4. Be accurate and fact-based

Whatever we say on behalf of our brand has to be true, because
trust – whether it’s in an individual or a brand – takes a career to
build up, but only a second to lose. Because we know from experi-
ence just how easily the media can get it wrong, this means sourcing
facts from original sources, not just media reports. It also means
being able to, where possible, back up assertions. Our brand journal-
ist mindset should be that we expect to be challenged, and if we are,
we should be able to defend our reporting.
Part of being objective is being able to separate personal opin-
ions/feelings and being able to look at something from a different
point of view. It should be noted, however, that this is not the same
as impartiality. Brand journalism is – by its very nature – partial.
But what it still requires is being able to look at a subject through
different lenses, with the author putting themselves in other people’s
shoes.
Amy Hatch, a former journalist, launched the Future of Customer
Engagement and Commerce site for SAP Customer Experience. Amy,
spoke to me about the impact of her journalistic training on her
approach to developing content for FCEC:

When I was 22, I got my first local journalist job. We had our printing
press on site, it was local, I wrote everything from obituaries to murder
stories to state politics. I covered everything by myself for the entire
community, and I think that that really informs how I approach my
readership now.

I don’t think these experiences have ever left me. I think of what we do
on our website as journalism. I think of it as trade journalism, and it’s
not a throwaway thing. It’s very much around the idea of trust: putting
meaningful facts into context; telling the truth; being factual and fact-
checking everything we say. Today we don’t say anything that is not
data-driven, or if it’s not data-driven, we make it very clear that this is
our perspective or our writer’s perspective.
28 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

We only have eight seconds to engage a reader, so we put the most

important information at the top of the story. We use the inverted
pyramid method of storytelling; it’s the very straightforward stuff that
they teach you in journalist school, that I don’t think all marketers have
in their back pocket.

The structure behind our beautiful content is highly disciplined, it has

a moral compass, and it’s really about truth and facts in context that
resonate with people.

Every piece of content we have comes from the same foundations.

There’s nothing in it that betrays that ethos, and that takes a lot of
work.

5. Develop a journalistic process

Every newsroom is built on efficiency. Without clear structure, plan-
ning and a ruthless attachment to process, it would be impossible to
create ongoing daily content of consistent quality. This applies to
whether the output produced is tabloid in nature, in-depth or other-
wise; this structure enables any publication to create a range of out­put,
and be able to respond to breaking news as it happens. Brand journal-
ism, however, is not about breaking news. It is about uncovering
feature stories and brand stories that continuously reflect the nature
of the organization.
Even if you cannot afford to create a dedicated newsroom for your
content marketing, it is still possible to pull together a certain amount
of resource to create content on a consistent, daily or weekly basis.
You just have to have a plan and then stick to it.

NEWSROOM TIP
Work to a deadline

There’s nothing like a hard deadline to encourage efficiency and effective

resource utilization. If you can set and hit deadlines when you’re planning
your organization’s content – even if they are for your own internal
purposes – you will build a more efficient system and process within your
organization.
 A NEWSROOM APPROACH 29

Set the system up properly and the output will follow. Whether large
or small, make sure you’re organized, with rigorous approaches to
planning, process and people. There’s nothing like a system to
improve efficiency, manage your resources better and deliver a flow
of quality content.

6. Don’t just be aware, be interested

This might sound obvious, but if you want to talk to your various
audiences about the issues that are vexing them in their own indus-
tries, it’s essential you know what you are talking about. You (and
your team) need to understand the issues and stories that are impact-
ing the world as a whole. Try to become acquainted with the
specialist technical areas that you work in. It may well be you are
developing wider ‘insight’ stories (thought leadership on manage-
ment or leadership techniques), but this doesn’t change the fact that
the context of what you are writing is the world around us.
If you are looking for Journalism 101 tips on how to get started,
keep the following actions in mind:
●●
Subscribe and ingest: read widely and in depth. Make sure you
have trustworthy sources for your general news and information;
be well versed in the politics, economics and context of today’s
complex business world.
●●
Talk and engage with your people: your organization’s experts are
an incredibly accessible group of people that can feed your knowledge
and understanding of a sector. Talk to them when you can, read their
commentaries, reports, articles and social media posts.
●●
Build specialist expertise: even if you are in a communications or
marketing position, start to develop your own expertise and
interest in key areas. If you have a team of in-house writers or
freelance journalists, become as expert as them. Subscribe to
specialist B2B papers and newsletters to update and freshen your
knowledge.
●●
Attend industry events: there is nothing like specialist B2B events
to really revive your knowledge and insight in a particular industry.
30 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

There are thousands of these to attend each year, but the leading
industry events are generally well known and attract leading
thinkers on multiple subject areas. Attending them can be well
worth the investment.

7. Be responsive
Much of what we see on our nightly news bulletins or on our online
news pages is actually fairly well planned – for instance, a visit by a
president, a celebration around a milestone event, a diary story or the
findings of a piece of research.
In addition to these scheduled events, newsrooms also respond to
breaking news on the day. In a newsroom, a story will change with
each new piece of evidence or insight that is gathered; the focus will
change as interviewees reveal new information. Speed, therefore, is of
the essence, as is an ability to gather and assimilate the facts.
As brand journalists you should look to appropriate this respon-
siveness and speed. That’s not to say that you need to respond to
every event, or create ‘breaking news’ content – but it does mean that
you should understand and analyse what is happening in the broader
world environment as well as in the particular industries in which
you are working. Focus on the changes and challenges being felt
inside the companies you are working with. For instance, if world
trade is slowing and it will impact container trade, freight, supply
chains – what kind of stories can you tell within that environment to
reflect those challenges?

CASE STUDY
Newsjacking to build engagement

Newsjacking is a term used to describe taking advantage of current events to

publicize your brand. When done well, events can be used to develop new or fresh
angles or stories. For instance, if you know your audience is talking about the
World Economic Forum in Davos and the key discussion points being raised there,
this can be a good time to engage in the debate. In fact, rather than shying away
from news events you should be actively seeking these opportunities.
 A NEWSROOM APPROACH 31

The simplest example of ‘newsjacking’ is the use of anniversaries, birthdays

and memorial dates to revisit an event from the past in order to review or analyse
an activity, industry or sector. Take a recent story from the World Economic Forum
entitled ‘What is going on in Chernobyl today?’ The article performed extremely
well on the World Economic Forum’s Agenda website, primarily because it tapped
into audience engagement that had been stirred up by a recent TV mini-series on
the incident. So the popularity of the post wasn’t simply driven by the reference
to the incident, but to a popular culture drama that emerged from it.

HOW DO YOU NEWSJACK SUCCESSFULLY?

Be clever: don’t be lazy about taking an event and building on it –

especially if the event is a negative or devastating one. Be insightful
and sophisticated about how to use a news event, memory, anniver­
sary or trend to develop strong material for your brand.
Be sensitive and mature: aim to be sensitive to how you are referencing
the source material, and ensure the tone of voice correlates to the
tone required for coverage of that particular topic. Consider
whether your story will cause offence.
Be quick: turn out your content quickly to ensure you make the most
of any conversation that’s out there and trending.
Be SEO clever: use your Google search and tools such as
AnswerThePublic4 – the data visualization tool that fetches and
maps keyword suggestions and predictions from a world of Google
searches. Once identified, dig deep on these keywords, or other
lines you can follow.

8. Consistency, commitment and agility

In a typical newsroom, the production system never breaks down, or
has off days. Those that work in news soon get used to this ‘always on’
approach, and it’s one brand journalists should try to replicate too.
This isn’t about a ‘set and forget’ approach to content delivery and
engaging with audiences. It’s about listening to the conversation and
responding. Some might call it being agile, but whatever you choose
32 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

to call it, you need to live and breathe the stories you are telling for
brands to audiences.
Consistency and commitment are key when producing branded
content; this is a long game that you need to commit time and
resources to for the long term, as part of your marketing mix. It’s not
an approach that will bear fruit overnight, but will gradually build
organic audiences over time.
Companies delivering great brand journalism demonstrate a
structured commitment to create, publish and amplify great content
to draw potential customers or clients closer to their brand. Owned
media platforms are the primary home for brand journalism
content – but stories can be leveraged across paid, earned and
social sites.

9. Quality over quantity

Organizations that espouse the benefits of brand journalism often
operate and commit to publishing at scale, with tactics informed by
data and insight.
But how many articles or pieces of content should you publish to
gain and maintain an audience? In a perfect world we would all have
the budget to produce high quantities of content, but in reality, budgets
and resources are often tight. On average, only three articles were
uploaded each week to IQ’s Intel site before it was shuttered – the focus
was on quality over quantity. SAP’s Future of Customer Engagement
and Commerce site publishes an average five articles each week. The
World Economic Forum, meanwhile, publishes dozens each day.
It’s worth remembering most largescale brand publishers focus on
creating high-quality articles – because quality pieces can be updated
or can be re-surfaced as evergreen content (which actually boosts
your publishing cadence if the high cost of original content is a chal-
lenge for your brand). Even engaged readers will consume five to
seven pieces of content before they move into the ‘support or inform’
stage of the buying process, ie before they become an opportunity.5
That means you need to keep serving up regular, interesting, new,
but also quality brand journalism to keep audiences engaged. I spoke
to content marketing expert and author Robert Rose about his view
 A NEWSROOM APPROACH 33

on where B2B brands can improve their approach to content devel-

opment and commitment to publication:

What most brands miss is they don’t build a platform. They don’t
build a publication. They don’t build a ‘centre of gravity’ around their
content. What they do is just build asset after asset after asset that lives
in a disaggregated format on their website.

What people don’t subscribe to are individual pieces of content. They

subscribe to something that they’re going to keep getting. This is what
creating and building an audience is all about, and it’s what most
brands, quite frankly, don’t do.

Most brands look at content as an asset that drives a transaction, which

for them might be a registration or an entry in my marketing database.
They call that an audience. But that’s not an audience, that’s just
somebody who transacted for a piece of content!

10. Have a consistent tone, look and feel

Just as every news programme is different, complete with a different
slant, focus or set of production values, so your own corporate
content must reflect your own brand or company. This means the
tone and image of what you produce – on every channel – must reflect
your values, and must appeal to your target audience. Once you
establish what this is (a good tip is to come up with a short paragraph
explaining what you are trying to do with your content), you must
then ensure it’s consistent. Consistency means from a tone of voice,
language and design point of view. Not only will this give cohesion to
your content, it will ensure it stands out in the huge flow of informa-
tion we are delivered each day.

Approaches to story creation

Good brand journalism shares some key storytelling techniques that
are worth considering before you commission or create your first
article, video or podcast.
34 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Step 1: Have the audience in mind

Your stories should reflect the particular audience you are speaking
to. They should reflect the things the audience is talking about, and
the concerns they have, or the challenges they face. Having an audi-
ence in mind is less about thinking, ‘What story do we want to tell?’
or ‘What message do we want to send?’; it focuses on the pivotal
questions of, ‘What parts of the story will people engage with?’ and
‘How do we get that message across?’
Answering these questions requires understanding that different
audiences want, like and react to things in different ways. There is
never one size fits all.

PERSONA DEVELOPMENT
Traditionally, one way of categorizing different audiences, and
making sure you are aligned to their values, is to create personas for
your audiences. In theory, the simple act of creating a character gives
more detail about who they are, where they come from, what age
they are and what roles they are in.

PERSONA DEVELOPMENT – A STARTING POINT

Role: key information about role, company, size, type of company,

location etc.

Demographic information: age, gender, income, marital status, location,

work location, family size, education status.

Status and challenges: range of goals and challenges at work or in role;

our/vendor solution to these problems.

However, it’s worth remembering that these sorts of facts do not

always give a clear view of what motivates a person. Personas can be
fleshed out more fully using:
●●
Quantitative research: ideally you will use research from your sales
teams, from your own organization and from your usage and
 A NEWSROOM APPROACH 35

archive data to get a sense of who you are talking to, what their
habits are, where they interact (online and offline) and what ‘makes
them tick’.
●●
Qualitative research: interviews with clients and customers give a
more nuanced understanding of who you are talking to and what
their needs and values are. You can also glean a stronger sense of
what type of information and content they will be interested in.
Renew and update your research when you can.
●●
First-person understanding: visit sample target audience profiles
on LinkedIn and Twitter to see what your audience shares, when
and to whom. Get a sense of what they value by what stories they
endorse or comment on. Quickly you can refine your understanding
of their world view.

If you put your audience first, you will always have them at the
heart of your storytelling, and will be able to maintain the quality
of your content as you need to build an ongoing audience. You must
aim to develop what social media marketing consultant and author
Mark Schaefer6 calls an Alpha Audience – this is ‘an elite and
engaged tribe at the top of the social sharing food chain, the bedrock
of your business’.
According to Schaefer, this Alpha Audience will be active and
engaged with your content, even if it’s just sharing it on social media,
and it builds the thing we all aspire to creating – trust. ‘Trust,’ says
Schaefer, ‘is the launch code for the Alpha Audience rocket. Trust
cements you to the only people who truly matter in your digital
world.’7

GROWING YOUR AUDIENCE

●●
Inform: be a source of information and insight your audiences can rely on.
●●
Analyse: keep on top of what they like, what’s working, what’s not.
●●
Experiment: try new approaches to your content; if they don’t work,
re-group and try again.
36 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

●●
Respond: reply and respond to comments on your content where
possible; moderate where you can. When, or if, your community becomes
big enough, you can often look to them to respond on your behalf.
●●
Collaborate: ask your audience for guidance and support.
●●
Paid: support key pieces of quality content with targeted paid promotion
to highlight the best of what you have to new followers or audience
members.

Step 2: Arrest the scroll

The stories you focus on should be developed to attract your audi-
ence and arrest the scroll when they are flicking through the deluge of
information that is served to them on their social media and web
channels. At its most basic, arresting the scroll means grabbing your
audience’s attention. But it’s important your brand journalism
contains certain characteristics to get them to notice what you have
to say, whatever format it’s in. These are:

Offer value: the value of your content is that which delivers value.
Robert Rose maintains you can engage audiences (and bring them
into an early trust relationship) with your brand at the search
phase, before they even have a perceived need. If you tell them
interesting and useful information, they’ll be inclined to have a
trust-based relationship with you right from the start.
Be credible: anything you create should deliver information or insight.
Therefore it must be based on research and knowledge, no matter
how short or long. One well-researched piece that is credible, shareable
and original will travel further through your target networks.
Be interesting: use strong headlines, clear images and punchy vocabu­
lary to draw in your audience via social media and promotion, then
present intriguing articles that are easy to scan, optimistic and
simple to digest. I will cover story structure later in the book, but
top stories on the World Economic Forum’s Agenda site include list-
structure stories that outline, in an easy-to-digest way, the world’s
 A NEWSROOM APPROACH 37

leading countries on a range of different topics. They are insightful,

but straightforward to digest.
Add drama: don’t be afraid of adding a bit of drama. When dealing
with drier, more detail-focused content, such as some more complex
B2B topics, it’s more important than ever to make sure you bring
these subjects to life. Add context where you can, add insight or
colour to the stories you are telling. Build tension and a hero/
challenge/resolution story arc if possible. If not, find other tech­
niques or mechanisms to engage.

Step 3: Put humans at the centre

Making your storytelling more human will always improve your
communication with the audience – because it helps the message
stick and aids cut-through.
Ideally you will identify a way to tell your story through a human
example or case study. Ask, for example, if there is one person that
exemplifies the narrative or demonstrates the point you are trying to
make and the impact it is having on a real audience or group of
people. Find out more about story structure and human examples
later in the book.

NEWSROOM TIP
Be personal

For the World Economic Forum’s Agenda site, successful headlines are
short, sharp, carefully written and often focused on personal experience, or
on the direct human impact of activity. For instance, it runs pieces entitled
‘How you talk to your child changes their brain’,8 or on one person’s view or
approach: ‘What Croatia’s president taught the world about leadership at
the World Cup’.9

Even if you do not feel confident in yourself as a ‘brand journalist’,

getting to grips with the techniques of the newsroom can underpin
your entire approach to top-of-funnel content marketing and content
38 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

creation. Before you create any content, you should first confirm and
agree your strategy, map your resources and establish the best formats
and platforms for your target audience.

Notes
1 Bull, A (2013) Brand Journalism, Routledge, p 1
2 Light, L (2014) Brand Journalism: How to engage successfully with consumers
in an age of inclusive individuality, Journal of Brand Strategy, 3 (2), pp 121–28
3 Lyons, D (2013) The CMO’s guide to brand journalism, HubSpot. Available
from: https://www.hubspot.com/cmos-guide-to-brand-journalism (archived at
https://perma.cc/3BC3-BSZ7)
4 Answer The Public (nd) Available from: https://answerthepublic.com/ (archived
at https://perma.cc/Z7S6-VWLV)
5 Interview with Amy Hatch for this book, referring to SAP website: Future of
Customer Engagement and Commerce
6 Schaefer, M W (2015) The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your
content, your marketing, and your business, Mark W Schaefer, p 97
7 Schaefer, M W (2015) The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your
content, your marketing, and your business, Mark W Schaefer, p 109
8 Hardach, S (2018) How you talk to your child changes their brain, World
Economic Forum, 28 February. Available from: https://www.weforum.org/
agenda/2018/02/how-you-talk-to-your-child-changes-their-brain/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/9X5U-2VN4)
9 Purtill, C (2018) What Croatia’s president taught the world about leadership at
the World Cup, World Economic Forum, 17 July. Available from:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/croatia-s-president-taught-a-lesson-
in-leadership-at-the-world-cup/ (archived at https://perma.cc/97B8-5B2X)
 39

03

Building your storytelling strategy

Great brand journalism stories speak for themselves. They play a

pivotal role at the start of the customer journey, supporting lead
generation and purchase reinforcement. They also create advocacy
and help brands build customers from audiences over time.
Yet by the same token, great stories cannot always be easily
surfaced. As previous chapters have referenced, they need to appeal
to the right customer base; they have to engage with audiences
personally (be this through tone, format or values), and just as impor-
tantly, they must work at scale in supporting customers as they move
through the buyer cycle.
But perhaps more important than any of these is the fact that any
brand journalism journey has to make having a clear strategy its core
­foundation.
To anyone still unsold on the virtues of brand journalism, a docu-
mented approach will also enable you to sell your concept to senior
internal stakeholders – those people who sign off the budget you will
need to deliver on your aspirations.

Creating your approach

To support the customer sales journey, your brand journalism ulti-
mately needs to support broader brand objectives, alongside any
specific tactical or campaign aspirations. The best strategies will take
a step-by-step approach, as shown in Figure 3.1.
40 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

FIGURE 3.1 Story publication: an ongoing process

Develop
Develop Create
abstracts and Measure
strategy content
briefs

Agree Story-mining Review, refine

Amplify
themes sessions and sign off

Outline Commission
Publish Distribute
calendar content

Define your goals and outcomes

Building a content marketing strategy supported by brand journalism is
an approach that will build engagement over time. Creating meaningful
relationships online through engaging storytelling will not happen
overnight. Your approach will be determined by the aims and aspira-
tions. It might well be that your brand is adjusting how it is viewed by
external stakeholders and audiences; you might want to shift percep-
tion of the brand, or be launching into a new market or product offering.

Before you start, consider:

●●
What do we want to achieve with this content strategy?
●●
Where does it fit into our overarching marketing planning?
●●
Which other partners will need to be included in delivering the plan?
●●
Who are the key stakeholders and how do each of them need to be
engaged?
●●
How will content support your wider communications planning?
●●
What do you want audiences to think, feel and do?
●●
How long is content needed for?
●●
How does this content fit with long- and short-term goals?
●●
How will you measure your success?
 BUILDING YOUR STORYTELLING STRATEGY 41

FIGURE 3.2 Building a content strategy

Brand objective
The overarching message for your brand

Content objective: the specific objective for your content

Eg Use content to build brand reputation and start meaningful content-led
journeys across the full spectrum of our client base

Content strategy

DEVELOP content-led
CREATE meaningful and AMPLIFY content across
brand experience
relevant stories that relevant social channels to
through distribution of
build trust and empathy. spread the messages and
content built around
Align to audience pull audiences through the
key messages and
needs and interests sales journey
proof points

Research
Outline Measure
audience Agree content Distribute
markets against
needs pillars and across target
and target KPIs and
and journeys platforms
audiences outcomes
consumption

Workflow and process

Resources and partners: internal and external

As your brand journalism develops, aims can shift, to move beyond

working simply at the start of the customer journey to support
engagement with sales and marketing teams, or more focused demand
and lead generation activity. It’s therefore vital that aims are continu-
ally revisited and continually assessed to see if they support the entire
customer journey.

CASE STUDY
Centrica

UK-based energy and services multinational Centrica chose to develop a brand

journalism hub called Stories to broaden its reputation away from a traditional
utility. Its approach was driven by a desire to disintermediate and to control how
42 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

the brand message landed to target audiences, as Laura Price, former Centrica
Director of Digital Communications, explains:
Centrica had to find a different way of reaching the audiences that we wanted
to speak to, whether that’s an investor audience, a political one, or even the
media. For us it was a natural pathway to mediating our own communication
because essentially it was getting increasingly difficult to use the media as
our mouthpiece. With digital delivery, you’ve got complete control over the
message, which is so opposite to a traditional channel where you talk to a
journalist and then they put the story out that they want to write or they
think’s going to sell their paper.
We were taking on something quite different in terms of an approach. It’s not
something that we’ve ever done before with Centrica; we’ve never told
stories, we’ve simply reported corporate news. We wanted to put Centrica in
a space with some of the new and emerging technology companies that our
business is competing with right now.

Use storytelling and brand journalism content across the entire sales
journey – but focus on where it will have the biggest impact.

According to research by McKinsey:

B2B organizations need to develop a much deeper understanding of the

modern Customer Decision Journey (CDJ). Where the old sales funnel
assumed a linear purchasing path – customers take in information,
narrow down their choices, kick the tyres, and submit the purchase
order – the CDJ moves away from the ‘funnel’ way of doing things. It
recognizes that the decision process is, in fact, anything but linear, and
the post-purchase period is often as or more important than other steps
along the way.

What the McKinsey research tells us is that content will need to gain
the attention of, and influence, a much wider range of different stake-
holders, from ‘strangers’ to ‘post purchasers’ (see table), each with
different needs, requirements and issues. It indicates that once a
customer has bought into your product or service – often over a long
 BUILDING YOUR STORYTELLING STRATEGY 43

TABLE 3.1 The evolution of brand journalism at different stages of the customer
journey

Stage in customer The role of brand

journey journalism Content recommendations

Pre-awareness Our content needs to REACH General insight articles, trends

and awareness a broad audience of our output, global themes content
targets and their networks. including videos.
Will our audiences share those Thought leadership and opinion
stories across their networks? pieces, podcasts and livestreaming
or live event broadcast to
demonstrate insights.
Personal value narratives and
stories engage potential clients
with our senior leadership.
Longer articles and white
papers can draw in specialist
audiences.
Interest Content needs to ENGAGE Business- and topic-focused
people in order to build brand articles, white papers, videos and
recognition. ebooks support sales engagement
Do our values and approaches and calls.
match those of our audience? Live coverage and reporting on
social channels covering specific
events, campaigns or target
business areas.
Consideration To become a real Continued insight delivery plus
consideration, brands need to case study and proof point focus
prove they UNDERSTAND a amplified via social media
buyer’s needs, problems to channels.
be solved and belief system. Ongoing email newsletters deliver
To build trust, brands and a regular digest of brand
individuals must SHARE journalism stories to segmented
values, beliefs and audiences.
expectations. Ongoing social posting, targeting
and sharing amplifies your
messages.

(continued)
44 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

TABLE 3.1 (Continued)

Stage in customer The role of brand

journey journalism Content recommendations

Purchase To make a sale, brands need Webinars, live event engagement

to CONVINCE people of their and more detailed case studies and
value. proof points focus on technical
details and queries. Trials,
face-to-face sales engagement,
product demos, Q&A and
specifications reassure and offer
more detail.
Post-purchase Brands need to REASSURE Continued email marketing
people they’ve made the with relevant, personalized
right decision by exceeding material tells clients about
expectations through actions. ongoing innovation, research
Where possible they must and change.
NURTURE this new Continued reinforcement of
relationship to build clients corporate values and beliefs
into advocates for the brand. encourages advocacy and brand
building or case study
development with clients.
Podcast content, live coverage
and reporting on social
channels tell clients we are
across new developments in
influential global events and
the industry.

period of time – upselling and retention are just as important. Here,

timely and regular stories will be required that resonate with your
buyers and customers, to reinforce their purchase decision as well as
encourage them to share your content across their own networks –
this time as advocates for your brand.

The content archetype approach

For those who feel that the sales funnel and customer journey model
is too structured a way to approach your brand journalism and
content marketing, there are other approaches. Strategic advisory
 BUILDING YOUR STORYTELLING STRATEGY 45

firm Altimeter has segmented content strategy into five archetypes1

that help define the end use or aim of content, and they can be used
in place of a sales funnel or customer journey model:

Content as Presence: this is where content is focused on demonstrating

broad awareness of your brand. Your audience is wide, and your
subjects are general and broad in appeal. The World Economic
Forum pursues this approach with its volume publishing model.
Content as Currency: this is when your organization delivers
content of value, either professionally or personally. Content
supports your audience by helping them make a decision in their
life. It will help make the brand a trusted partner or thought
leader. As an example, strategic advisor McKinsey puts thought
leadership front and centre on its main website. The content is
regular and of high quality, based on research and insight across
all its multiple segments of expertise. Commercial data company
Dun & Bradstreet similarly produces regular ‘expert insights for
business leaders’ on its Perspectives hub,2 focusing on sales and
marketing skills, data management, procurement and compliance
challenges.
Content as a Window: this is when companies tell the stories about
their people or products to demonstrate transparency and build
credibility with audiences. This approach is a great way to build
trust in your brand. As more brands focus on purpose, building
trust, and demonstrating the culture of their organizations, this
type of content will become more instrumental in the future for
delivering key messages.
Content as Community: this is when companies create platforms
where their network (or community) can discuss and engage, as
well as respond to content created. American Express content site
Open Forum was a benchmark of community building through
content, providing support and guidance to thousands of small
business customers and hub members. The site has now been
integrated into the American Express main website as Business
Trends and Insights, but it continues to add value to a targeted
small business audience.3
46 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Content as Support: this is when content has an educational purpose.

The style will be more ‘how to’ in nature and it supports and
informs a very specific need. Content like this complements
retention strategies as a hygiene factor on your website, delivering
tactical information around the key questions current clients might
have.

Map your audience

Whatever you want to achieve, it’s crucial you develop clear descriptions
of who you are talking to with your brand journalism and storytelling.
At the back of your mind, with any piece of content, you should always
ask: ‘Why will my target audiences be interested in what we have to say?’
or ‘What do I want my audiences to think, feel and do?’
To answer these questions, as you will have read in the previous
chapter, you must first establish your customers’ personas and needs
and map them against your own business aspirations (for instance
building trust, driving reputation, reducing time to sale). This will
determine which type of content you should prioritize and focus
attention on to best fulfil both sets of requirements.
As we have learned, it is not simply about creating a demographic
or quantitative list of the characteristics of your target audience(s).
What matters most is what matters to them. If you’re going to develop
stories that resonate with people, you need to understand their very
personal drivers, beliefs and challenges. There are a number of tech-
niques you can use to establish this.

Mine audience outputs to create insights

Personas based on a broad set of information (such as need state,
position in the sales journey, role, challenges, and demographics) are
fine, but you need to dig more deeply to get a more rounded picture.
For instance, what issues are your audiences interested in, or what do
they feel motivated by?
 BUILDING YOUR STORYTELLING STRATEGY 47

You can uncover this type of insight by tracking the activity of your
target audiences on social media sites, and seeing what type of content
they are sharing and commenting on. Right now this is a whole emerg-
ing science around the ‘psychology of social sharing’, including a
recent New York Times-commissioned study with Customer Insight
Group and Latitude Research. Previous research has also revealed
that the top three types of social content shared are blog articles, visu-
als and comments. So, research the Twitter and Instagram accounts of
key targets and export them into spreadsheets where you can review
keywords, common phrases and repeated commentary. You can read
more about audience understanding in the next chapter.
Remember though, you are not looking to mention products,
product launches or news from your company; you are looking to
match the interests and needs of your audiences.

Focus on adding value

Your aim is not just to service a core audience with your stories and
brand journalism; it is to deliver content that will be part of the
broader customer experience and can be shared to a broader network,
reinforcing a brand message for you throughout multiple arenas or
networks.
The best way to ensure success with audiences is by giving them
something of value. According to those surveyed by Altimeter in
2018, high-value content is that which helps the customer make a
decision (both personally and professionally), and promotes the
brand as a subject matter expert. This type of content worked best
for those interviewed from service-oriented industries like banking,
healthcare and technology.4
So, choose areas where people need or want to gain knowledge or
insight, or where they have specific challenges/pain points in broader
business terms. There is scope here for companies – even those who
are ultimately trying to sell a service or product – to become a trusted
source of information. Some 90 per cent of those interviewed for the
Demand Gen Report’s 2019 Content Preferences Survey5 said they
48 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

FIGURE 3.3 Understanding your audiences

Defined and specific

target audience with
whom you have a
direct relationship

Wider network around

that audience,
influencer or thought
leader
Broad range of
audiences that can
share and amplify your
stories across a wider
CORE network
AUDIENCE
NETWORK
AUDIENCE

BROAD
AUDIENCE

would consider vendor content as trustworthy, whilst 68 per cent

said they wanted content grouped around an issue, challenge or pain
point.
If your aim is to build brand awareness with engaging top-­
of-funnel and pre-funnel brand journalism, you will have an even
broader canvas of content areas from which to choose that might
interest your audiences. Your ultimate goal should be to pique an
interest with a story that engages or informs.

Create themed content

Segmenting your content into themes will help audiences better navi-
gate your content, and will allow you to promote it more efficiently.
Rather than taking your internal structures or divisions as a theme
structure, begin with your audience needs, groups or verticals.
Here are some ways in which B2B content hubs in the technology
and financial services sectors have segmented their content into
themes to reflect specific verticals, audience needs or challenges.
Ideally you should not create themes that simply reflect your internal
 BUILDING YOUR STORYTELLING STRATEGY 49

corporate structure or divisions, as these do not always reflect your

audiences’ key drivers:
●●
Aon’s The One Brief.6 This site delivers its content under the catch-
all heading of ‘The world’s most pressing business issues’ and covers
industry-changing macro trends in ‘Capital & Economics’,
wellbeing and workforce trends in ‘People & Organizations’, and
challenges to global business in ‘Risk & Innovation’. Using a range
of formats (graphics, imagery, original design), as well as social
sharing tools on each blog article, The One Brief encourages sharing
amongst target audiences.
●●
Fujitsu’s I-Global Intelligence for the CIO.7 Covers business issues
and peer-to-peer debate on business and technology trends to
appeal to CIOs themselves or their influencer networks. Content is
grouped into strategy, management, innovation and thought
leadership (called ‘Big Thinkers’).
●●
SAP’s Future of Customer Engagement and Commerce.8 Here,
content is grouped around the themes of commerce, customer
experience, service, sales, marketing and purpose. Some of those
are more closely aligned to the SAP product than others, but half
are focused on broad areas of insight and learning (sales, service,
marketing), whilst one harnesses the interest in brand purpose,
covering topics such as diversity, gender equality and broad
thought leadership topics.

Agree your style and tone

Your verbal or written identity speaks volumes about who you are as a
brand. Landing the right tone of voice – one that sits with the image you
want to create, and doesn’t jar with existing style guides – is an art form
any brand journalist has to master and then stay consistent with to get
the cut-through they want. It’s likely a tone of voice document will already
exist – developed by your communications team or the marketing team
as part of the corporate communications toolkit – but based on your new
stated aims for our brand journalism, it might need updating.
If you need to develop an approach from scratch, you should
consider:
50 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Drivers Detail

Tone Your tone of voice is ‘how’ you speak and can often be driven by or guided
by your values. You might be human, approachable, efficient – and therefore
you might want to engage with audiences in a relaxed but direct way.
You might be, like MailChimp, committed to speaking like an ‘experienced
and compassionate business partner’ who doesn’t take himself very
seriously, so injects humour into his words.9
But it may well be that your brand needs to be smart and innovative.
Whatever the requirement, ensure your content contains or reflects those
keywords or maxims in all the content you create.
Consider creating a list of ‘yes’ words – words you will use for your brand
writing – and ‘no’ words – those that don’t support your guidelines.
Language What level of audience are you pitching your content at?
Who will read it and what kind of tone will they relate to?
Remember, you need to make your content readable and accessible and
encourage ‘frictionless sharing’.
Our recommendation is to keep your language as accessible as possible.
People reading online tend to read more slowly than they do reading from
standard print. Keep your sentences short and your language as simple as
possible, whilst aiming to get your message across clearly and precisely.
Technicality How much technical information do you wish to include, or how much
detail on any subject that you are covering?
Steer away from technical language where possible. Obviously if you are
creating technical content, you will need to reference specifics, but if you
are writing on broader topics, or industry-wide content that is relevant for
a broad audience, limit your technical content and explain what you need
to with a glossary.
Localization Many markets need content or stories ‘localized’ to reflect the true issues
and translation of that region or area. Do not overlook the need for local knowledge if
specific audiences have tailored needs.
Do not believe that you can simply translate your available content into
local languages; often content and stories will need recreating or
developing from scratch for specific locations. One option is to use
template base copy and then drop in localized quotes and insight if
producing stories for multiple regions or geographies.

SAP’s Customer Experience content hub, the Future of Customer

Engagement and Commerce, had a clear ‘voice’ from the start, says
Amy Hatch when interviewed for this book:
 BUILDING YOUR STORYTELLING STRATEGY 51

One of the reasons this site is so successful is because it has a

personality, it has a tone. When you read it, it’s got heart and soul, it
feels very human, it doesn’t feel sterile and it feels genuine, authentic
and it’s very transparent. We’re not trying to be something we’re not.

The site very much reflects who the team is. It can be a double-edged
sword, because you have to continually find people to help run that
strategy who have that mindset, but we have a really special chemistry in
our team. Our internal subject matter experts have cultivated knowledge
over many years. It’s a long game, so you have to have a leadership that’s
educated and that understands what you are trying to do.

Find your rhythm

When you’re looking to enhance and encourage maximum sharing
with your content, finding subjects that resonate with your target
audience is essential. On GE’s content marketing hub GE Reports,
the subjects it focuses on are aviation, digital, healthcare, energy, and
advanced manufacturing – all under the overarching primary theme
of ‘Innovation’. Editor in Chief at GE, Tomas Kellner,10 leads the
team that publishes the GE Reports website and newsletter. He says
stories that tend to work best are larger themes GE has a connection
to, such as climate change and renewables in energy, for instance. As
stories are topical and broad, he sees his competition as the Wall
Street Journal rather than content from GE competitors.

Formats: no right or wrong

While stories themselves might chop and change, there is no right or
wrong when it comes to choosing your formats, and there is no ‘one
size fits all’ approach to how you structure your stories.
If you have already started producing content, then you will prob-
ably have a sense of what works and what does not. It could well be
that your audiences prefer video to the written word or have shown
a particular interest in podcasts as a channel for specialist insight.
52 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

From here you will be able to analyse in great detail whether it’s
short-form video or longer-form content that works better, and what
style of text copy is more appealing.
If you have not started on the brand journalism journey yet, then
you will need to review content as you go and test your format ranges
for popularity. As well as measuring appeal and popularity of the
content in terms of readership, completion time and bounce rate for
individual pages, you should also look for the crucial sharing metrics.
Remember, the aim is to encourage frictionless sharing of your
content across your audience networks.
Broadly, visual content and video are growing in popularity
because they are appealing and easy to digest (and share). Their
merits will be covered in more detail in later chapters, but at this
point, simply ensure you are thinking broadly about what you will
produce. Do not simply focus on text alone.

A regular publishing cadence

Ideally you want to have consistent, ongoing content delivered to
your site on a regular basis – what’s often called ‘drumbeat content’ –
supported by shorter, focused ‘campaigns’ based around key themes,
target audiences, events or outcomes.
Naturally, publishing frequency will always be dictated by resources
and budget, but regularity does breed readership. When thinking
about your own drumbeat, you need to think about how you schedule
not only your regular drumbeat content but your sporadic themed
material additional to this, and specific campaigns (see Figure 3.4).

Regular drumbeat content

This is your ongoing, consistent pulse of content delivered at your
own pace and rhythm. In an ideal world you would publish quality
content to a content hub or your blog site as often as daily (as in a
newsroom), but for many brands the reality is one new quality article
each week, with only high-volume publishers delivering more.
 BUILDING YOUR STORYTELLING STRATEGY 53

FIGURE 3.4 Drumbeat content at the heart of regular output

Drumbeat overlaid with themed and campaign content

Campaign Campaign Campaign

Theme bundle Theme bundle Theme bundle

DRUMBEAT CONTENT: daily, weekly, monthly – regular

As you build up an archive of material over time, you could always

consider re-purposing and re-posting material that has worked well
in the past with audiences, amplifying it with updated social media
content as required. Often archive material will supplement your
SEO activities and continue to drive meaningful traffic volumes.
Ideally, drumbeat content comprises stories that address the key
concerns or needs of your audience, but can still live in your archive for
some time into the future. Articles and topical blogs will form the
bedrock of most drumbeat content. These are relatively cost-effective
to create and can fit into a regular rhythm of commissioning. However,
drumbeat content could just as easily be in a video format, or podcast,
or long-form, if you feel that is what your audience will be receptive to.

Curation in the mix

If you are considering a high-volume approach to a specific hub, you
might want to consider the cost-effective approach of curating specific
pieces of content from strategic partners. Source key publishing part-
ners who you believe will be a good fit for your brand and who are
already creating the sort of content you feel would work on your
own hub or site. Ideally you will also create a limited volume of
curated material alongside your own original content. If you are
planning to curate content from other sources, make sure you
consider some key factors:
●●
Brand alignment: is the content you are posting aligned in vision
and values to your own brand?
54 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

●●
Value-add: is the content delivering insight to the end user? Will it
chime with the aspiration and mission of your content hub?
●●
Quality: is it well written/edited and regularly delivered? Are you
able to change, re-write or subedit the content or does it need to be
published in its entirety?
●●
Promotion: what kind of promotion or reference does any partner
expect from your publication of the content?

If your site becomes popular and successful as a standalone engage-

ment hub for key audiences (for instance, Adobe’s CMO.com) you
might well find brands approach you with content that they would
like to have posted. The World Economic Forum has built a high-
volume, high-quality audience for its on-site Agenda platform and
is in the lucky position of being able to agree publishing arrange-
ments with global thought leaders, associations and academic
institutions. This enables the Forum to have a pool of more than
600 articles each day from which it can choose a handful to publish
that fulfil its quality and content criteria, supporting its volume
content aspirations.

Thematic packages

FIGURE 3.5 The content theme bundle

The Content Theme Bundle

Agreed theme or focus Each asset supported

by social media
amplification content:

Asset: blog, article, insight Twitter Assets

LinkedIn Assets
Asset: thought leadership piece
Facebook Assets

Asset: podcast, video, infographic Additional platforms

as required
 BUILDING YOUR STORYTELLING STRATEGY 55

Regular drumbeat content can be supplemented with additional

content packages that reflect a specific theme, challenge or area of
focus. A bundle can be created around a sales push or product where
the broad journalistic messaging drives readers further into the sales
funnel with links to additional insight.
Content can be developed as one larger ‘cornerstone’ piece that
harnesses a key thought or focus for your business. This can then be
‘atomized’ or split up into smaller, snackable pieces of content that
will be supported by amplification – either paid or organic – across
your target audience channels. Entrepreneur and digital marketing
evangelist Gary Vaynerchuk uses this approach comprehensively for
his content and for clients, calling it the ‘pillar model’. He explains
that he starts with a piece of pillar content – for him always a
video – and then his team creates dozens of smaller pieces of content
from that, contextualized according to which platform they are
uploaded to.
Remember, however, to be flexible with your approach. As chan-
nels and formats change and proliferate, what is popular today might
not be popular in the very near future.
As you build up your content and develop a production flow, you
can begin to analyse which formats and types of content are more
successful with your audiences and mould your future content plans
accordingly. Build a repeat schedule, enabling you to stretch timeless
content and leverage your archive.
Adrian Monck is a Managing Director at the World Economic
Forum. In an interview for this book he explained how his team used
original material and a robust repeat schedule to develop and grow
the Forum’s popular Agenda site with a broad and engaged global
audience:

If a story doesn’t resonate today, it might next month, it might strike a

chord in six months’ time. We regularly see stories that perhaps didn’t
perform as well as expected when they were first published being
brought to life because they happened to capture something that is
suddenly relevant.
 56
FIGURE 3.6 An indicative publication schedule

Indicative brand journalism content schedule

Timing Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly
Archive,
Topic Theme/focus 1 analyse and
schedule for
Website Asset 1 Asset 2 Asset 3
future repeat
Social
assets
Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly
Archive,
Theme/focus 1
analyse and
Asset 1 Asset 2 Asset 3 schedule for
future repeat

Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly
Archive,
Theme/focus 1 analyse and
schedule for
Asset 1 Asset 2 Asset 3 future repeat

Brand journalism can be supplemented with targeted how-to or educational content if relevant to
your audience groups
 BUILDING YOUR STORYTELLING STRATEGY 57

Ultimately you don’t necessarily know, and you don’t necessarily have
the control that says, ‘I’m going to plant this seed, and it will grow right
now, right here’. That seed may get taken and planted somewhere else;
it may blow in the wind; it might grow to be something completely
different. But if you’re not sowing seeds, you’ll never get anything
growing. Yes, you are taking a risk in producing content, but it’s not a
risk that’s unmanageable, and it’s for a payback that is potentially very,
very long term. We’ve now been doing this for five or six years, and
we’ve got evergreen stories that we published right at the start that still
deliver audiences and still speak to people. Good, relevant content is a
gift that keeps on giving.

Campaign content
One-off campaign content will build peaks into your regular cadence
and rhythm of publication and can target specific audiences. This
type of content can be developed based on your marketing or PR
activities, or broader industry or organizational timelines, for
instance:
●●
Build campaign content around product launches or PR events,
ensuring you get maximum amplification for your stories.
●●
Create campaigns around key people moves, for instance a new
CEO or senior-level executive switching roles.
●●
Use the broader calendar of external events to drive a campaign –
for example, Pride Week.
●●
Use an internal event to support your timing – for instance an
internal conference or supplier/vendor event.
●●
If you have a specific product you are promoting or launching into
a region or market then use this to support a campaign.
●●
Market creation can be supported by targeted campaign material
that rolls out alongside your ongoing content.

For software company Red Hat, the Global Director of Content Laura
Hamlyn explained to me that she has evolved the approach to content
commissioning to always reflect the needs of the customer – campaign
58 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

content ebbs and flows, reflecting specific customer pain points, whilst
evergreen content maintains audience levels:

​ e believe evergreen content and campaign content ​can work together

W
well. For example, organic traffic to our website actually converts over
time and creates some of our most valuable leads.

Our teams have aligned to messaging via what we call ‘sales

conversations’. These are themes we identified via research that our
customers and prospects have identified as challenges/opportunities for
their business. We align with these themes across all of our marketing
teams so sales, marketing, and our prospects and customers are all
exposed to the same terms and concepts.

Evergreen content builds trust, educates, and becomes a reliable source

of information from day to day or month to month. Campaign content
is more dynamic and fluid and can serve to create brand awareness via
paid media, or function as a call to action telling the prospect what
action to take next. As our data and MarTech get more advanced, we
can personalize any of this content dynamically to reflect our customer
and prospect goals and user profiles.

Develop a commissioning process

As we have already seen, your content rhythm, format, delivery, and
amplification aspirations will always be driven by your available
budget and resources.
If your budget is extremely limited, you will need to assess what
types of content you can create most cost-effectively, and how you
can get maximum value from them. If you are lucky, it may also be
possible to find internal partners (and their budgets) who are willing
to support your content aspirations, for instance in sales, communi-
cations or other areas of marketing support. Generally speaking
though, there are three main options for approaching your content
production:
 BUILDING YOUR STORYTELLING STRATEGY 59

TABLE 3.2 Content sourcing options

In-house content Many larger brands (especially in B2C) have taken their
production content production and creation in-house. This can assist in
maintaining strong lines of control, but the associated
longer-term commitment to headcount can be unappealing
for some organizations.
Part in-house production – Keep some of your content in-house – ideally
part agency or freelance commissioning and editing – and outsource some tasks on
the value chain such as content production and creation.
Fully outsourced model Establish one provider as your content strategist and content
producer, or build a network of agencies or providers who
can support all aspects of the content supply chain.

Managing the flow of content in your organization requires having

one overseeing department or editor. This unit, person or department
will manage the editorial flow of content and ensure themes are coor-
dinated to target audiences or personas. Using a hub and spoke
structure allows a centralized editorial vision to be held and driven in
one department – or potentially individual – with commissioning or
content creation devolved to internal teams or external agencies. A
devolved model will see responsibility for content creation and distri-
bution to local or regional divisions and/or marketing teams.

System governance
Whatever your content format, and however regularly it is created,
you will need to establish a system for analysing, guiding and
­reviewing it – either individually in detail, or as a whole. If you are a
highly networked organization, the simplest and most effective way
to build governance into your approach is to establish an Editorial
Board or Content Advisory Group (CAG), either a real or virtual
network. Your CAG should include representatives from marketing
strategy, communications/PR, sales and relevant wider divisions who
can take an active hand in guiding the following:

Marketing and PR integration: are you fully integrated and aware of

activity in the wider marketing and PR teams? Is there a regular
60 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

flow of material and information from your team to theirs (or vice
versa) to enable calendars and campaigns to be coordinated?
Partnerships and stakeholders: are you connecting with all relevant
areas of the business to include their thinking and stories into the
narrative flow? Often, sustaining the flow of content from around
the organization is the biggest challenge, especially for larger
multinationals. Selling in your vision and building a team of
evangelists through internal stakeholders will support the wider
aspirations you have for your brand journalism.
Sales coordination: is your content reaching your sales teams and is
it useful or relevant to them in their conversations with potential
customers? It’s not about using content marketing as pure sales
collateral but using it to open doors for potential discussions.
Measurement and data: can you measure what you’re doing? Bring
in a wider cohort of people to review and discuss content and to
supply information and success metrics that can support your ROI
and discussions around success.

Establishing what you want to achieve with your content – and how
you will deliver on those aims – is just a starting point. Once the strat-
egy is mapped out, the key to efficient ongoing delivery is a resourcing
plan and a management structure that will allow you, your team, or
your agency to deliver consistent brand journalism content as a regu-
lar flow. Refining and reviewing your approach consistently based on
success data and metrics will enable you to remain agile and respon-
sive in what is a constantly changing marketing environment.

Notes
1 Prophet (2018) There are 5 content strategy archetypes – pick one, Prophet,
12 July. Available from: https://www.prophet.com/2018/07/choosing-the-right-
content-strategy-archetype/ (archived at https://perma.cc/T9UW-TBLJ)
2 Dun & Bradsheet (nd) Perspectives. Available from: https://www.dnb.co.uk/
perspectives.html
 BUILDING YOUR STORYTELLING STRATEGY 61

3 American Express (nd) Business Trends and Insights, American Express.

Available from: https://www.americanexpress.com/en-gb/business/trends-and-
insights/ (archived at https://perma.cc/CPJ6-5C2M)
4 Prophet (2018) The 2018 state of digital content, Prophet. Available from:
https://insights.prophet.com/2018-state-of-digital-content (archived at
https://perma.cc/35SH-KFFQ)
5 Demand Gen Report (2019) 2019 Content Preferences Survey: Growing
demand for credible and concise content reinforces need for research and
relevancy in B2B messaging, Demand Gen Report, Hasbrouck Heights, NJ.
Available from: https://www.demandgenreport.com/resources/reports/2019-
content-preferences-survey-report (archived at https://perma.cc/J5EW-CMBJ)
6 The One Brief (nd) Available from: https://theonebrief.com/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/SJ9Q-LNDY)
7 i-cio (nd) Global Intelligence for the CIO. Available from: https://www.i-cio.
com/ (archived at https://perma.cc/7NRW-EDNL)
8 The Future of Engagement and Commerce (nd) Available from: https://www.
the-future-of-commerce.com/ (archived at https://perma.cc/DZN8-SZ7U)
9 Mailchimp (nd) Voice and Tone, Mailchimp Content Style Guide. Available
from: https://styleguide.mailchimp.com/voice-and-tone/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/C44K-83UC)
10 Silber, T (2018) Multinational conglomerate GE Goes all in on content
marketing, Forbes, 20 June. Available from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/
tonysilber/2018/06/20/multinational-conglomerate-ge-goes-all-in-on-content-
marketing/#9ad774963da3 (archived at https://perma.cc/43KG-WR5L)
62

THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

 63

04

Finding the narrative: telling

the stories that matter

Sourcing stories with impact

The days of a simple B2B buying journey are long behind us. Today
future buyers are influenced by a wider range of content than ever
before, from an increasingly wide range of sources. The process is
more complex, more layered and ultimately much more long-winded.
Because of this, your brand has to stand out from the crowd and the
stories your brand tells must reflect the essence of what that brand
stands for. And because everything you say and everything you do
interconnects as part of both your brand identity and your overarching
narrative, it’s important to be clear on your narrative from the start.

Overcoming corporate myopia

The most common trap organizations fall into is believing their audi-
ences will be interested in every announcement they make, or that any
news event, or any new piece of information is good enough.
Corporate myopia tends to lead organizations to produce s­ ub-standard,
bland content that does them no favours at all. News output and
announcements have merit and resonance as part of your marketing
and communications mix, but won’t develop or grow long-term
­relationships with audiences.
64 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

To get a sense of what you need to do to change this, you only need
to ask yourself how much time you spend each day being meaning-
fully engaged with content produced by other organizations. It could
be a video on LinkedIn or something you’ve been emailed. What is it
that makes you stop what you’re doing and pay attention? What
does it take for you to arrest the scroll and click through and sign up
to a newsletter, for instance? Think along these lines to get yourself
into the mindset of applying the right narrative to your content.

What makes a great B2B story?

We’ve said already that great content is about creating great stories.
But the narrative tropes and storytelling arcs that so often feature in
‘how to write a story’ blogs/books might not always translate well
into the B2B environment. There are a range of approaches you might
take to structuring and telling your brand stories to encourage audi-
ences to stay with you and your content.
Chip and Dan Heath address this point in their book Made to
Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die.1 The brothers propose
six applicable principles that they believe make ideas as a whole more
‘sticky’.

What does that mean

Principle in practice? For your B2B Content

Simplicity Relentlessly prioritize and strip out Stick to one idea, one thought –
the extraneous to ensure your what’s the one point you are trying
idea sticks. to make with this piece?
Unexpectedness ‘Violate people’s expectations’ to Find nuances, personalities,
gain attention. analogies or case studies that will
pique the audiences’ attention to
explain or elaborate.
Concreteness Explain your ideas in human Bring your content to life with case
actions, with real examples or studies, real people, real life
concrete imagery. examples, comparisons or word
pictures.
(continued)
 FINDING THE NARRATIVE 65

(Continued)

What does that mean

Principle in practice? For your B2B Content

Credibility ‘Sticky ideas have to carry their Add credentials, quote an expert, or
own credentials’ – this makes give a tangible example or case
people believe. study; use real life examples,
numbers or reference points where
you can.
Emotions Make the audience feel Engage with a human tale, a tale of
something – an emotional idea good v bad, the challenge of
makes people care. unpicking a problem that was
insurmountable.
Stories Help us act, by demonstrating and Build a strong narrative, or clear
inspiring us. structure to deliver powerful
messages in a world swamped with
content.

These principles can be applied to B2B content you produce for your
organization, and they work especially well for narrative blogs,
videos and articles that might form the basis of your content hub or
blog site. Integrate what you can of these principles to help your
stories arrest the scroll and gain the attention of your audiences.

Building a message framework

Before you can create anything you need to be clear about your
communications messages. A simple messaging framework can guide
and support your content if you are not clear what you should be
talking about and what subjects should form the core of your content.
It will also help you clarify your messages and how you should talk
about your organization.
While some businesses will have multiple communications frame-
works for different sectors, divisions and areas, a small business
might only have one messaging or communications approach.
Ultimately though, a narrative framework doesn’t have to be overly
complicated – it just needs to encapsulate the core offer and support-
ing messages and points.
66 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

FIGURE 4.1 A messaging framework

We support our customers with [this activity], that

Our mission offers [these benefits to our customers] in order that
narrative they can [achieve these goals]

How we achieve our How we achieve our How we achieve

mission 1 mission 2 our mission 3
Communications
themes Underpinned by [this]
AND Underpinned by [this]

Communications
messages Supporting message 1 Supporting message 2

Proof points / Proof points: Proof points: Proof points: Proof points:
reasons to believe area or area or area or area or
example 1 example 2 example 3 example 4

If you need to develop one for your organization, start with the over-
arching mission and build your framework from there.
Your messaging framework should include these core pieces of
information:
●●
The mission or narrative: this is the main or overarching message
or mission of your organization, or potentially your business unit,
geography or division. Your headline messaging outlines the total
business offer and could also include the outcomes you drive for
customers.
●●
Communications themes: a handful of communications themes
will underpin your primary narrative. These will summarize the
thrust of your business and what makes your offer appealing and
unique. You could have between three and five specific messages,
supported by core principles or behaviours, or cultural assets that
underpin this activity.
●●
Communications messages: these will be messages distilled from
your narrative and themes that you might use in publicity material,
speeches or primers for your key people as spokespeople or for PR
appearances.
 FINDING THE NARRATIVE 67

●●
Proof points: these are the examples, ‘reasons to believe’, case studies,
stories and people that support your messaging. They demonstrate
what you are doing in real life and can form the basis of some of
your storytelling. You could also categorize according to your client
or customer ‘pain points’, taking as the start of your content
development the issues that are challenging your audience base.

Which stories should your organization create?

It’s all very well saying content must travel through your broader
network and your target micro-networks without friction, that it
must interest people organically – but what does this actually mean?
Ultimately, all content should have value. Sites such as the
D!gitalist,2 created by SAP, offer stories of insight and value that tap
into a range of different topics – from the overarching challenges of
a changing world, to the specific work being done by CIOs and CFOs
(stories such as the ‘25 Most Important Customer Experience
Questions Answered’3). Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Community
hub,4 meanwhile, offers technically led content, as well as tapping
into the wider challenges of the modern IT professional (stories
include titles such as ‘Why DevOps fails!’).

Building awareness with stories of value

Not all content is working for the same results, and stories will need
to deliver different insight and messaging – and encourage different
actions or responses – depending on where in the sales funnel they sit.
Brand journalism is about bringing in, and engaging with, a B2B
audience before targets and audiences have entered the notional sales
funnel and are only just embarking on their customer journey. Your
task is to develop stories that engage audiences by delivering insight
or information that aligns with their values to start conversations and
relationships with target buyers (and the networks of target buyers)
before there is a demonstrated need. By understanding your audience
68 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

and creating broad content that reflects the world around them and
their own concerns and challenges, you will catch their attention, you
will build interest and influence how your brand is viewed. At the
pre-funnel stage your stories will ideally be broad in scope with
limited brand reference, reflecting the world we live in today.

The case for broad content

Don’t be afraid to develop more wide-ranging ‘raincatcher’ content.
Broad and contextual stories reflect the issues, narratives and chal-
lenges of the world we live in, and it’s a world that brands also
operate in. As such, these stories should be created to attract the
attention of our audiences and pull them in.
However, the stories – told in whatever format – must reflect the
values and beliefs of your target audience and must resonate with the
themes and insights they are discussing in their everyday life and
work. As Amy Hatch, former global head of content marketing for
SAP Customer Experience, explains in an interview for this book, it’s
crucial to see your audience as people first, and B2B buyers second:

FIGURE 4.2 Raincatcher content: engaging audiences before the start of the sales
funnel
Establish reputation

Contextual PLANET
content reflects
the world we PURPOSE
live in
PEOPLE

PROCESS
Thematic
and product
content supports PRODUCT
Drive lead generation

coms and
marketing
messaging

The sales funnel

 FINDING THE NARRATIVE 69

The audience is the very foundation of our strategy – that is audience

first, and not even customer. It’s empathy for the reader, empathy
for what they’re going through, understanding their world, and
understanding that there’s constant change that’s vital. The pace of
change in history is more rapid now than ever before, and that affects
everybody from every piece, and every part of their world. The point
is, when people go to work, they’re not suddenly a different person.
They’re still the same person who watches Netflix, who tweets, who
looks at Facebook, who sends an email, and so we approach our
content creation with that hat on. There is no such thing as a B2B
person. You don’t go to work and become a B2B person. I want to be
engaged the same way I am when I’m reading a parenting blog as when
I’m reading about content marketing.

If you understand the context clearly – the world we live in, the chal-
lenges business and individuals face, the existential narrative of our
world and the people in it – you will be better equipped to create
stories that are both relevant and meaningful and that will travel
efficiently through networks.

Finding stories that resonate

Broadly speaking, it is useful to divide contextual content into the
following story groupings:

PLANET The world we live in, what is challenging or informing us. New trends and
issues that influence the world around us, our lives and our work.
PURPOSE Trends in the way we work and run businesses; how companies and
countries are led; the importance of values; the nature of leadership.
PEOPLE Stories of individuals or leaders, evangelists or thought leaders in an
organization. This could be their personal story, or insight, their guidance or
advice on relevant topics.
PROCESS Industry and business stories, information and insight on the broader topics
in the sector of interest for your organization.
PRODUCT Your priority narratives to drive business growth through sales of your
products and services.
70 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Each story grouping has its own relevance for particular pieces of
content, so it’s worth looking at each of them in more detail.

Planet: Researching the conversation ecosystem

Put simply, planet-based content tackles and reflects the broader
conversations that your audiences and customers are having about
the world around them. It’s therefore essential that you and your
writing teams are plugged into the macro insights and trends that are
shaping the broader social context, the wider news agenda and world
events and narratives.
Groundbreaking content is that which creates intelligent stories
that resonate at this level and are predicated on having a clear under-
standing of the context in which your organization is operating. At
this stage you could map a broad cross-section of themes and trends,
rather than those that are directly impacting your work.
The World Economic Forum’s content is a good example of this
type of brand journalism. Stories on its Agenda5 site are broad and
topical. The Forum has consistently tapped into the zeitgeist, the
key discussions, the obsessions, the mythologies and concerns of the
wider populace, and does it by seeking the views of business,
academics and thought leaders. Not only has it told these stories
effectively, it has found new formats and new approaches to deliver
these narratives. World Economic Forum content has been shared
many millions of times and has supported the Forum in driving
huge growth in follower numbers, as well as shifting perception of
the brand. At times it has also had a practical impact on communi-
ties, as World Economic Forum Managing Director Adrian Monck
explained to me:

Stories that work for us are those that leave people with a sense of
optimism and hope about complicated and big topics. Take a subject
like climate change – that’s on everyone’s mind. Can we give people
information that says, ‘There’s something you can do, the situation is
not hopeless’? The most important thing about content is motivating
 FINDING THE NARRATIVE 71

people to act or challenging apathy. For me, finding stories that give
people an example of what can be done, that inspire action, and also
help create connections is crucial.

Purpose: Leading with your values

As we saw in Chapter 1, trust in our established political and societal
leaders has diminished, and individuals are looking for new role
models.
People are turning to leaders of companies to demonstrate how to
‘do the right thing’ in the absence of national governments taking
action on issues they are concerned about. As the Edelman Trust
Barometer6 for 2019 outlined, more than three-quarters of people
surveyed believe company leaders should proactively take the lead on
emerging social and environmental issues rather than waiting for
governments to take action. In addition, 71 per cent of employees
said they believe it’s important for their CEO to respond to current
societal and global challenges – for instance political events, employee-
related issues and industry events.
This creates a huge opportunity for creating authentic, purpose-
based content. It’s an opportunity for brands to stand up for what
they believe in and to proclaim their real, genuine purpose. It’s an
opportunity to reflect brand values, aligning yourselves with the
values of your audience and those you want to influence.
Here’s Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, with his wider view
on what business can do to drive change:

It’s my belief that businesses are the greatest platforms for change and
can have an enormous impact on improving the state of the world. As
business leaders we are in positions of influence, and responsible for
more than just shareholders. We are accountable for the wellbeing of an
extended community of employees, customers and partners, as well as
our fellow beings on this planet we inhabit.7

There are many examples of companies starting to demonstrate and

write about their strongly held beliefs, on society, for instance, or
72 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

other issues where they might have impact, such as technology

companies discussing the impact of automation.

CASE STUDY ARTICLE

Four ways to help close the skills gap in the age of automation: Autodesk 8

With this article, and with others on the Redshift site, Autodesk demonstrates a
commitment to its avowed commitment: ‘At Autodesk, we’re focused on how we
can help both businesses and workers succeed and thrive in the age of
automation.’

CASE STUDY SITE

i-CIO.com: Fujitsu 9

Some organizations choose to align themselves to a particular topic by creating a

space where issues can be discussed, albeit not always authored by their own
senior people. The i-cio.com site created by Fujitsu hosts ‘big thinkers’ on the site
who create or author content that challenges conventional thinking and/or tack-
les some of the issues facing the world today.

Many larger organizations have the size, impact and customer base
that allows them to discuss these types of topics widely, with no nega-
tive impact. That is not the case for all companies and in all countries,
who might not be able to talk openly and freely about, for instance,
representation and equality, due to societal or governmental constraints.
Consider carefully how you and your company approach complex or
controversial topics; align your messaging clearly with that emanating
from your communications and corporate communications teams.

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE

Gay rights failures holding back Asian banking: Bloomberg 10

Hosted on Bloomberg’s own Insights hub, this piece is just one of a range of
articles that tackle inequality in the workplace for LGBTQ workers, the disabled
and other minorities. The site header states: ‘As our global client base becomes
increasingly diverse, our focus on diversity and inclusion helps us stay attuned
to our clients’ rich and varied cultures, norms and business practices.’11
 FINDING THE NARRATIVE 73

People: Demonstrating your human side

Personal viewpoints and testimonies are a powerful way of approach-
ing your content. When done well, they’re authentic, engaging and
informative. The power of one person’s unedited view – especially if
that person holds a senior position at a large organization – is not to
be underestimated.
Broadly speaking, ‘personal’ stories will often be categorized as
thought leadership, which I cover in more detail in Chapter 10.
Thought leaders are innovative, forward thinkers who can create
content so good that it engages broad audiences and is shared widely.
They can theoretically come from any level in your organization, but
authority tends to increase with experience, although not always
seniority.
In terms of the kinds of personal brand journalism content that
these thought leaders should look to share, the most powerful are
those that reflect the concerns or interests of the broad audience you
are trying to build brand awareness with. There are many thought
leaders/influencers in B2B who are also writing on highly technical
topics (both on their own sites, blogs and on other specific sites such
as Reddit or through WhatsApp groups).

CASE STUDY EXAMPLE

Will a smarter social safety net help people survive the Age of Automation?
Autodesk 12

This article is written by the CEO of Autodesk, Andrew Anagnost, who argues that
there is a responsibility for organizations and governments to take action to
support those groups of people who may be negatively impacted by the continued
rise of technology and automation. Dr Anagnost is an authentic CEO who chooses
to speak his mind on multiple topics on the Autodesk content hub, Redshift.

It’s worth noting the personal can also overlap with the product and
the process, or the purpose of the business to cover a wide range of
subject areas, for instance:
74 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

●●
Educating: education and new insights on broader management,
leadership or operational challenges.
●●
Campaigning: responding to the challenges or conundrums facing
the broader industry – the What should we do? or What needs to
happen?
●●
Sharing: insights and inspiration from that person’s experience
and track record – the What do they think? and What would
they do?
●●
Aggregating: grouping other people’s thoughts together, or those
of their team, to shape an argument or point of view.

Process: Researching your business or industry environment

With a clear understanding of the broader environment that frames
the conversations of potential audiences and customers, you can start
to focus on finding specific narratives/stories that are relevant to your
specific industry, business or sector. If you are looking for a starting
point for these stories, consider thinking about story ideas under
these broad headings:

INNOVATION SUCCESS TRENDS CHALLENGES EVENTS

What’s coming What examples What are the trends What is What are you
down the can you discuss that are shaping the keeping your learning from
track? What’s from your future of your sector, customers or the events in
new and organization or industry or audiences your sector?
innovative and beyond that organization? How are awake at night? What are
what might demonstrate you responding and Can you start industry
the future success with a what does that mean to discuss experts
hold? particular for your customers, or these issues or discussing?
challenge? society? concerns?
 FINDING THE NARRATIVE 75

INNOVATION STORY EXAMPLE

The rise of the humble brown box: MHI 13

Taking as its starting point the increasing demand for boxes for online shopping
product delivery, this piece tracks the history of the cardboard box, and new
engineering techniques shaping its development (driven by Mitsubishi Heavy
Industries). Build a story such as this from one simple statistic – in this case the
predicted growth in the brown box industry.

The content hub Redshift has been created by software developers

Autodesk.14 The site content covers how products, buildings and
cities will be built in the future. It’s broad and reads like a magazine.
Head of Content Distribution and Social Media at Autodesk, Luke
Kintigh, explained the approach to this brand journalism site:

At Redshift we basically have a full-blown newsroom inside the

company. We produce content much like a magazine. Our primary
outcome is to build the brand and to shift perception from a brand that
simply produces AutoCAD to a company that provides a wider range of
software to a range of businesses. We’re not a product blog; we focus on
the people and not the product. Part of the strategy is to cover multiple
industries and provide value to our audiences – for instance around
how the way things are changing could be applied to how you design a
shoe or to how you design a skyscraper. We have some amazing people
in the company driving change and getting their perspective and point
of view is at the heart of our strategy. But we also include other sources,
sometimes partners and customers who can tell the full story of, for
instance, how Autodesk is helping with product design, but also what’s
it like to see a project come to fruition.

TRENDS STORY EXAMPLE

Six ways AI improves daily life: SAP 15

On the D!gitalist content hub from SAP, this simple listicle takes as its starting
point the impact that artificial intelligence is having on our daily lives. It’s
straightforward and written for a broad audience in non-technical language. Use
this type of piece as a jumping-off point for more detailed content if required.
76 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

CHALLENGES STORY EXAMPLE

IoT may hold the key to public safety: Dell 16
Housed on the Dell Perspectives blog space, this long article maps the ways in which
the Internet of Things might impact on public safety challenges in the future. Again
written in a journalistic way in non-technical language, it references Dell insight
further down the story but offers broad value and information to the reader.

Product: Your business making a difference

Although a key tenet of brand journalism is not to push products, it
is still possible to develop thoughtful product-related material that
has brand journalism characteristics to ensure it is more popular,
more shared or more engaging.
To do so, you must map out the kinds of questions that your
audience(s) might have when thinking about purchasing your prod-
uct or service and work backwards from there to develop lists of
potential titles and subject areas.

CASE STUDY
How algorithms deliver renewables to the grid: Centrica 17

This article and video content is housed on the Centrica.com website on the
Stories content hub. It is a long-form multi-format piece that includes animating
graphics alongside video, static graphics and text. It digs deeper into the broader
topic of energy trading systems and the impact of technology on the energy
sector, whilst focusing on the work that Centrica is pioneering in the space.

Narrative approaches can often be developed in bulk for this type of

content, and so ideally you would set up formats or approaches that
allow this content to be easily and quickly prepared and uploaded
(see Chapter 6 for more ideas on what formats you should choose).
Examples of this type of content could include:
 FINDING THE NARRATIVE 77

●●
Case study-led problem solving content: using examples of specific
issues or wider problems that have been solved by your product.
Frame your product as the ‘hero’.
●●
Explainers: ‘What is…’ content explains a product approach, a
concept or a business solution, while ‘How to…’ content gives
advice and guidance on common challenges or areas of business
they might be tackling. There’s also ‘What’s the benefit of…’
content that tackles different approaches to various challenges,
while ‘About us…’ content can dip into how the culture of the
business impacts outputs, products and solutions.
●●
Thought leadership: thought starters, overviews and commentary
from key thinkers and managers can touch upon products as
specific solutions for broader problems.
●●
Profiles: who are your people, what do they know, what’s their
experience and what insight do they have about this product or
service? Forecast is a site created and hosted by enterprise software
company Nutanix and promises to explore ideas and technologies
that are shaping our future. Edited by Ken Kaplan, it has an entire
section dedicated to the ‘profiles’ of Nutanix people. These people
have a story to tell that feeds directly back into the work of the
company.

Don’t forget ‘the brand’

How much is too much?
You can follow all the content marketing models you want, but
there’s one question many brand journalists often get stuck on: how
much should they reference the brand?
The hubs and content I am focusing on as brand journalism content
are light on brand mentions and instead focus on adding insight and
encouraging sharing, primarily because they’re interesting stories.
Many of the sites and publications referenced here mention the brand
very little, and are looking to develop brand awareness through tell-
ing stories of value – for instance SAP’s FCEC and Roland Berger’s
78 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Think:Act publication. By sharing the content as insight they hope to

engage a target audience and build engagement at a later date. Other
sites will mention their brand less in the copy, but will have links to
further branded suggested reading.

The benefits of ‘low’ or ‘no’ brand reference

Companies that have a long-term vision to grow a robust and authen-
tic audience for their content might decide not to mention the brand
at all or only mention it tangentially.
By shifting focus away from the brand, marketers and communica-
tors are less tempted to foist their own brand message on to their
audience, ensuring they are more focused on the needs of the buyer.
As marketing thought leader Heidi Taylor writes:

…we need to create content, tell stories and have conversations that
are not about the products or services we sell, but about the big issues
that are really important and personal to our customers. It’s these issues
that bring the human element to what we do, make conversations more
meaningful and build relationships that last, enabling us to engage with
our customers in ways that will linger in their hearts and minds long
after any sales promotion or marketing campaign is over.18

One downside to this strategy is that a longer-term approach can be

challenging to sell to more short-cycle marketing leaders. Here, you
need to make the case that it can take time to develop an audience
(especially if you have limited access to paid amplification), but that
it will pay off in the longer term, particularly when long-tail audi-
ences build from archive content amplification. Also, any content
created can be stretched further as the basis of lead generation and
demand generation activity further down the sales funnel (for
instance, built out to an e-book or gated white paper).
On SAP’s Future of Customer Engagement and Commerce site, the
content hub is branded, but only lightly so. None of the stories on the
site include brand referencing. This was a conscious decision by the
SAP team when the site launched. The brand sits only on the site as a
logo and on the banner, and on the bottom navigation, along with
right-hand navigation links and click-throughs.
 FINDING THE NARRATIVE 79

Whichever path you take for your narrative structure, you will
need a system in place to ensure that you can continue to deliver on
your brand journalism promises. That means making sure that you
have a process to source and deliver content in whatever guise or
format. We will cover production in later chapters, but many organi-
zations find that the toughest challenge is to source engaging stories
from their everyday activities – and this is where thinking like a jour-
nalist can help from the start.

Notes
1 Heath, C and Heath, D (2008) Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and
others die, Random House, pp 15–19
2 D!gitalist Magazine (nd). Available from: https://www.digitalistmag.com/
(archived at https://perma.cc/Y5PE-K3UE)
3 Koch, C (2015) The 25 most important customer experience questions
answered, D!gitalist, 18 February. Available from: https://www.digitalistmag.
com/lob/sales-marketing/2015/02/18/25-important-customer-experience-
questions-answered-02253418 (archived at https://perma.cc/TB37-XVU7 )
4 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Community (nd). Available from: https://
community.hpe.com/ (archived at https://perma.cc/9N6L-RPSF)
5 World Economic Forum (nd). Available from: http://weforum.org/agenda
(archived at https://perma.cc/AZA6-33CD)
6 Edelman (2019) 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer: Expectations for CEOs,
Edelman, 29 April. Available from: https://www.edelman.com/research/
trust-barometer-expectations-for-ceos-2019 (archived at https://perma.cc/
LAX4-U6ZV)
7 Benioff, M (2016) Businesses are the greatest platforms for change, Huffpost,
18 January. Available from: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/businesses-are-
the-greate_b_8993240 (archived at https://perma.cc/4N5P-KDJL)
8 Speicher, J (2019) Four ways to help close the skills gap in the age of
automation, Autodesk, 12 June. Available from: https://adsknews.autodesk.
com/views/four-ways-to-close-the-skills-gap-in-the-age-of-automation
(archived at https://perma.cc/GX5P-7J9V)
9 Ritchie, R (2019) Defining a new ethic for technology, I by Global Intelligence
for the CIO, May. Available from: https://www.i-cio.com/management/insight/
item/a-new-ethic-for-technology (archived at https://perma.cc/J6SH-PAJV)
80 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

10 Gopalan, N (2019) Gay rights failures are holding back Asia banking,
Bloomberg, 6 May. Available from: https://www.bloomberg.com/diversity-
inclusion/blog/gay-rights-failures-holding-back-asia-banking/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/S962-J7C8)
11 Bloomberg (nd) Activating every employee’s potential, Bloomberg. Available
from: https://www.bloomberg.com/diversity-inclusion (archived at https://
perma.cc/2E4E-PCTY)
12 Anagnost, A (2019) Will a smarter social safety net help people survive the age
of automation? Redshift by Autodesk, 12 June. Available from:https://www.
autodesk.com/redshift/age-of-automation/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
K96J-7DU9)
13 Jezard, A (2018) The rise of the humble brown box, Spectra, 15 November.
Available from: https://spectra.mhi.com/the-rise-of-the-humble-brown-box
(archived at https://perma.cc/32VM-T5MJ)
14 Redshift by Autodesk (nd). Available from: https://www.autodesk.com/
redshift/ (archived at https://perma.cc/JAY2-SB28)
15 Gardner, K (2019) Six ways AI improves daily life, D!gitalist Magazine, 18
May. Available from: https://www.digitalistmag.com/improving-lives/
2019/05/28/6-ways-ai-improves-daily-life-06198539 (archived at https://
perma.cc/N24G-YK2X
16 Hynes, C (2019) From college campuses to sports stadiums, IoT may hold the
key to public safety, Dell Technologies, 12 June. Available from: https://www.
delltechnologies.com/en-us/perspectives/from-college-campuses-to-sports-
stadiums-iot-may-hold-the-key-to-public-safety/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
KM46-C92S)
17 Centrica (nd) How algorithms deliver renewables to the grid, Centrica
Platform. Available from: https://www.centrica.com/platform/ai-renewables
(archived at https://perma.cc/68RK-8J95)
18 Taylor, H (2017) B2B Marketing Strategy: Differentiate, develop and deliver
lasting customer engagement, Kogan Page Publishers, p 17
 81

05

Story mining: uncovering your

powerful brand journalism

Even the best stories can’t tell themselves. Committing to creating a

regular flow of content means also committing time and resources to
the vital job of someone (or some mechanism) producing it and
getting it out for public consumption. At first this can feel like a
daunting task: it means creating an efficient process for finding,
producing, and publishing content.
Brand journalism is not about creating PR stories that you can
place in publications (media relations) and nor is it about developing
examples of where you have been successful with client work (case
studies). It is about taking your expertise and knowledge and creat-
ing stories that align your brand with a particular way of thinking by
either delivering a portion of that knowledge, or insight that will help
to develop your audience capabilities.

Story mining is a process that enables you to integrate longevity and

relevance to your content.

Establishing your process

Whilst every company is different, and the content it produces will
clearly be unique to itself, it shouldn’t matter whether you’re planning
a technical white paper, an explainer video, or a social campaign – the
82 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

FIGURE 5.1 The story-mining process

IDEATION PLANNING SIGN-OFF

Editorial team Brainstorm long list Develop titles for

agrees key themes ideas agreed stories, as
Integrate internal Review against aims well as source
messaging and priorities and calendar Create approx.
Source ideas from Map and confirm 100-word abstracts
network ideas, dates and for agreed stories
Schedule ongoing schedule
story workshops Integrate review Sign off and
Develop ideas system for submitted commission stories/
submission system ideas content items
Schedule ongoing
brainstorming

mechanics of creating content are the same. Everything needs to be

aligned to your business on some level, and it must deliver on a specific
aim or purpose.
Story mining involves developing mechanisms and processes to
surface information-rich stories from all parts of the organization or
its network that can be developed into multiple formats within your
content schedule.

Building a flow of stories

Establishing a system is key to maintaining the flow of ideas within
your organization. Longevity is really about sustainability of stories.
For most large companies, finding a few short-term (one-off), inter-
nal stories is relatively easy. What’s more tricky is finding relevant
ideas on an ongoing basis to create a sustained flow of stories.
Establishing a system adhering to certain criteria and processes
will ensure you identify and create stories that align with your busi-
ness ethos and needs, demonstrate your thought leadership skills, and
create a platform to display your credentials and proof points. At its
simplest, good story mining becomes a process for identifying the
right stories from within your organization – those which your target
audiences will find appealing, relatable, and which will help you and
your organization meet its business objectives.
 STORY MINING 83

In Chapter 3 I described some of the tenets of brand journalism,

and in Chapter 4 I discussed how to find the narrative – this chapter
will tackle the challenge of keeping the ideas coming, generating an
atmosphere of creativity and finding those stories in all parts of the
business.

A broad approach to finding narratives

It’s worth reinforcing at this point that you need to agree and share
with others the types of stories you are looking for in the first place.
The Raincatcher model outlined in the previous chapter explains
an approach to creating stories of interest related to your corporate
environment that can be created by your content teams and distrib-
uted across multiple channels. These are briefly summarized here:

Planet Purpose People Process Product

These are the Use stories to give These are the These stories Product stories
issues a true sense of human stories tap into the tell of a
challenging the the values of your you can tell wider business challenge where
planet. You can organization. that reflect environment a product or
put your own Buyers want to how your and themes service is the
corporate prism understand organization within it. They hero. Ensure the
on these what your operates. are broad topics, value or benefit
narratives, organization’s They are the tangentially is upfront and at
delivering a clear position is on the people that aligned to your the top of your
sense of your most challenging make your industry or story, not the
value set. topics of our time. company tick. product. specification.

The wider story environment

Try to understand the types of stories that the wider populace is hear-
ing and sharing. Globally, for instance, a trend towards an increase in
diversity in many countries is broadly welcomed.1 There are other
stories that are challenging traditional belief systems, such as those
that focus on equality, environmental challenges or the impact of
artificial intelligence and computing on the traditional workplace.
84 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Other, world-based issues that suit statistical analysis or trends-

based commentary include our ageing populations, our growing
population, and a migration to urban areas from the countryside. If
we understand the broader context of these discussions and concerns,
we can become more relevant with our storytelling.
The sources you choose will undoubtedly be influenced by the
world view of organizations that are publishing them, but there is a
wealth of material from which to draw. You can turn to publications
such as the World Economic Forum’s Agenda2 website, mentioned
previously, or pull on global publications that you know and trust, or
national and international newspapers.
As well as reading relevant publications and literature, also take
note of the mountains of research and insight, mostly freely available,
that informs these discussions. Remember:
●●
Wider trend stories will give audiences a true sense of your organ-
ization’s thinking and its way of working, enabling them to engage
more completely in a conversation or relationship.
●●
These mega trends will inform broader, evergreen articles that might
touch on wider challenges of running a business or organization.
●●
Global narratives will inform thought leadership and articles that
guide on aspects of leadership, broad management or response to
societal influences.
●●
Evergreen articles created with these themes in mind can be the
broad base on which your company or organization builds its wider
narrative and reputation.

Other sources include academics, research bodies and industry bodies.

All give an insight into the key challenges faced by the world as a
whole, and can inform areas you can move into, or have a view on.

Looking internally for ideas

Narratives that reflect the challenges of your industry and the benefits
of your product can be surfaced using internal evangelists, communi-
cations teams and editorial team members. Other sources that can be
leveraged and managed by your central editorial team include:
 STORY MINING 85

●●
Agency writers and editorial teams. If you are working with an
agency you can challenge them to manage the story-mining process
on your behalf, using their own people and network as well as
regular workshops to surface additional ongoing ideas. Whilst not
always integrated into internal business decisions, an external
team can sometimes ensure a regular flow is maintained.
●●
Communications team members. As those people who own and
drive communications for your organization – and often former
journalists themselves – the PR and communications staff will be a
great source of ideas for your brand journalism and are often at
the heart of the editorial team. Ideally team members can be given
story goals and targets to encourage a sense of creativity and inno-
vation in thinking and production techniques.
●●
Sales and marketing teams. Sales teams are often a wealth of
knowledge about the challenges and questions posed by buyers,
while marketing teams will deliver research, analytics and have
internal research divisions to surface additional information. Seek
out subject matter experts and those people who are the story find-
ers and storytellers to whom you can turn for more information.
●●
Original research or aggregated research by industry bodies, inde-
pendent bodies, think tanks, charities, analysts and corporate bodies
should be integrated into the cycle of research. Often these groups
publish a range of information, reports and data. These might
include bodies such as The Organization for Economic Co-­operation
and Development, The Royal Society, The King’s Fund, manage-
ment consultancies such as PwC, KPMG and Deloitte, as well as
organizations such as the UN, the World Bank and the African
Development Bank. Also don’t ignore philanthropic organizations –
the likes of Chatham House in the UK, or the Milken Institute and
the Aspen Institute in the United States.

Establishing an effective system to mine and surface ongoing stories –

particularly in a larger or dispersed organization – can still be a
challenge, even with a structure or approach in place. Jim Cox, a
former journalist and now VP of Communications at global logistics
organization Agility, champions storytelling, but also understands its
challenges, especially with a B2B audience. He says:
86 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Unearthing great stories can still be hit and miss. Often there are
internal business and political considerations that can stop stories
in their tracks, or thrust them forward even though they might have
limited interest to the audience. Sometimes we find out about great
stories and narratives, but only after they’ve gone stale. We are also
faced – occasionally – with persuading stakeholders that the reward for
sharing information is greater than the risk.

What’s heartening, Cox adds, is that when things are done right, there is
generally an appreciative audience: ‘Human stories tend to resonate well,
as do ‘How-tos’ for smaller businesses trying to get into international
trade or understand emerging markets.’ He adds: ‘Balanced explainers
that simplify something complex and offer a framework for the customer
audience to make informed judgements are also successful.’
Subscribe to as many industry newsletters and content hubs as you
can to find other relevant and informative information. It’s even worth
subscribing to your competitors’ content to ensure you know what
they are saying too, and how you might frame your own messages
differently alongside theirs.

THE BENEFITS OF THE ‘NEWS MEETING’

All daily and weekly newsrooms tend to follow a similar routine or process.
At the start of each editorial day or week, news editors and daily output
editors have a meeting for all members of the team to discuss the ongoing
stories of interest – what’s happened, what’s happening, what’s going to
change during the course of the day etc. This news meeting is the
opportunity to shape the news agenda by suggesting stories that ‘fit’ the
purpose of the newsroom’s output (whether serious, tabloid, global, local).
Stories might have been sourced by the journalists who have uncovered
exclusives through interviews, contacts and news sense, or the news might
be dominated by coverage of scheduled events that have been on the
agenda for some time such as elections, protests or demonstrations. The
most productive news meetings are those where there is lively engagement
and conversation from the team. The same is true of your own internal news
meetings for your story and content development. You need to engender a
sense of purpose in your story generation – ie what type of story will ‘fit’ the
organization or company and reflect the brand’s profile and tone of voice.
 STORY MINING 87

Encouraging a story culture

The most obvious way of driving ongoing content from your organi-
zation is to talk to people, internally and externally. It sounds simple,
but in reality, you will need to apply a process and approach to this
to ensure you deliver regularly and to your schedule.
Ken Kaplan was executive editor at Intel’s iQ, which was launched
in 2012 as a tech culture news and social media site. At its height, iQ
attracted over 3 million page views a month.3 In 2018, Kaplan
became Editor in Chief of the Forecast, a business and technology
news site by enterprise software company Nutanix. The branded site
features original articles, videos and audio podcast segments about
the people and tech trends driving digital transformation. Interviewed
for this book, he explained how he approached story development
for the iQ site:

When I started directing the editorial side at iQ, I wanted to create

original journalistic content. We went out and talked to people then
wrote stories or produced videos relevant to anyone interested in
technology; that’s been the vibe I’ve gone after for a long time, which is a
journalistic approach to storytelling, driven by great interviews. I want to
pull more humanity and emotional aspects from people working on the
cutting edge of technology. The technical challenges they overcame and
the technology they used are definitely part of the story, but I also want
to know what it’s like, after two weeks of hitting their head on the wall
about a problem, what clicked? How did it feel when all of a sudden
everything made sense? When you have really good stories they ladder
up to a living brand story that the company is always refining, honing
and adjusting. That brand story is really made up of many anecdotal
pieces that can be crystallized into an impactful brand message.

By demonstrating success with published stories and content being

shared widely, you will start to build a ‘story culture’ – but how else do
you encourage a story creation rhythm within the wider organization?

REWARD: ESTABLISH QUOTAS AND KPIs

Try encouraging your communications teams and business units to
come up with a minimum number of ideas per week/month. Teams
88 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

can be split up either by geography, verticals, industries or client

groups depending on your story requirements. Where possible,
reward innovation and consistency of thinking. This should help to
boost the number of ideas coming through.

DEMONSTRATE: PROMOTE SUCCESS

Success breeds success. Try developing and promoting stories that
have proved to be successful on your internal platforms. If you can
demonstrate success, others in your organization will want to emulate
this by promoting stories of their own. Coach writers about how to
develop stories and you’ll find more will start to deliver ideas.

EDUCATE: SHARE INSIGHT

Develop a toolkit for how disparate teams can source and share
stories. This toolkit could comprise a story pro forma or list the key
questions that individuals should ask within their own areas or divi-
sions to elicit ideas and suggestions. Use your editorial board or
communications teams to share and disperse the toolkit as well as
centralized, and local, examples of best practice.

GIVE RECOGNITION: PUBLISH AND PROMOTE

It’s vital your internal audience stays engaged in the practice of story
mining. Without it there is danger of a loss of momentum. Colleagues
and partner networks need to understand why they should get on
board with your efforts. So you might also want to consider formal
or informal recognition, or using internal communications to publicly
thank those individuals who have either delivered, or come up with,
strong ideas that have made it through to publication.

Developing a structure to deliver ongoing ideas

It’s also worth remembering that how you build your team for
successful ongoing delivery will also depend on your size and struc-
ture as an organization. Here are some of the approaches you could
take to ensure your story-mining system continues to deliver ongoing
‘gold’ to your output.
 STORY MINING 89

TABLE 5.1 Four different approaches to story mining

Devolved hub-and- ●●
Develop templates and questions to drive story sourcing.
spoke model ●●
Find evangelists in each business unit, sector or region.
●●
Develop a sample story with an outline of what makes it great.
●●
Suggest questions that evangelists can ask to source ideas and
stories.
●●
Create a template to share with co-workers in the field; this
might even be developed as a ‘toolkit’ that explains what a
good story looks like and what you require each story to
contain.

Centralized model ●●
One centralized communications/marketing team or staff
member establishes all aspects of the content commissioning
and production process, including communication objectives,
calendar and required pattern and flow of story upload.
●●
The centralized team undertakes its own story-mining sessions
or interviews to develop content. Content might reflect local
markets through interviews or desk research. Generic stories
can have localized sections dropped in by regional business
units, offices or operations.
●●
Ideas are uploaded to a centralized document or online hub
for consideration and sign-off.
●●
Interviews or source information are sought from local
representatives and stories are created centrally or
outsourced.
●●
One global management consultancy has no formal story
surfacing structure or process; instead, each relevant division of
the organization (eg energy, digital, financial services) is
expected to surface and deliver its own ideas which are then
reviewed and written by a central team of journalists.

Collaborative model ●●
Establish a rhythm for face-to-face or remote group story
ideation sessions. It could be six-monthly, quarterly, monthly,
weekly, or (in some instances) daily, depending on corporate
pressures, timelines and volumes of material required.
●●
Facilitate face-to-face sessions using structured process for
story generation. Sessions are led by communications or
marketing team representatives.

(continued)
90 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

TABLE 5.1 (Continued)

Outsourced model ●●
Recruit an agency to develop story ideas, manage the process
of story sourcing and mining with divisions and geographies.
●●
Engage in a chemistry meeting to download business drivers
and imperatives, communications messages and marketing
campaign plans, as well as PR priorities.
●●
Task the agency to review the industry area, or interview key
leaders, or meet with the communications and marketing teams
to solicit a number of ideas for articles.
●●
Review article ideas and sign off those that fit with the business
requirements; commission, review and upload as required.

Building a range of story types

I will cover how to structure your stories, articles and videos later in
the book, but there are some simple approaches you can take to
pinpointing stories that can help in your sourcing process.

The internal interview-led story

As mentioned previously, as any good journalist knows, stories come
from people – so an obvious way to find stories is to talk to as many
people as you can within your organization in different areas to
uncover their stories, insights or resources that you can pull on to
develop your brand journalism. Work through each business area to
engage team members and investigate potential stories; arrange group
meetings to surface insights, and mine out archive reports, blogs and
interviews for ideas and inspiration.

NEWSROOM TIP
Building a network

A great journalist has an extensive and varied contacts list and is always
talking to people to find out what is exciting and challenging them.
Encourage your own team members – or challenge yourself – to think like a
journalist and create your own network of story-mining contacts inside your
organization.
 STORY MINING 91

The from-the-workplace story

If you have project work taking place in the field or on location, this
is where a number of potential stories could – and should – come
from. Whether you’re drilling for gas, setting up clean water projects,
or installing renewable energy production facilities or building a
technology infrastructure, you need to go looking for story material
here. You can do this remotely, with phone calls to team members,
but the ideal is a trip to meet those involved and capture powerful
images of what is taking place. If you can organize a foray for a
brand journalism production team (potentially a writer with a smart-
phone camera kit, or a camera operator or photographer) into your
project or production sites, they will come back armed with high-
quality stories and ideas that can keep your content flowing for some
time. This might be a substantial investment but will continue to add
value for many months or give content that can support your wider
marketing or communications campaign.

The event-driven story

If you have a key event, gear your content towards it, including writ-
ing pre-event publicity to success stories from previous years. Drive
registrations, then on the day(s) ramp up the volume of content by
deploying your own news desk. Create videos, live blogs, live stream-
ing opportunities and more to feed your social accounts and push the
level of engagement out beyond just the physical attendees. Largescale
internal events and conferences, as well as partner events, can be a
rich source of ongoing annual material as multiple stakeholders are
on one site during a short period of time.

The research-led story

Data and evidence can be a great source of story material – especially
if you have a team analysing the sector, or an analyst watching
competitors or trends. Working them up into potential stories and
seeing where they fit with your business needs is the next logical step.
92 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

The expert-led story

If you have a team of highly experienced operators, senior managers
or technical staff, you can work closely with them to deliver consist-
ent stories. Often those who are involved in the minutiae of the
everyday overlook some of the best stories around as they seem
mundane or unexciting to them. Sometimes the key is to start a
conversation that enables them to recognize how different or innova-
tive or interesting a piece of work that they do is. From here, you can
pinpoint interviewees through your organizational network. You can
also ask managers, local managers and regional representatives to
suggest individuals who may be interesting to talk to.

QUESTIONS TO UNCOVER STORIES INCLUDE:

●●
What are you working on that’s new, different or challenging?
●●
What are your clients, networks and contacts being challenged by at the
moment?
●●
What’s surprised you in your work or environment over recent months?
●●
What innovative solutions to problems have you and your team been
working on?

The online- and desk-researched story

Good journalists are always plugged into the world around them.
They know what’s going on and who’s doing what in their ‘beat’ or
areas of interest. They build a network and engage with contacts to
find stories. While you might not be in such a position to do this, you
can benefit from many of the discussions taking place online about
specific industries. Websites such as question and answer site Quora
can give you a sense of what some experts are discussing, as can
trawling Reddit for the latest comments and news. Twitter is a great
source of news and updates. Tools such as BuzzSumo and SEMrush
can also tell you instantly what stories are popular and trending.
Know this and you can identify ways to build on what’s already been
written; you can know what stories will gain traction, and you can
focus attention to build a niche.
 STORY MINING 93

Sense-checking with an editorial board

It’s entirely likely there’s a wealth of great stories ready and waiting
to be surfaced in your company, but they remain hidden because they
sit in remote divisions or departments within the business or because
these sub-units are traditionally not used to engaging with PR,
communications and marketing teams.
The challenge is to first recognize that these stories are likely to
exist, and then that they need to be surfaced. If you don’t have one
person, such as an Editor in Chief, to support a push for content, or
if your team is disparate and geographically dispersed, then there is a
very good case for establishing what’s known as an Editorial Board.
Comprising area experts with their fingers more closely on the
pulse, magazines often have them to ensure they’re covering what
audiences expect, or might be new to them. A storytelling board could
well comprise divisional communications heads, as well as represent-
atives from different geographies, or those from various different
silos or networks.
Having a board allows you to pull in people who will have the
guidance and insight on story development and story sourcing that
you need. It doesn’t have to meet all the time, or feature everyone on
it every time. It can meet weekly, monthly or quarterly to drive and
surface great stories. The key is that the board can help define the
archetype of the ‘perfect’ story for your organization, while you can
support the hub-and-spoke model of story mining by taking templates
and story guides and pushing them down to those staff who are
working directly with customers, clients or audiences.
An editorial board also can act as a dispersed or fragmented ‘news-
room’. It’s possible to run editorial board meetings in the same way
journalists run their daily or weekly editorial meetings in order to
surface great stories.

Know your rivals

Whatever the model you use to develop your story structure, rhythm
and narrative, you must also understand what your competitors are
94 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

saying or publishing as part of their content marketing mix. Your

approach to understanding your rivals could examine the following
areas.

Understand the conversations your competitors are having

To stand out within the broader narrative and across the entire indus-
try, ideally you need to find a different line or perspective on your
content – a ‘clear white space’ for your stories. It might be that you
find a novel format or unique approach (a distinct podcast series, for
instance), or find a specific take on a developing area that will set you
apart. For instance, technology firms are jostling for a point of differ-
ence in the area of 5G.

Create your own qualitative analysis

Map and assess a range of aspects of competitor content in order to
build a comprehensive gap analysis and comparison table. First,
review their storytelling on the blog pages, or any content ‘hub’
spaces of their websites. Follow this up with a review of all their vari-
ous platform content – including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter – as
well as other visual and video channels if they are present on those.

Develop a competitor audit

Target a handful of your key competitors (your core competitors at
this stage) and create a breakdown of what they are publishing and
which digital channels they are using. Use social listening and analy-
sis tools to understand what conversations are being had across social
media by your competitors. You can use tools such as Onalytica,
Pulsar or Meltwater to understand the focus of successful content
and conversations.
Take the time to develop a qualitative assessment of the following
aspects of your competitors’ activity. This audit can also be used as
the template for an analysis of your own existing content if you feel
that this is required.
 STORY MINING 95

TABLE 5.2 The content audit process

Content audit
For internal use, or for competitor assessment
Volumes The number of posts, pieces of content and social posts in total across
recent weeks, months.
Cadence An overview of the publishing rhythm and regularity of content being
uploaded.
Depth and An understanding of the level of detail and analysis or research that has
detail been undertaken to create the content.
Quality The quality of the content in terms of delivery of meaningful information,
as well as the usual spelling, grammar etc.

Content themes
Stories An analysis of the range of the stories they are telling; this could be based
on geography, range, or case study. Also, the format or approach to
storytelling is useful to know.
Value to The level of value and information being delivered – create overview of
audience what type of insight it is delivering.
Themes An overview of the themes or topics that are being covered and which of
these takes priority; plus a description of any particular angle they are
taking on these topics.
Theme or If you are looking at segmenting your content into specific genres or
subject subject areas, then log the number of articles across those specific subjects
priority within the site – where can you find a point of difference?
Thought Analyse who stands out and why; who are the key names, speakers or
leadership spokespeople and make a note of the topics they are uncovering or discussing.
Style and format
Tone This analysis will allow you to see if the tone is warm and engaging or more
formal; authenticity and human references also make a difference in terms
of the emotional engagement content will deliver.
Writers Do they name their writers and give them bylines? Are they ‘staff writers’ or
do you think they have outsourced content to an agency? Are they building
a personality around their key people and evangelists? Are they using
influencers to write or to share content?

Length and Review the word length of blogs, articles and posts. Is the written content
style styled as listicles, or as short-form blogs with video or strong on imagery?
What are they creating to catch the attention of the reader and audience?

(continued)
96 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

TABLE 5.2 (Continued)

Readability Map and list the look and feel of the blogs or articles that have been
created – for instance, are they simple text, or text with sub-headings and
pull quotes, or lists? This will give you a sense of the ease of readability of
the content.
Formats Analyse the types of content that each company has created. These will
include videos, graphics, infographics, listicles and buzz blogs (short-form
blogs with charts and/or images and limited text).
Imagery How are they using stock imagery, graphics and original illustrations? Is
stock imagery dull and dry or stylish and engaging? This will impact
shareability across social media.

Distribution
Success Are they getting traction with their content? If yes, what kind of results can
you see in terms of shares, comments and engagement? Note the key
metrics such as followers and fans on social channels, as well as shares on
web or hub content.
Amplification How is the content being shared across social media? Which sites are they
using and how? What’s the regularity of content uploaded, and what does it
look like? What kind of traction is being achieved?
Calls to What are the ads, calls to action and supporting links that surround the
action content? If there is no brand mention, how are they building engagement
or amplification for the brand?

By analysing what the competition is doing, and on what platforms

and in what styles, you’ll soon get a sense of where the opportuni-
ties are for a ‘new’ or ‘different’ voice. Not only will this analysis
ensure your own content has a point of difference and plays a differ-
ent role for the end user or audience, but it gives you an opportunity
to map themes and discussions to better understand the story
ecosystem. By understanding your editorial ecosystem you’ll find
areas that are not being tackled that you can own and inhabit. Next
comes the challenge of deciding on which formats will work best for
both you and your resources and team and, more importantly, for
your audiences.
 STORY MINING 97

Notes
1 Fetterolf, J, Poushter, J and Tamir, C (2019) A changing world: global views on
diversity, gender equality, family life and the importance of religion, Pew Research
Center, 22 April. Available from https://www.pewglobal.org/2019/04/22/a-
changing-world-global-views-on-diversity-gender-equality-family-life-and-the-
importance-of-religion/ (archived at https://perma.cc/TR7G-3MFU)
2 World Economic Forum (nd). Available from: http://weforum.org/agenda
(archived at https://perma.cc/7MJD-CDFA)
3 Papandrea, D (2016) An Inside Look at Intel iQ’s Global Content Marketing
Strategy, NewsCred Insights, 14 December. Available from https://insights.
newscred.com/intel-iq-global-content-marketing-strategy/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/5JGM-38ZL)
98

THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

 99

06

Choosing your format: audience

needs and the power of text

Planning your approach

Engaging journalism, whether daily or feature-based, comes in multi-
ple online and offline formats and from a range of different publishers
and platforms. From video packages and soundbites, to live stories
and audio storytelling, as well as good old-fashioned text, there is a
dizzying range of ways to capture people’s attention. Brand journal-
ists too should take inspiration from, and advantage of, this increasing
and accessible range of approaches to telling corporate stories.
There is a fast-increasing spectrum of available techniques and
approaches to content creation – and many of them are getting
cheaper and easier to deliver.
From video packages, soundbites, GIFs, animated graphics and
so-called flat graphics to live stories and live coverage on social chan-
nels – there is no reason not to expand your content approaches.
New means of storytelling are revolutionizing both journalism and
B2B brand journalism alike; given that the typical B2B buyer will
consume, read or digest at least three pieces of content before talking
to a sales representative1 (some reports even say it’s more), then you
will need to consider a variety of formats, depending on what
outcomes you have in mind.
100 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

TEST AND LEARN

Always test what works with audiences – success and engagement might
change from one day, week or one quarter to the next. If one particular
format works best or is more popular then use it more and continue to
measure responses. Reduce the volumes of the content that does not work.
Text might be the foundation for the bulk of your stories and brand
journalism initially, but experiment with low-risk approaches to other
formats and analyse and respond to the results.

Research audience preferences

While there’s no ‘perfect’ format for a piece of content, there is the
‘right’ format for the nature and drivers of your audience. And the
key to enable you to prioritize which channels are likely to bring
most success is solid research around your core audiences – where are

FIGURE 6.1 Formats for use in B2B brand journalism: text

• Insight articles • Short-form text and

• Listicles image video
• Buzz articles • Interview videos
• Live coverage
• Thought leadership
• Q&A /round table
• Longer-form
article
• Live blog Text Video

Format
mix

• Infographics Image • Podcast

Audio
• Graphics, • Webinar
charts and
statistics
• Interactive
graphics
 AUDIENCE NEEDS AND THE POWER OF TEXT 101

they digesting content? How long do they engage for? Do they share
a particular type of format?
For younger demographics within the B2B buying journey (those
who have grown up as digital natives), social media will often repre-
sent a publication or broadcast channel, rather than just an
amplification channel. As research from Hubspot recently revealed:
‘Younger consumers consistently show the greatest preference for
social, and they treat it as a valid research channel.’ As such, it adds:
‘The age of your customer should play a major role in how you shape
your content strategy.’ It also finds that millennials engage more with
video and image-based content, whilst older audiences still relate to
content delivered via email. 2
As you undertake your research, also analyse who the people are
that your audiences are inspired or influenced by. According to the
Demand Gen Report 2019,3 some 95 per cent of those surveyed
prefer credible content from industry influencers. Use a tool such as
BuzzSumo or Sprout Social to augment your research and refine your
understanding of people’s preferences in terms of publishing format.
Those preferences are likely to change over time as habits change and
new platforms emerge. As I write this book we are seeing a resur-
gence in podcasting, a continuing commitment to blogs and copy,
while webinars for mid-funnel communications and visual content
are still popular.

Assess content according to position in the sales journey

One of the most important considerations to remember when match-
ing format to channel is being aware of where audiences might be in
their sales journey.
The brand journalism stories I have outlined in this book are
created in the first instance to build brand awareness and grow a
loyal audience to your publication or output. With this in mind, at
the top of the sales funnel and before we even enter the sales funnel,
we need to remember that we are trying to attract attention to our
content and gain interest in the stories our brand is telling.
102 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

At these early stages of consideration, almost three-quarters of

B2B buyers like to read blog posts and articles, with videos, e-books
and podcasts also popular (according to the Content Marketing
Institute4). In the middle stages of the funnel, white papers are most
popular and – perhaps unsurprisingly – in the late stages, in the eval-
uation and purchase stage, it’s case studies that take centre stage in
terms of content needs.
The value of researching audience needs cannot be underestimated.
For instance, in its content preferences survey report, 93 per cent of
those interviewed by Demand Gen5 said they wanted shorter formats
in the first instance because they are increasingly time-poor and want
to digest multiple pieces of content before approaching vendors or
making buying decisions. The same survey also noted that content
needs to be shared in a way that is ‘easily digestible’. Content shared
by colleagues and peers is, according to this research, the most trusted.

MATCH FORMATS TO DEVICES USED

●●
Research from the United States suggests more people consume content
on their smartphone than on laptop devices, but the time spent on laptop
devices content is longer than with content consumed on mobile. In
addition, it finds the number of pages viewed per site visit is
substantially higher on desktops than on mobile.6
●●
Research now confirms what we might have already guessed – that
younger audiences use their mobiles more, whilst older demographics
mainly consume content on their laptop.7
●●
Data finds time spent on websites accessed through desktop computers
is substantially higher than time spent on sites from mobile devices.8
●●
While mobile devices are more popular, B2B conversion rates and
engagement rates are higher from desktops than mobiles.

How to start writing great content

Research having been done, the content creation can begin and, for
many brand journalists, your content will be (initially at least) about
putting together enthralling copy. Since newspapers were first
 AUDIENCE NEEDS AND THE POWER OF TEXT 103

invented in the 1600s, the written word has been a consistently

powerful medium that delivers complex and simple messages to audi-
ences across multiple platforms.
With video and image-based media growing in popularity every
year, especially with younger audiences, that is changing rapidly, and
you should develop parallel content that fulfils the increasing drive of
image and video for attracting audiences online. I will cover the
development of image-based media and audio in the next chapter,
but let’s first turn our attention to text. For the moment at least,
words still have impact.

Know your text ‘types’

Not all text is equal, and some variations of presentation work better
than others at different stages of the buyer journey, and on different
platforms. Below is a guide to the types of some of the text-based
content you can use. All of the types listed below build on some of the
best-known approaches to story structure and/or story development
that any junior reporter might learn in the first stages of his or her
career. Any of them can easily comprise the bedrock of your awareness
and interest-building content but some are more complicated to organ-
ize, expensive to deliver or more challenging to develop than others.

Choosing the right approach

Insight articles
If you choose to ‘keep it simple’ with a third-party insight article, writ-
ten with a byline either by an internal team member, by an outsourced
agency team or by a freelance writer, choose a story structure that
works well for the type of information you are delivering. The way
your articles are structured has a massive bearing on your content’s
readability and ability to create audience trust. There are several tech-
niques you can use, however, to ensure your stories have resonance
and impact with your readers. Scripts for accompanying videos can be
lifted or re-versioned from any of these types of text article.
 104
TABLE 6.1 Text format overview

Name Detail Impact vs. effort Benefits

Insight articles These are standard-length written Simple, cost-effective and low barriers to entry Build brand awareness at the top of
articles often 600–800 words in length Focus on quality rather than just volume the funnel and continue to nurture an
with two or three sub-headers audience further down
They can stretch to over 1,000 words
Listicles Another narrative approach for a long or The single focus listicle is a useful tool if you Build brand awareness at the top of
short-form article, this is a considered are looking to pique interest with a round-up the funnel and continue to nurture an
list of grouped content or insight The ‘listicle’ technique – a short article based audience further down
on a list – is simple to execute
Buzz articles These are short, sharp single-focus Buzz articles feed the need for short, sharp Buzz pieces grab your audience’s
articles, based on a piece of research, information delivered in a mixture of text attention and help build brand
report, chart or statistic that is then and imagery awareness
fleshed out with additional desk Buzz pieces can cover a lot of ground in a
research short space of time
Thought leadership First-person experience-based narrative Thought leadership can have high impact but First-person storytelling can build
For more information or viewpoint the challenge is persuading senior leaders to affinity with your audience, and also
see Chapter 10 on set aside time to develop the content reassures and informs
Thought Leadership Thought leaders might not have natural
writing or narrative creating abilities and may
need external support
Q&A A simple and time-effective way to The Q&A is a straightforward approach which Build affinity with your audience,
create content from a one- or is time-efficient reassure and inform
two-person interview. Answers can Quality of insight will depend on the quality
often be extended to create reports or of the interviewee and the preparation that
white papers has been put into staging the event
Round table Often these sit in the format of Q&A but An extended Q&A bringing in additional Build awareness with your audience,
report/Q&A they can also be developed into a full speakers is sometimes called a round table reassure and inform
report and delivers the benefit of a selection of
views or opinions on a particular topic
The round table can allow your brand to
position itself as a thought leader or an
organization with a view on an issue, by
leveraging the viewpoints of others
As well as brand journalism pieces, ideally
you would produce a long-form piece of
content from this that can be used further
down the funnel
Long-form articles These are deep and well-researched, Time and energy should be invested to get Continue to build an enduring trust
building on value for the audience. this format right relationship with your audiences
Their focus is on giving or aggregating Longer pieces will deliver substantial benefits
information to a target audience in terms of dwell time, SEO results and
reputation building
Mid- and bottom-of-funnel content
White papers, These formats offer research-based More effort and investment is required to Move your audience further into the
research-driven insight (original or desk-research), produce these mid-funnel content products sales funnel – most often this is more
articles and e-books structured as a longer narrative Paid, targeted engagement campaigns (and technical, product-led content
White papers and e-books will include ABM) can be built around these outputs
sub-sections or chapters to divide Insight and deep dive research are of value to
narrative and theme a technical or niche audience group in B2B

105
106 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

The inverted pyramid approach

The simplest story construction approach is to follow the inverted
pyramid – putting all the facts in descending level of importance so
that all the crucial why, who, what, where and when questions are
answered first.
This is the technique many journalists learn in their first few weeks
on the job, and it is particularly suited to a simple narrative. It wins on
its immediacy and ‘scannability’. Many readers want information
quickly and in bite-sized or snackable ‘chunks’, so you need to ensure
they are pulled into the stories you create. All the vital information goes
up first, while additional insight or facts follow as the story progresses
‘down the pyramid’. Map the challenge, problem or issue in the first few
paragraphs and add the detail as you move through the story. The
further down readers go, the less ‘newsworthy’ the content becomes.
Clever techniques to keep readers’ interest might include using an
analogy at the top of the story to grab people’s attention, or including a
human interest reference or case study to make it more easily relatable.

The hero and villain approach

Another narrative approach that works particularly well for B2B
stories is the classic hero and villain framework – the good against
evil that makes stories eminently more readable.
Typically, a hero-villain story introduces the plight of characters
that readers want to invest time and emotion in. They generally
involve a ‘hero’ character, who embarks on a metaphorical ‘journey’
and is challenged by a crisis. The hero responds to that crisis, over-
comes the challenge, and is changed as a result. This type of story
structure creates empathy and a desire to read on and know what
happens next. Often the story features unexpected juxtapositions or
additional challenges layered onto the journey.9
Neuroeconomist Paul Zak’s research indicates our brains produce
the stress hormone cortisol during tense moments in a story, which
allows us to focus, while anything with a ‘cute’ factor releases oxytocin,
the feel-good chemical that promotes connection and empathy. Other
neurological research tells us that a happy ending to a story triggers the
 AUDIENCE NEEDS AND THE POWER OF TEXT 107

limbic system, our brain’s reward centre, to release dopamine, which

makes us feel more hopeful and optimistic. Zak’s research demon-
strates that character-driven stories with emotional content result in a
better understanding of the key points that a person (or brand) wants
to get across, and that people are inherently more interested in the
transcendent purpose of a product (how it will improve lives) rather
than its transactional purpose (how it sells goods and services).10
The lesson, therefore, is to use real-life examples where you can to
demonstrate how your brand has resolved the challenges presented
to clients or the world at large with knowledge or expertise.

CASE STUDY
Saving the endangered one-horned rhino, one drone at a time, TCS 11

Tata Consultancy Services’ #DigitalEmpowers website hosts a good example of

the hero and villain storytelling technique. The article tells how drones are being
used by wardens in India’s Kaziranga National Park in their ongoing cat-and-
mouse game to tackle poaching of endangered rhinos. There is only one
reference to the work of Tata Consultancy Services in the whole piece, but the
message of the story is clear – technology is now saving the lives of animals and
researchers. A shortened text and stock image video version of the article sits on
the page and was shared on social media platforms after publication.

The resolution/drama approach

This is similar to the hero/villain approach, but is more about a
protagonist (potentially supported by a brand) facing a particular
challenge. Typically, the way this is structured is that the protagonist
comes up with a solution that is practical, and deals with an issue of
some level of adversity to a level of completion where it is resolved.

CASE STUDY
The power plant next door: Centrica 12

This story is hosted on the content hub section (named Stories) of Centrica.com’s
main website. Instead of jumping in with a straightforward outline of the facts,
the piece is ‘humanized’ and brought to life with reference to one of the
homeowners taking part in the scheme:
108 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Suzanne Schutte is a supermarket worker – and an energy pioneer. The

mother of two from Wadebridge, Cornwall is the first householder to have
solar panels and cutting-edge battery technology installed as part of a £19
million trial that aims to help unlock further renewable energy use across her
part of Southwest England.
It’s a simple way to bring the story to life, before delving into the corporate detail.

CASE STUDY
The African country pioneering digital fishing: TCS 13

This story, also on the #DigitalEmpowers site, frames the challenge of women
fishing for their livelihoods in Senegal. The opening of the story emphasizes the
challenge and introduces the resolution, before moving on to give more
information and context:
Not far from the stunning white beaches and azure waters that fringe the
Senegalese town of Mbour, Anta Diouf and a thousand other women like her
work in the baking heat to gut and dry fish for sale at market. It’s dirty work
and the hours are long, but all the effort is paying off. […] The key to Anta’s
increased income? Her smartphone.

The ‘What if?’ approach

Much as its name suggests, this is a very simple but effective tech-
nique. The future-gazing story will pose a challenge and posit a
response from a brand. Ideally you would add a human element to
demonstrate the practical application of your work or insight. This
helps the audience empathize and draws in the reader.

CASE STUDY
How close are we to flying in air taxis? Honeywell 14

On the website of international US conglomerate Honeywell you will find the story
of the future of Urban Air Mobility. Framed also as a ‘personal story’ of one man’s
commute in rush hour in Georgia, United States, it paints a picture of the future
and the steps that will need to take place to take us there in terms of technology,
infrastructure and regulation. It’s a simple, effective and powerful way to take a
small amount of information, research or insight and build it into a story.
 AUDIENCE NEEDS AND THE POWER OF TEXT 109

I would also include ‘debunking a theory or commonly held view’ in

this particular group. An example of this type of story might include
‘Why home DNA kits might not be as private as you think’15 (World
Economic Forum).

CASE STUDY
How robots will change the world: MHI 16

This piece is published on the MHI Spectra website and takes as its starting
point the current disquiet around future robot development. A strong premise
on which to build content for technology, innovation and industrial clients,
the utopia/dystopia argument is a powerful one and enables brands to talk
about how their own technology can bring a positive influence to bear in
future scenarios.

The ‘How to?’ approach

Taking a common challenge as a jumping-off point for story devel-
opment is another straightforward storytelling technique that is
simple for those starting out on writing. Often you can take a single
interview, or range of interviews, to create this content, and build
on one single topic area. If you choose an evergreen topic with
broad interest for your audience you will ensure that these articles
deliver ongoing benefits as they are repeatedly surfaced from your
archive, or shared in a regular ongoing pattern on your social media
platforms.

The listicle
A listicle is a text or video format that delivers a list of aggregated
data, facts or advice. These ‘expanded lists’ are a great source of cred-
ible and legitimate information and are wonderfully simple for
readers or viewers to follow or navigate. They are straightforward to
deliver because there is limited need for any complex narrative. Any
sign-posting is also very simple.
110 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

CASE STUDY
Nine things that will kill your career: WEF 17

Posted on the World Economic Forum’s Agenda site, this article is written by
author and academic Dr Travis Bradberry. Supported by relevant and up-to-date
statistics to contextualize the premise, the piece outlines the activities that
might hold you back in your career, in a simple list order. These types of lists are
appealing to audiences (there’s a big appetite for career and leadership content
online at present) and relatively straightforward to create.

CASE STUDY
These three forces are shaping the future of global energy: MHI 18

This piece appears on Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ Spectra magazine hub. It is

technical, but accessible in written style, and taps into a wide and growing interest
in the challenges of future energy. The structure is a simple list, but the content is
insightful and intelligently written.

Whilst they are comparatively easy to build (often from various

different sources gathered by a writer or researcher), attention to
detail is key, so ensure the quality of your research is solid. Think of
listicles that have not been produced elsewhere, or a twist you can
take on a conventional approach.

The best listicles are considered, clever and new, whilst the worst are
repeats of poor-quality content or contain click-bait material that is already
rife across the internet.

Listicles can range from how to live life more efficiently, how to live
more healthily, to how companies can benefit from the digital revolu-
tion.19 They can be original thought (as outlined above with Travis
Bradberry’s article for the World Economic Forum’s Agenda site) or
they can be curated output pulling together other people’s thinking,
writing or innovation.
 AUDIENCE NEEDS AND THE POWER OF TEXT 111

CASE STUDY
5 coolest things on earth: GE 20

On GE Reports, the well-established and successful online magazine hub for GE,
the listicle is a well-established weekly format. The ‘5 Coolest things on earth
this week’ format is a regular, accessible opportunity to pull together curated
stories from around the web about innovation, science and technology. This
curation approach saves time for audiences by delivering high-quality, relevant
stories only from credible sources.

Research by Backlinko21 suggests that list blogs, along with ‘why?’

and ‘what?’ posts get more average social shares than other formats,
as do longer headlines, in fact. Many corporates and B2B organizations
are already using listicles within their blog sites. UK insurance
company Hiscox, for example, has published a ‘How to start a
photography business: 9 steps to success’ list, whilst collaboration
tool Slack posted on their Slack HQ site22 its ‘Five employee retention
strategies every company should implement’.

The buzz article

Buzz articles are short, sharp (often image-based) pieces of content
you might be familiar with from news sites such as Axios, Politico, or
Buzzfeed.
There is often a limited, but focused, amount of information
contained in them – sometimes just crucial facts. Axios (which offers
a mixture of original and narrated coverage of politics, tech, business
and the media), has developed an approach it calls ‘Smart Brevity’.
The articles that readers first see on the site stretch to a maximum of
300 words. Axios then offers a shorter summary (or top line with an
image underneath), with the ability to ‘go deeper’ with one click to
access more information.
Axios’s approach was developed in response to changing audience
habits it noticed before launch,23 namely that audiences bounce
quickly, with two-thirds typically leaving a publisher’s website before
reading anything. It also found audiences often shared without ­reading
112 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

(59 per cent shared content without reading it fully). This research
added to existing data that found readers were increasingly moving
away from reading newspapers, and spending more time on social
media sites.24

CASE STUDY
World Economic Forum/chart of the day: these are the world’s most
innovative economies 25

Here’s an example of how you can take a set of statistics or a selection of

relevant charts to build a story. The short piece takes as its starting point a
Global Innovation Index report produced by a group of organizations and
universities. The headline teases the answer and encourages the reader to dip
into the piece – lists of countries and rankings often perform well on the World
Economic Forum’s social media channels.

Buzz articles are a great length and type of content for B2B brand
journalism. If done well these stories travel well across social media
(using your chart or well-written headline as your pull), and they are
quick and easy for audiences to engage with. They can give readers
swift insights that – we hope – move them through the site and further
into the sales funnel/journey.

The Q&A
A question and answer format can deliver swift and meaningful
content results – especially if the questions are carefully planned and
well thought through. If your interviewee or subject matter expert is
informed and clear, the format lends itself to much faster delivery
times than standard articles. The Q&A involves either interviewing a
guest live (or via phone or video link) and transcribing the content,
or having your guest write down answers to questions sent via email
or otherwise delivered.
It’s worth remembering, however, that the success or otherwise of
Q&A content will be based on the authority of your interviewee,
coupled with the relevance of his or her insight. You can interview
 AUDIENCE NEEDS AND THE POWER OF TEXT 113

someone outside of your organization (a partner, supplier or ally), or

you can choose to interview someone from inside your organization
(C-suite member, internal evangelist or thought leader), but you must
contextualize your interviewee in the introduction.
Q&A treatment pieces also need to serve a purpose – ie has the
interviewee delivered something new? Have they developed fresh
insight? Have they launched a product, created a team or uncovered
a new approach? Perhaps they have achieved a personal milestone, or
have demonstrated specific purpose, vision or values in their work?
Before you organize a Q&A, ensure you are clear on the notional
title of your article or finished piece. Consider who this is for and the
purpose and value of the content. This will also help shape your
­questioning narrative.
Here are some other journalistic principles to guide your Q&As:
●●
Do your preparation: ensure you are briefed on the person you are
interviewing. Mine for background information from internal
sources.
●●
Help your guest(s) prepare: send questions through beforehand, or
talk through the thrust of your story with your interviewee before
you meet. This will ensure they are properly prepared and bring
relevant or interesting case studies, information, statistics or evidence.
●●
Use open questions: in order to elicit broader information and
stories, use why?, what? and how? questions. If the focus of your
story is narrow, then focus them on a specific topic: ‘Tell me about
this…’ or ‘How did you approach that...?’.
●●
Ask for examples: where possible, ensure the guest substantiates
their points with real-life examples of where or when they have
applied a principle, or used a product or approach.
●●
Flesh out where appropriate: remember that your end game is to
deliver value for your own audience or end user. Ask for more
information or insight to add to what is already available in the
public domain.
●●
Listen: if your interviewee drops in some information you’re not
familiar with, or if it sounds new or interesting, then build on that
and dig deeper.
114 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

The round table

A round table is akin to a multi-person Q&A. It is an opportunity to
get a range of different voices and insights on a topic in a relatively
time-efficient manner. As one might expect though, organizing this
type of get-together will always be a challenge. If you are trying to
pull together subject matter experts from different organizations
(potentially your partners, suppliers or network), this only adds to
the complexity.
A ‘virtual round table’ could solve some of these logistical prob-
lems, with guests taking part via video or audio links. A further
challenge with a round table is ensuring the discussion is moderated
and driven in the direction that you need to deliver information that
is new, different and coherent for your storytelling content.
Round table sessions will need to be choreographed to ensure they
have a narrative arc. Moderators must understand how they need to
develop and guide the discussion to ensure all areas and topics are
discussed and resolved as far as possible. If the round table is live you
can video the event and cut the discussion into an extended video,
shorter excerpts or short-form soundbites.

Longer-form articles
The struggle to grab people’s attention in today’s busy world is real,
but there is still an appetite for longer-form content – and you
should still consider it as part of your content mix. Not only does
good-quality longer content stand out from the crowd, it also gets
shared in high volumes.26 UK newspaper the Guardian27 and sites
such as Ernest28 and Delayed Gratification29 are all sites and publish-
ers offering audiences long-form stories.
Here’s why you shouldn’t forget why length can be good.

READERS LIKE LONG-FORM

Research by Tom Rosenstiel of the Brookings Institution30 shows
many audiences on digital actually prefer longer-form content and
 AUDIENCE NEEDS AND THE POWER OF TEXT 115

will enjoy longer articles. Long-form articles (including lists, aggre-

gated thoughts from other experts etc), have long been demonstrated
to be more successful for bloggers in congested content areas – as
long as they are new, different and well-researched.

CASE STUDY
How to compete in a world of transient advantages: Roland Berger 31

This piece from the Think:Act magazine site from global consultancy firm Roland
Berger focuses on the work of Rita Gunther McGrath, a global innovation expert;
the article is based on the insight included in McGrath’s book on the subject of
innovation. It is a substantial written piece that also includes a short-form listicle
(the three-step process for your own inflection point), images and graphics.

LONGER PIECES DRIVE MORE TRAFFIC

Data from the Pew Research Center indicates that, whilst shorter
news is more prevalent – and thus gets higher volumes of traffic –
longer-form articles are actually accessed via mobile phone at nearly
the same rate. Interestingly, it finds Facebook drives more traffic to
articles in general, whilst Twitter tends to bring people who spend
longer with the content. Users that come from Facebook average 107
seconds with the content, compared with 133 seconds for those who
come from Twitter. It also finds that across short- and long-form
content, it’s Facebook that drives more referrals – about 8 out of 10
first visits from social media sites come from Facebook, compared to
15 per cent from Twitter.32 Whilst these statistics are for traditional
published news journalism, they are a useful benchmark for our own
B2B brand journalism and storytelling.

LONGER ARTICLES CAN DRIVE HIGHER DWELL TIME

Analysis of Parse.ly data by Pew’s researchers found consumers spend
more time on average with long-form news articles than with short-
form articles [short-form in this instance refers to articles that are
fewer than 1,000 words]. The total engaged time for readers of arti-
cles more than 1,000 words averages about twice that of the engaged
time with short-form stories – an average of 123 seconds, compared
116 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

to 57.33 Research also finds people spend more time with longer
stories, that is, they are more willing to deep dive into more informa-
tion if it is there. With shorter stories they skim and go.

CASE STUDY
Centrica.com/Stories 34

Many of the articles on the Stories section of Centrica.com run to several thousand
words. They are broken up with bullet points, pull quotes and multi-format content
such as scrolling graphics, as well as embedded video. These longer pieces
encourage a longer dwell time through engagement with the video, as well as
insight from the heavily researched articles.

EXTENDED ARTICLES DRIVE SEO SUCCESS

Not only can long-form articles support your dwell time aspirations,
but several studies35 show that they will also drive traffic and gener-
ate more leads on average than shorter content. Perhaps because of
this, the Content Marketing Institute’s 2019 analysis of US content
marketers finds 74 per cent of B2B content marketers say they’ve
used or developed long-form content in the last 12 months.36
Although long-form content shouldn’t be created for the sake of it (it
still needs to be good content), the data seems to support the fact that
longer can sometimes be better.

LONGER ARTICLES ALLOW YOU TO DEMONSTRATE KNOWLEDGE

Longer-form pieces can allow you to dive deeper into a specific topic,
to add maximum value to your audience. By the very nature of the
space available to you, you can include more information, context or
research and more keywords to boost SEO success, as well as more
quotes, soundbites and information from your key people. Longer-
form content can demonstrate your knowledge or expertise in a
specific area, and can form the basis for an e-book that can be used
further down the marketing funnel, as your audiences demonstrate
an interest in a specific area, product or topic.
 AUDIENCE NEEDS AND THE POWER OF TEXT 117

Arresting the scroll with your content

Whatever the technique, and whatever the format, the key attribute that
will make your stories successful is their resonance with the audience.
Some of that will be down to how you have researched your stories and
which topics you have chosen – are they relevant to the audience you
are appealing to? Some of the success of your content will be down to
how you have created it, and in which format. The way it is written and
the structure of the narrative itself are also crucial, as we have read. But
some of your content’s success will be down to how it is written – the
language, tone and structure of the pieces you produce.
Here is some guidance on how you can make your written content
as accessible as possible, and thereby engaging and relevant to your
audience:

Keep it simple: if you are writing corporate content it can be tempting

to reach for the thesaurus and include technical jargon and complex
language. This will almost certainly alienate your readers. The best
reporters write short sentences. They also use simple everyday
language. Your aim is to get the story across in a way that is easy
for readers to understand. So, avoid putting obstacles in the way.
Keep adjectives to a minimum and avoid flowery prose.
Opinion, attribution and accuracy: unless you are writing a first-person
piece, there is no room for antagonistic opinion in your copy. The
source of facts, figures and quotes should be clear to readers. Make
sure the sources you quote are credible. Do not use Wikipedia as a
single source. Where possible, offer solutions to issues and challenges
rather than focusing on the negative or hopeless.
Use active sentences: many people struggle with the concept of the
active and passive voice. ‘The cat sat on the mat’ is more simple,
accessible and brief than ‘The mat was sat on by the cat’. The first
is active and direct, while the second is passive and meandering.
Active sentences tell us who did what. They give clarity to your
story and it normally takes fewer words to say the same thing.
Spelling and grammar: a writer’s, and a brand’s, reputation is
grounded in good spelling and grammar. If you struggle with these
118 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

there are online tools to help you. All computers have a simple
spell checker. There are also more advanced online tools like
Grammarly37 or ProWritingAid38 that check grammar, readability
and other writing errors.
Don’t feel the need to paraphrase: don’t be afraid to quote directly. If
you have based your article on interviews with employees, experts
or other spokespeople do not be afraid to include their thoughts at
length. Let them talk, and judiciously transcribe what they say.

Improving on-screen readability

With so much competition for your attention, brands must make
readability of their text a priority, especially as so many of us are on
the move when we are digesting content.
There are some simple tips that you can use to ensure your text is
more readable on screen (whether on desktop or mobile) for your
audience:
●●
Play to your audience: people want information quickly. Add a
summary or have bullet points at the top of your article. If they
want more they’ll dive deeper into the story.
●●
Add clearly understandable sub headers: this makes for ease of
navigation and breaks up slabs of text.
●●
Keep sentences short: chiming with the guidance on your writing
style to improve readability, it also makes sense to keep both
sentences and paragraphs short; keep writing tight and to the
point.
●●
Have clear headlines: choose one that excites rather than mystifies –
this will also help with your SEO.
●●
Break up the text: use pull-quotes, images and pull-statistics to add
variety, as well as bullet lists if relevant.
●●
Vary the length of your sentences to add pace: but remember to
keep sentences tight and punchy.
●●
Avoid jargon: don’t use long words, jargon or over-use acronyms
when you’re talking to a non-technical audience. This reinforces
 AUDIENCE NEEDS AND THE POWER OF TEXT 119

the writing guidance above, and will ensure your readers can spin
through your copy quickly.
●●
Be bold: phrases or quotes can be highlighted in bold to stand out.

Creating content that has authenticity and emotion

Whether written, verbal, or visual, language is how we communicate and
influence. It’s how we tell our stories, and the best stories – and the best
marketing – resonate on a very personal and emotional level. Writers,
orators and film makers innately understand this, yet marketers don’t
think or do enough about it (Heidi Taylor, B2B Marketing Strategy).39

As we learned in Chapters 4 and 5, one of the most powerful ways to

make sure your content gets the attention it needs is to ensure it is
authentic. In a world where we are swamped with information, this
can help make sure your content stands out. Here is some more guid-
ance on building empathy with your B2B content:
●●
Stop being anonymous: where possible, name your writers and
ideally include the opinions of your senior people; if you cannot
encourage your own people to be writers, then interview your top
talent and reference them in your own bylined pieces.
●●
Focus on real outcomes: if you can find examples and human stories
that will exemplify your work in a natural way then try to do so.
See some of the examples earlier in this chapter for inspiration.
●●
Reveal more detail about the company: tell readers about real
people in the company, using real-life case studies. Case studies
don’t have to be bottom-of-the-funnel technical pieces. Use them
as examples for your product or service.
●●
Encourage team members: support those who are keen to start
creating content with guidance on editorial to enable them to start
publishing and demonstrate success to others.
●●
Reveal honest and genuine stories: as we outlined in the previous
chapter, use workshop settings to reveal real-life stories about
challenges, outcomes, wins and losses that might deliver relatable
content.
120 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

●●
Lose anodyne stock imagery: it’s always a challenge, but try to find
less generic ways to house, showcase and deliver your content. If
you have to use stock, find ways to treat it or manipulate it to add
some of your brand character or personality.
●●
Reference impact and outcomes: detail matters – reference
everything that you are able to demonstrate in terms of outcomes
(for instance, personal stories), not just facts and figures.

STRETCHING YOUR TEXT FURTHER

You can re-purpose your text for various platforms, ensuring you maximize
its value. Consider the following:

SlideShare. Break out your copy onto slides and build a design around
them. Share across the network for SEO growth.
LinkedIn. If you are the author, consider re-purposing your article with
more of a ‘personal prism’. Adjust the writing slightly to focus on your
viewpoint more strongly. This subjective approach, or more
personalized writing style, might not be appropriate for your content
hub, but will work for sharing on your own LinkedIn profile.
Voice. Consider recording your longer-form written articles and
sharing them as podcasts or podcast series.

Read more about how to stretch your text content even further in Chapter
7 on non-text content formats, and in Chapter 9 on distribution and
amplification.

Before we move onto other formats that are available now for some
powerful B2B storytelling, I shall leave the final word on written
formats to the Head of Global Content Team at Red Hat, Laura
Hamlyn, who puts it so well in an interview with me about balancing
text content with other formats:

Words matter. But only if they are relevant, original and concise. That
said, people scan. They might scan first to see if you cover what they’re
interested in. People also need to know what you want them to do.
 AUDIENCE NEEDS AND THE POWER OF TEXT 121

What’s the next step? All of this requires energy and intellect. At their
best, words are an escape. They capture our attention and take us
somewhere else. Whether we love reading a blog post about a software
patch or watching a video about the future of farming, words/text can
get us where we want to go.

Notes
1 Miller, J (2018) B2B buyers have spoken: here’s what they want from your
content marketing, LinkedIn, 18 April. Available from: https://business.
linkedin.com/en-uk/marketing-solutions/blog/posts/B2B-Marketing/2018/
B2B-buyers-have-spoken-heres-what-they-want-from-your-content-marketing
(archived at https://perma.cc/T2PP-NL2T)
2 An, M (2017) Content trends: preferences emerge along generational fault
lines, Hubspot, 6 November. Available from: https://blog.hubspot.com/
news-trends/content-trends-preferences?_ga=2.79538132.1320947067.
1560881037-1945944375.1538653434#video (archived at https://perma.
cc/7M8D-Y8RA)
3 Demand Gen Report (2019) 2019 Content Preferences Survey Report,
Demand Gen Report, Hasbrouck Heights, NJ. Available from: https://www.
demandgenreport.com/resources/reports/2019-content-preferences-survey-
report (archived at https://perma.cc/A3WH-XZEV)
4 Content Marketing Institute (2019) B2B content marketing 2019:
benchmarks, budgets, and trends – North America, Content Marketing
Institute, 10 October. Available from: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/
wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2019_B2B_Research_Final.pdf (archived at
https://perma.cc/UD9N-C78K)
5 Demand Gen Report (2019). 2019 Content Preferences Survey Report,
Demand Gen Report, Hasbrouck Heights, NJ. Available from: https://www.
demandgenreport.com/resources/reports/2019-content-preferences-survey-
report (archived at https://perma.cc/A3WH-XZEV)
6 Enge, E (2019) Mobile vs desktop traffic in 2019, Stone Temple, 11 April.
Available from: https://www.stonetemple.com/mobile-vs-desktop-usage-study/
(archived at https://perma.cc/Y49U-BK8F)
7 An, M (2017) Content trends: preferences emerge along generational fault
lines, Hubspot, 6 November. Available from: https://blog.hubspot.com/
news-trends/content-trends-preferences?_ga=2.79538132.1320947067.
1560881037-1945944375.1538653434#video (archived at https://perma.
cc/7M8D-Y8RA)
122 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

8 Enge, E (2019) Mobile vs desktop traffic in 2019, Stone Temple, 11 April.

Available from: https://www.stonetemple.com/mobile-vs-desktop-usage-study/
(archived at https://perma.cc/Y49U-BK8F)
9 For more information, see the work of Joseph Campbell: https://www.jcf.org/
works/titles/the-hero-with-a-thousand-faces/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
B7YX-ZNZ8)
10 Zak, P J (2014) Why your brain loves good storytelling, Harvard Business
Review, 28 October. Available from: https://hbr.org/2014/10/why-your-brain-
loves-good-storytelling (archived at https://perma.cc/N7R8-6R2N)
11 Muggeridge, P (2017) Saving the endangered one-horned rhino, one drone at a
time, Digital Empowers, 8 January. Available from: https://digitalempowers.
com/saving-endangered-one-horned-rhino-one-drone-time/ (archived at https://
perma.cc/PTB2-XWBL)
12 Centrica (nd) The power plant next door. Available from: https://www.
centrica.com/platform/the-power-plant-next-door (archived at https://perma.
cc/PY8P-QKJQ)
13 McKenna, J (2017). The African country pioneering digital fishing, Digital
Empowers, 18 December. Available from: https://digitalempowers.com/african-
country-pioneering-digital-fishing/ (archived at https://perma.cc/6XTC-N39Z)
14 Honeywell (2019) How close are we to flying in air taxis? Honeywell, 8 June.
Available from: https://www.honeywell.com/en-us/newsroom/news/2019/06/
how-close-are-we-to-flying-in-air-taxis (archived at https://perma.cc/E2CJ-2BYN)
15 Fox, C (2019) Why home DNA tests might not be as private as you think,
World Economic Forum, 9 August. Available from: https://www.weforum.org/
agenda/2019/08/home-dna-tests-privacy/ (archived at https://perma.
cc/46QU-6Y75)
16 Willige, A (2017) How robots will change the world, Spectra, 28 November.
Available from: https://spectra.mhi.com/how-robots-will-change-the-world
(archived at https://perma.cc/4X97-TFMN)
17 Bradberry, T (2019) Nine things that will kill your career, World Economic
Forum, 8 August. Available from: https://www.weforum.org/
agenda/2019/08/9-career-killers/ (archived at https://perma.cc/AV6D-P7RF)
18 McKenna, J (2019) These three forces are shaping the future of global energy,
Spectra, 8 July. Available from: https://spectra.mhi.com/these-three-forces-are-
shaping-the-future-of-global-energy (archived at https://perma.cc/E26V-ZYAE)
19 Leibert, F (2017) 3 things every company can do to benefit from digital
disruption, World Economic Forum, 14 December. Available from: https://
www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/12/3-things-every-company-can-do-to-avoid-
digital-disruption (archived at https://perma.cc/Y6HX-U79T)
20 Worley, S (2019) The 5 coolest things on earth this week, GE Reports, 5 July.
Available from: https://www.ge.com/reports/the-5-coolest-things-on-earth-this-
week-10/ (archived at https://perma.cc/6LKB-T63A)
 AUDIENCE NEEDS AND THE POWER OF TEXT 123

21 Dean, B (2019) We analyzed 912 million blog posts. Here’s what we learned
about content marketing, Backlinko, 19 February. Available from: https://
backlinko.com/content-study (archived at https://perma.cc/C4TF-NWM6)
22 Slack (nd) Available from: https://slackhq.com/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
BV4W-YYUL)
23 Seale, S (2018) Axios reaches today’s reader with ‘Smart Brevity’ journalism,
INMA Conference Blog, 5 September. Available from: https://www.inma.org/
blogs/conference/post.cfm/axios-reaches-today-s-reader-with-smart-brevity-
journalism (archived at https://perma.cc/A2WA-A23G)
24 Nielsen (2019) Time flies: U.S. adults now spend nearly half a day interacting
with media, Nielsen, 31 July. Available from: https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/
insights/article/2018/time-flies-us-adults-now-spend-nearly-half-a-day-
interacting-with-media/ (archived at https://perma.cc/V4YY-7FN6)
25 Hutt, R (2019) Chart of the day: these are the world’s most innovative
economies, World Economic Forum, 30 July. Available from: https://www.
weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/chart-of-the-day-these-are-the-world-s-most-
innovative-economies/ (archived at https://perma.cc/F5UX-R593)
26 Blackwell, J (2018) Content marketing: beginners guide for maximum success,
Buzzsumo, 7 November. Available from: https://buzzsumo.com/blog/content-
marketing-beginners-guide (archived at https://perma.cc/N7NA-KKW9)
27 Tortoise Media (nd) Available from: https://www.tortoisemedia.com/ (archived
at https://perma.cc/59L5-DBJQ)
28 Ernest (nd) Available from: http://www.ernestjournal.co.uk/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/J9DC-7G3H)
29 The Slow Journalism Company (nd) Available from: https://www.slow-
journalism.com/ (archived at https://perma.cc/XH4N-PF3T)
30 Rosenstiel, T (2016) Solving journalism’s hidden problem: terrible analytics,
Brookings Center for Effective Public Management, February. Available from:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Solving-journalisms-
hidden-problem.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/F3XB-5NMN)
31 Volyes, B (2019) How to compete in a world of transient advantages, Roland
Berger, 25 June. Available from: https://www.rolandberger.com/en/Point-of-
View/How-to-compete-in-a-world-of-transient-advantages.html (archived at
https://perma.cc/CW23-WB5Z)
32 Eva Matsa, K, Mitchell, A and Stocking, G (2016) Long-form reading shows
signs of life in our mobile news world, Pew Research Center, Journalism &
Media, 5 May. Available from: https://www.journalism.org/2016/05/05/
long-form-reading-shows-signs-of-life-in-our-mobile-news-world/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/E8Y4-JCK4)
33 Ibid
34 Centrica Platform (nd) Available from: https://www.centrica.com/platform
(archived at https://perma.cc/7VML-GU7B)
124 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

35 Zalani, C (2018) Amazing results with long-form content: 5 simple tips,

Semrush, 19 October. Available from: https://www.semrush.com/blog/amazing-
results-long-form-content-5-simple-tips/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
K3EX-M42U)
36 Content Marketing Institute (2019) B2B content marketing 2019:
benchmarks, budgets, and trends—North America, Content Marketing
Institute, 10 October. Available from: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/
wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2019_B2B_Research_Final.pdf (archived at
https://perma.cc/UD9N-C78K)
37 Grammarly (nd) Available from: https://www.grammarly.com/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/2C2U-3BZ6)
38 Pro Writing Aid (nd) Available from: https://prowritingaid.com/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/J3WA-R9DG)
39 Taylor, H (2017) B2B Marketing Strategy: Differentiate, develop and deliver
lasting customer engagement, Kogan Page Publishers, p 32
 125

07

Choosing your format: developing

visual, video and audio content

Humans have an amazing ability to remember pictures; in fact, in a

seminal study, people were able to remember more than 2,000
pictures with at least 90 per cent accuracy1 in recognition tests
carried out over a number of days. This memory for pictures consist-
ently exceeds our ability to remember words.2 In Mary Meeker’s
Internet Trends report 2019, Kevin Systrom, the co-founder of
Instagram, is quoted as saying: ‘People have always been visual – our
brains are wired for images. Writing was a hack, a detour. Pictorial
languages are how we all started to communicate – we are coming
full circle.3
Whether you believe wholeheartedly in what Kevin Systrom has to
say, the statistics bear out the fact that, in today’s B2B marketing world,
much of the most successful messaging is based on, or leverages, visual
and graphic storytelling. As mobile phones have proliferated, they have
allowed everyone to become a visual storyteller, with high-quality
cameras, filters and special features that can turn the most basic image
into something much more impressive. Whilst not every format is right
for every brand, visual imagery is increasingly being used by most
content developers in some guise or other.
According to research by the Brookings Institution into the appeal
of different structures of news stories (with or without images),
there’s powerful evidence of the influence of non-text content online.
Stories presented with a photo scored almost 20 per cent higher in
126 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

engagement than stories without, whilst stories with either audio or

video correlated with 36 per cent more overall engagement.4
Image-creation and image-sharing volumes have skyrocketed in
recent years – the emergence of tools such as Facebook stories,
LinkedIn Live, WhatsApp and Instagram stories as content develop-
ment formats (rather than just as amplification tools) are starting to
edge into regular use by B2B brands. Not only do marketers now
have more platforms with which to precisely target their specific
audiences, they can now pull on new formats and approaches that
are more accessible, more cost-effective and quicker to test and
deploy than ever before.
In this chapter I will elaborate on brands using, and experimenting
with, video, audio and image-based storytelling alongside, or instead
of, text output.
Your decisions about where to start in terms of format will natu-
rally be based on what it is you want to achieve with your brand

FIGURE 7.1 Formats for use in B2B brand journalism: video, visual, audio

• Insight articles • Short-form text and

• Listicles image video
• Buzz articles • Interview videos
• Live coverage
• Thought leadership
• Q&A /round table
• Longer-form
article
• Live blog Text Video

Format
mix

• Infographics Image • Podcast

Audio
• Graphics, • Webinar
charts and
statistics
• Interactive
graphics
 DEVELOPING VISUAL, VIDEO AND AUDIO CONTENT 127

journalism, as well as the resources available to you and your own

knowledge and expertise, along with the experimentation tolerance
of your organization.

Video delivering brand journalism

Video content has been growing exponentially in popularity among
audiences, both B2B and B2C, in recent years and, according to
research, will get you more attention than your standard text content.5
So if you have the right resources or enough budget to create it, it
should be part of your content marketing mix, either as promotional/
amplification content on social media, or as a substantial part of your
base content hub or cornerstone content storytelling.
It’s all a question of balance. When you are deciding on your strat-
egy, and considering your audience habits and response to content,
video should be just one of the formats you consider. You will be
guided by resource and budget as to what that content looks like, but
ideally it will be part of your content marketing mix.
Research of a group of UK B2B marketers by LinkedIn6 shows:
●●
62 per cent of them use video for brand awareness;
●●
86 per cent value video for product and service explanation;
●●
78 per cent agree that video engagement helps them identify
higher-quality leads;
●●
57 per cent say video drives high lead volumes overall.

Millennial audiences tend to show a preference for video and as those

millennials shift into buying positions in organizations, or positions
of influence in the B2B buying cycle, a shift to video will be advisable.
When creating your video content, however, you need to consider
the same maxims as you do when tackling your brand journalism in
text format – you must develop your narrative with the audience in
mind, create ideas that are of value and interest to them and consider
how you will tell those stories with a narrative arc that will encour-
age sharing and engagement from your audience.
128 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Video engaging audiences

Often video can be a more powerful way to engage and draw in an
audience through the powerful mix of images, colour, sound and text.
Consider the outcomes you are looking for before commissioning or
creating your organic video and focus on:
●●
Attracting attention: we want to tell stories our audiences are
interested in so they will engage in some way and thereby start to
notice our brand.
●●
Engaging your audience: how can you excite with the stories you
are telling? Ensure you are tapping into their needs and concerns
and demonstrate very early in any piece of content why the
audience should take notice of it.
●●
Delivering information: just as with our text content, you will need
to offer video stories that deliver information or insight, that will
help our audiences with their approach to life and/or work. Don’t
lose sight of the core requirements of your brand journalism, even
when you are using video, graphics or images as your preferred
approach.

What are the benefits of video for message delivery?

●●
Video can easily show and demonstrate a product, your people
and your place without the need for standard words on a page.
●●
Moving pictures impart a large amount of information in a short
time with the interlace of images, sound, music and text overlay.
●●
Video journalism is a way to impart passion, emotion and
authenticity.
●●
Live coverage brings immediacy and authenticity to your messaging.
●●
Video enables you to build character and engagement through
your real people.
●●
Simple new formats are emerging all the time, driven by smart
phone functionality.
 DEVELOPING VISUAL, VIDEO AND AUDIO CONTENT 129

●●
Video gives the opportunity to inject character and emotion into
your B2B content, with fun and engaging approaches with filters,
overlays, music beds and innovative editing.

You should see video as a tool to be used all the way across your sales
funnel – it can be effective to develop interest (top of funnel), to
amplify (on social media platforms) as well as to dig deeper (middle
of the funnel) in longer form and interviews, or Q&A formats, or to
deliver more technical information (close to conversion) and to reas-
sure after purchase.

What type of brand journalism video?

Certain video formats lend themselves to brand journalism – the type
of value-add, insight-driven content you need at the top of your
funnel and for driving audiences further into the consideration phase.
You can either re-work or build on the same narratives and stories
that you have shortlisted as part of your story-mining activity outlined
in Chapter 5. Video is simply another approach to telling these stories.
Here’s an overview of these video approaches in more depth.

Short-form social videos

You will no doubt be aware of the short-form videos popular across
social media sites today for corporate messaging, news delivery and
B2C engagement. These have many different names but they are
often edited stock imagery with large, clear graphics and a music bed;
generally they are short and sharp in length.
I will call these ‘short-form social videos’ as they are primarily used
on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and
Instagram, but they can be embedded into blog posts or used within
web articles to enhance a text story. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries uses
this technique on its Spectra website, with a short text story on electric
vehicles7 and an embedded short-form video on the page.
130 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

TABLE 7.1 Different video formats and their benefits

Format Benefit and narrative Channel

Short-form social These are incredibly popular on social Social media sites such as
video media platforms where they can be Facebook, LinkedIn,
viewed in their entirety, or can link Instagram and YouTube
through to longer-form versions or blog
content.
Tap into a zeitgeist issue, a key audience
challenge, or deliver an explainer on an
ongoing social or global problem.
Interview video Build intimacy and authenticity through Website or content hub
stories from real people.
This is a relatively straightforward type of
production with limited need for
scripting, filming days and post-
production.
Live video There is high engagement for live Social media and website
coverage streaming on LinkedIn and don’t
overlook live video as a powerful tool on
Facebook for business audiences.
Animation Short animations from 10 to 30 seconds Social media
can stand alone as insight content or be
used to promote and link through to
longer-form journalism, blogs, interviews
or videos.
When pictures are a challenge, longer-
form animations can be a useful format
with which to convey information.
If the subject is complicated, graphics
can be a simple way to tell your story.

There is no right or wrong when it comes to length, although today

many of the most successful videos are ‘snackable’ – short, sharp and
to the point and ideally somewhere around one minute or less. The
length you choose will depend on the depth and complexity of your
message and the objectives of your video campaign or output; you
should always test and learn as you become more experienced with
video activation and creation. With the emergence of artificial
intelligence-driven tools and stock footage libraries there are fewer
 DEVELOPING VISUAL, VIDEO AND AUDIO CONTENT 131

FIGURE 7.2 Creating short-form video

Source stills Source

Create Source Create Edit and
or video interviews
script music bed graphics export
imagery (optional)

barriers to entry than ever before when it comes to creating these

simple videos for use on your marketing channels or for distribution
and promotion.

Step 1: Create script

Ideally you would be able to take the source narrative for your video
from a pre-existing blog, article or white paper. This will give you the
narrative flow to work from. Simplify the language and create one
simple sentence to reflect each stage of your story. This sentence will
be laid onto the video as graphics as part of the editing process.

Step 2: Stills and video

Use a stock library if you don’t have access to video or stills inside
your organization. Try to choose images that have people or action in
them. If you have a very powerful image then use that at the start of
your video to get people’s attention. You will need to switch image
every 3–5 seconds to keep the pace of the video up.

Step 3: Soundbites/interviews
Do not feel that you need to include interviews or soundbites, but if
you have them, then they can add to the impact of your video. As the
majority of your viewers will be watching with the sound down,
ensure you add clear and easy-to-read subtitles.

Step 4: Music
There are multiple sources for stock music that are cost-effective and
easy to access online. Match the type of music with the tone of your
132 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

story – for a bold, impactful story on space travel then go for a bold
track; opt for a lighter tone for your more straightforward stories. If
you have access to professional editing, ideally you would edit to the
beat of the music where possible.

Step 5: Graphics
Your graphics need to be created in a clear, large font that is easy to
read. Ensure they stand out against your background images or video.
If necessary lay dark text on a light background (or vice versa) to
make them readable.

Step 6: Edit
Finally editing will mix these various assets together to create your
short-form social video. You can create shorter versions for use on
Instagram and Twitter, or extended versions to sit on your website or
content hub. Add a call to action at the end of each video.

SOCIAL VIDEO CASE STUDY

World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum has used short videos to great effect across its
digital channels to build audiences in their millions. Videos are tightly scripted,
and imagery has real punch. Videos often start with a query, challenge or
unusual fact. Visit the World Economic Forum’s Facebook video page8 to see
many examples of the format.

If you can, find a production device or original approach to lift your

video content and make it stand out from the many videos we see
today. Think back to some of the text formats for short-form articles
I covered in Chapter 6, and also think of the power that video can
bring for new and different outputs:
 DEVELOPING VISUAL, VIDEO AND AUDIO CONTENT 133

Video listicle A numbered list or round-up is a simple way to cover a topic and to
join unrelated examples.
Thought leadership Grow your internal thought leaders and influencers with in-house
short-form and extended video interviews.
Video explainer Find an expert from your company to tackle a challenging subject or
issue and outline a potential solution on video.
Q&A The simple Q&A can be a powerful video format that is simple to
produce and delivers instant insights.

INSTAGRAM VIDEO CASE STUDY

Goldman Sachs

Global investment and banking firm Goldman Sachs is innovating with video on
its Instagram feed. One format is called ‘3 Things’, digging into topics such as
hybrid acceleration, healthcare sensors and consumer snacking trends. Users
swipe left on the title slide to reveal three short social videos that play on a swipe
and deliver more information via graphics on the topic. Goldman also uses the
swipe left functionality within a format that has a still graphic with a key quote on
it from a spokesperson; a swipe left reveals a short video clip of that person.

Interview video
Interview videos are straightforward to produce and can give instant
value to the viewer. They are a simple way to develop thought leader-
ship content that has instant impact, as video footage enables
audiences to immediately relate to the human behind the message.
Ensure you use captioning or subtitles on all video interviews as the
majority of video viewed online and on social platforms is viewed
with the sound down.
They are often used for longer, more thoughtful insight delivery
and can take a variety of formats (many of which you will be familiar
with from watching nightly news bulletins), for instance:
●●
Single soundbite interview: short, sharp, to the point. Edited with
subtitles and generally used on social media platforms to deliver a
single insight point and push audiences to engage to find out more.
134 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

●●
One person interviews or talks with another (a ‘one plus one’): a
longer format where one person interviews another. Trail these on
social and host on your website or YouTube.
●●
If you have access to multiple cameras, or are confident in the
format, and your presenter, then consider multiple interviewees
(one plus two) from live events.
●●
Selection of soundbites: take a selection of interview clips and edit
them together into a narrative or montage to outline a particular
theme or experience.

Interview video is ideally filmed with one person in shot in a ‘medium

close-up’ framing that shows their head and shoulders, or top half of
the body. You can zoom in even more closely when you are finalizing
your video. Video with close-ups of faces will engage your audience
more than a wider shot where you can only see your speaker or the
image in the distance.

NEWSROOM TIP
Frame it right

For your brand journalism interviews, film your interviewee speaking ‘off
camera’ (that is, looking slightly to the left or right of the lens) rather than
directly into the camera lens. Consider using graphic ‘chapter headings’ to
segment answers or content sections delivered by your interviewer. If the
message to be delivered is a powerful one, that has a single sense of
urgency, then consider adjusting your speaker’s eyeline to be ‘down the
barrel’ (ie directly into the lens) for intimacy and impact.

Stretching your video interviews further

If you are using an external agency or professional video team to create
your video it can be a sizeable commitment, both in terms of time and
budget. Create a plan beforehand for how to get as much value out
of your content as possible, considering alternative and additional
formats that you can create from your original raw (rushes) footage.
The interview video is versatile in that you can take the original
material and use it in a multitude of ways:
 DEVELOPING VISUAL, VIDEO AND AUDIO CONTENT 135

●●
Prepare your questions carefully so that you are able to strip the
audio from the interview video and edit it into a podcast format.
●●
Develop a transcript from the video for upload to enhance SEO
and give wider access to your material.
●●
Use the insight from video interviews to develop parallel written
material, either grouping subject matter or considering a single
topic.
●●
Edit powerful soundbites for even shorter-form social sharing
teasers.

Live video coverage

If your company or organization can tolerate the stress of live broad-
casting – and any potential risks associated with it – then live coverage
is a really powerful tool and brand journalism approach. Just as news
shows report live from events and news story locations, why shouldn’t
you, as a brand, take ownership of your live coverage on your own
owned channels? Emerging tools such as LinkedIn Live and Facebook
Live make brand broadcasting simpler than ever.

The benefits of going live with your brand journalism

●●
Build a relationship with distributed audiences.
●●
Demonstrate the value of your products and insights.
●●
Grow awareness of your brand with your own people as influencers,
journalists and commentators.
●●
Build immediacy into your brand message – demonstrate your
knowledge.

Today there are no end of options for the B2B marketer to deliver live
coverage across the platform mix. Smartphones combined with the
most rudimentary technical kit, such as an external microphone and
tripod, give all brands the opportunity to go live; if budget and resources
allow, you can develop a multi-camera, multi-location solution.
136 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

When to go live
Live, real-time coverage for your corporate events (small or large) is
a highly effective means of getting attention for your brand and lever-
aging the energy of a particular event or experience. The ideal
situation is to offer insight and information from an event where you
have multiple guests, an engaged audience and a range of potential
interviewees – this could be an internal event such as a supplier or
vendor event, or it could be a sponsored event where you, the brand,
have pulled together various stakeholders or partners to discuss a
particular issue, challenge or business trend.
Try to have either some activity in the area or something of value
to say, as the key to your live coverage is – just as you see on the
nightly news – either activity or insight. There are dozens of largescale
global industry events that you can no doubt consider as the back-
drop for your live coverage. You will need to assess which is the best
event to give you the opportunity to develop your own live news
output, and how you might go about creating that output. Do not be
intimidated by the task – today’s smartphone technology can enable
even the smallest B2B player to ‘go live’, albeit with a more restrained
aspiration than a multinational.

CASE STUDY
Gartner on LinkedIn Live

Gartner launched its Smarter with Gartner series on LinkedIn Live as another
platform to engage audiences with its insight and thought leadership. The most
recent episode – a half-hour interview with a senior VP at the research
company – gained more than 80,000 views and more than 800 comments.

Where to stream live coverage

There are many ways to easily stream video, information and inter-
views from your own internal events, or external events that you are
visiting, exhibiting at or attending:

Website: depending on the purpose of your live video coverage you

can either stream live to your own website using a service such as
 DEVELOPING VISUAL, VIDEO AND AUDIO CONTENT 137

YouTube with embed software, or an alternative such as Vimeo’s

Livestream technology. Either way the set-up is relatively
straightforward for your tech team or outsourced video agency.
Social channels: more platforms are adding live or near-live
functionality. Increasingly we are seeing B2B brands live on:
–– Facebook: use Facebook Live functionality to interact with
audiences. Network security company Juniper Networks uses
the functionality for Q&A sessions with its experts. Also look
at the World Economic Forum’s Facebook page for regular live
sessions from the Annual Meeting in Davos and the Forum’s
own Book Club.
–– LinkedIn: apply directly for broadcast capabilities through
LinkedIn Live and use the platform for live streaming of content
such as interviews and corporate events.
–– Instagram: Instagram Stories enable you to publish and track
your activity and can be useful for event coverage; unlike other
Instagram posts they allow you to include a link. Instagram live
functionality is also available.

CASE STUDY
Cisco on LinkedIn Live

Cisco is using LinkedIn Live functionality for delivery of live interviews with staff
to its 2.5 million audience to discuss the culture of the company. Topics include
work/life balance and interviews with interns.

Using imagery for your complex storytelling

Images, graphics and infographics perform well, as I have already said,
when added to your written content, but they are also an obvious format
to be turning to with the ever-increasing popularity of social platforms
that are focused on imagery and visuals. Imagery and social sharing
formats should be developed, ideally, in parallel with the original piece,
either to be embedded or used as part of your social media campaigns on
LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social sites.
138 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Infographics
There is a huge range of infographics that you can use to tell complex
stories within your brand journalism mix. They are an alternative to
text, and can help to enhance or supplement a pure text article.
Infographics can be a substantial investment of time and money
but can prove to be a great format that you can ‘slice and dice’ into
additional social media imagery from your larger design. Infograph-
ics can help as a tool for search engine optimization in general terms
as visual assets, but they can also be used further down the funnel
for engaging with very specific audiences on focused topics of
narrower interest. Whichever outcome you are looking for, here are
some key principles to consider before embarking on an infographic
build:
●●
Evergreen: choose a subject that will have a long shelf life and that
you can continue to use over a period of time. There is little point
investing in a large and complex infographic if it will only have a
short window of use.
●●
Structure: create a draft script or storyboard for your infographic
as early on in the process as possible. This might be something you
commission your agency or graphics department to do, but
(whoever does it) ensure you have a clear view of the ‘journey’
through the graphic before it is built or finalized.
●●
Research: look at what others have designed and built to decide
what you want to create before you commission or issue a brief.
Often infographics will be produced by an agency or outsourced
graphic design team. The biggest challenge for agencies is to
visualize what a client is imagining – one person’s infographic may
look very different to another’s.
●●
Invest: invest the time and money in proper research to back up the
information in your infographic. Make sure you have enough
depth in the data you are intending to use. Thin data will not
deliver a good outcome.
 DEVELOPING VISUAL, VIDEO AND AUDIO CONTENT 139

In formatting terms, remember:

●●
Top-to-bottom scrolling works for your infographics so ensure they are
built to be read from top to bottom as audiences scan through them on
desktop and mobile.
●●
Narrative arc: ensure there is a narrative arc in your infographic – that
you are laying out your story (perhaps a challenge, with solutions and an
outcome) as clearly as you would a written or video piece.
●●
Brand colours: where possible work with your brand palette to ensure
consistency of look and feel across your channels.
●●
Legibility: too many infographics are not easy to read and digest. Ensure
your colours and font choice and size work for maximum readability.

Graphics, charts and statistics

You and your team can create simple graphics to help supplement or
tell your stories. Charts and statistics can form the basis of your short
buzz articles, as I outlined in the previous chapter. A range of charts –
or a deep-dive into a longer report using graphics as the primary means
of telling the story – can be an option for an alternative way of getting
your message across. Charts also perform extremely well on social
media platforms as shareables to grow awareness of your stories.
Make sure any charts are well-referenced and come from a reputa-
ble source, if not your own research. Ensure they are clear and easy
to read and deliver a clear visual message in a short amount of time.
Also make sure they have a specific title that clearly outlines what is
included in the image.

CASE STUDY
5G in industrial operations: Capgemini 9

This chart-based piece clearly maps the story of 5G and its impact on industrial
operations. It has been built as a lengthways list of standalone facts with charts
and graphics, but also works as a full narrative, reflecting the contents of a
deep-dive report that users can click through to.
140 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

CASE STUDY
World Economic Forum 10

These 12 charts show how the world’s population has exploded in the last 200
years. The World Economic Forum often aggregates charts and images from
partner organizations or legitimate sources to pull together a piece of brand
journalism for its Agenda site. This is an example of a group of a dozen varied
charts and animations that together tell a composite story of population growth.

Animating and interactive graphics

Animations dropped into your longer articles, or supplementing your
articles and text pieces, can increase dwell time and help with sharing
and engagement. Consider pulling out one theme from the longer
piece, or encapsulating the entirety of the story in your animations.

CASE STUDY
AI is personalizing energy for customers. Here’s how: Centrica, Stories 11

The scrolling graphic within this long-form article tells the story of the number
of Internet of Things devices connected worldwide. It animates as the user
scrolls and delivers simple facts in a more visually appealing manner.

CASE STUDY
Edge, fog or cloud? How the Internet Of Things is shaking up how – and
where – data is handled: The One Brief, Aon 12

This article from Aon digs into the handling of the vast amount of data being
generated by the Internet of Things. To illustrate more clearly where different sets
of data are handled and processed the editors have created a simple but effective
interactive graphic that offers a set of scenario journeys that you can click on to
read more.

Audio: the rise of podcasting

Audio content is growing in popularity as audiences seek new formats
for digesting extended material. Podcasting, particularly, has grown
 DEVELOPING VISUAL, VIDEO AND AUDIO CONTENT 141

hugely in the UK and the US, with audiences looking to the medium
to extend the radio experience.13,14
More than a third of those polled by Edison Research said they
had listened to a podcast in the last month – a figure that’s been rising
every year since 2013 – and the average podcast listener listens to
seven a week. According to some research, more than 60 per cent of
B2B buyers describe podcasts as a content format that they value in
the early stages of the buying process.15
Numbers are growing, and those who enjoy their podcasts tend to
become passionate about them, but in reality many brands do not
have the commitment to this publishing medium that a ‘regular
publisher’ will have. Podcasts, for one thing, take a surprising amount
of work to develop and create – from building the strategy, finding
recording locations, choosing and booking an available guest, plan-
ning the questions, recording, editing and then uploading.
Laura Hamlyn, Head of the Global Content team for software
company Red Hat, explained to me how the company sources ideas
and remains audience-focused with its podcast, Command Line
Heroes.16 One of the aims of the series is building brand awareness
and affinity through the use of Red Hat and non-Red Hat voices.

For our podcast, we started a listening tour focused on different tech

events around the world. We have conducted hundreds of interviews
with our target audience, asking them about their careers, how they
got started (their origin story), what they’re working on now, and
what inspires them. We also share ideas for podcast themes with a
wide variety of Red Hat employees from across our business, because
many of them represent our target audience. Our team also monitors
influencers to understand what they think is important, and we try to
step out of the main storyline a few steps to see if there’s a tangential
connection point we can make.

Creating a successful podcast

You can develop a strong and loyal followership via podcasting
(there’s something intimate and authentic about a piece of voice
content), but the challenge for most B2B and corporate marketers
142 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

when it comes to this format is maintaining consistency and flow. As

those of us who have ever created a radio programme can confirm, it
takes time, energy and effort to make a high-quality piece of audio
content – and if you are attaching your brand to that output it’s
important that you get it right. Here are some considerations before
you get started:

Commit to a series: if you are dipping your toe in the water with
podcasting then commit to a short series, rather than launching a
weekly podcast and then not being able to sustain that. A series
can be promoted as a short run and if you run out of steam (or do
not hit your targets or KPIs) then you can always divert resources
elsewhere.
Audience first: what do your audiences need or want to know and
how can you help them? Just as when we were looking at developing
stories for your brand journalism as a whole, you need to consider
what you are talking about and why each week or each episode
and ensure you are delivering value.
Clarify your outcomes: what do you want to achieve from your
podcast and how will it deliver? If you are clear on who your
podcast is for, and what you will talk about, then you will be more
successful. For instance, Trader Joe’s broadcast is for internal staff
and communications and the name reflects that, as does the
content. It gets great reviews from internal team members on the
podcast apps from where it is available.
Get a host: if you can find someone internal who is relaxed and
charismatic enough to host your podcast then that’s great – you
might even find two if you scour your communications and
marketing departments. But if you can’t find your ‘talent’ in-house
then use a freelancer, or better still, an influencer or blogger to give
you instant credibility. Red Hat marketing – which noted it has
more than half a million downloads of its podcast after season 217 –
uses ambassador and expert Saron Yitbarek to tell its story on its
podcast.
 DEVELOPING VISUAL, VIDEO AND AUDIO CONTENT 143

Focus on quality: as with any content you produce with your brand
attached to it you need to produce output of quality. Ensure you,
or your presenter or producer (or your agency if you have
outsourced the work), have done the homework and have prepared
questions to ensure you will deliver the story that is required for
the audience, pitched at the right level and with the right messaging.
Find your voices: consider who you will interview in your podcast
and what they will talk about. Ensure your theme will stretch
across multiple episodes and still be of interest to your audience.
Ideally a brand would source many of its speakers (either the host
or the guests) from its own ranks, but it also adds to authenticity
and brand journalism credentials to interview others who will
chime with the values of your brand, or have insights that will be
of value to your audience.

PODCAST CASE STUDY

Dell Luminaries

The Dell Luminaries podcast is a standout. Titles for its programming including
industry-focused episodes such as ‘5G is coming… to transform connectivity’ and
broad, news-type content such as ‘Promoting diversity in the tech industry… by
design’. The podcast is a great case study to emulate. Why?
●●
It is consistent and regular, and includes guests from Dell, from its partners
and analyst network.
●●
It has knowledgeable and professional hosts (Mark Schaefer and Douglas
Karr) who add value to the overall programming and discussion.
●●
The full range of formats and outputs is included – there is a transcript, plus
detailed introduction and full background information.
●●
It is easy to access and digest – the descriptions include bullet points on what
you’ll learn, for instance, encouraging you to engage.
●●
The text accompaniment is easy to read, with variety in the text, pull quotes
and a focus on quality etc.
●●
There is a biography of each guest outlining who they are and why you
should listen.
144 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Learn from these other B2B podcasting examples

Home Depot: Give me an H:18 – overview of Home Depot’s sustain-
ability work and credentials, values-based culture, and what it’s
doing to ensure its supply chain is robust. This sits well as part of
their internal communications marketing suite and has got engage-
ment in the thousands.
Inside Trader Joe’s:19 culture and behind the scenes. Trader Joe’s
podcast goes behind the scenes and interviews people working
there. It’s humorous and light-hearted, and goes into stores to
unpick aspects of the company values and culture. Internally
focused, it’s of value for internal staff and potential recruits.
Leadpages.net: The Lead Generation:20 the series features conversa-
tions with entrepreneurs being honest about their work and
challenges. It is consistent and the format and design of the hosting
page is clear. Each podcast page includes:
–– five bullet points on key takeaways from the podcast;
–– a transcript of the conversation (making that content work harder
for SEO);
–– links and listings of all resources mentioned in the podcast;
–– some suggested discussion topics for those who have listened to
the podcast;
–– follow-up calls to action.

Notes
1 Standing, L, Conezio, J and Haber, R N (1970) Perception and memory for
pictures: single-trial learning of 2500 visual stimuli, Psychonomic Science, 19
(2), pp 73–74
2 Shepard, R N (1967) Recognition memory for words, sentences, and pictures,
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 6 (1), pp 156–63
3 Bondcap (2019) Internet Trends 2019, Bondcap. Available from: https://www.
bondcap.com/report/itr19/ (archived at https://perma.cc/C96Z-YR5E)
 DEVELOPING VISUAL, VIDEO AND AUDIO CONTENT 145

4 Rosenstiel, T (2016) Solving journalism’s hidden problem: terrible analytics,

Brookings Center for Effective Public Management, February. Available from:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Solving-journalisms-
hidden-problem.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/D94E-NDRT)
5 An, M (2018) Content trends: preferences emerge along generational fault
lines, Hubspot, 14 December. Available from: https://blog.hubspot.com/
news-trends/content-trends-preferences?_ga=2.79538132.1320947067.
1560881037-1945944375.1538653434#video (archived at https://perma.cc/
T5PV-JBPF)
6 Bunting, J (2018) Welcome to the era of B2B video, LinkedIn Business, 16
April. Available from: https://business.linkedin.com/en-uk/marketing-solutions/
blog/posts/B2B-video/2018/welcome-to-the-era-of-b2b-video (archived at
https://perma.cc/24CD-Z43T)
7 Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (2019) Electric cars are powering buildings from
parking lots, Spectra, 12 June 2019. Available from: https://spectra.mhi.com/
electric-cars-are-powering-buildings-from-parking-lots (archived at https://
perma.cc/4FTN-AHAS)
8 World Economic Forum Facebook Videos (nd). Available from: https://www.
facebook.com/WEFvideo/ (archived at https://perma.cc/ADC4-GMXE)
9 Capgemini (2019) 5G in industrial operations: how telcos and industrial
companies stand to benefit. Available from: https://www.capgemini.com/
wp-content/uploads/2019/06/5G_Infographic.pdf (archived at https://perma.
cc/R9MK-Y7VV)
10 Bostock, B (2019) These 12 charts show how the world’s population has
exploded in the last 200 years. World Economic Forum, 15 July. Available
from: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/populations-around-world-
changed-over-the-years/ (archived at https://perma.cc/UJW2-W4FW)
11 Centrica (nd) AI is personalizing energy for customers. Available from: https://
www.centrica.com/platform/ai-personalising-energy (archived at https://perma.
cc/A2TF-FLKL)
12 The One Brief (nd) Edge, fog or cloud? How the Internet Of Things is shaking
up how – and where – data are handled. Available from: https://theonebrief.
com/edge-fog-or-cloud-how-the-internet-of-things-is-shaking-up-how-and-
where-data-is-handled/ (archived at https://perma.cc/G2S4-USPV)
13 Ofcom (2018) Podcast listening booms in the UK, Ofcom, 28 September.
Available from: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/media/media-
releases/2018/uk-podcast-listening-booms (archived at https://perma.cc/
MSC8-ALCR)
14 Edison Research (2017) The Infinite Dial 2017, Edison, 9 March. Available
from: https://www.edisonresearch.com/infinite-dial-2017/ (archived at https://
perma.cc/WQD8-W38G)
146 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

15 Miller, J (2018) B2B buyers have spoken: here’s what they want from your
content marketing, LinkedIn, 18 April. Available from: https://business.
linkedin.com/en-uk/marketing-solutions/blog/posts/B2B-Marketing/2018/
B2B-buyers-have-spoken-heres-what-they-want-from-your-content-marketing
(archived at https://perma.cc/4G6B-PW9X)
16 Red Hat (nd) Red Hat Command Line Heroes. Available from: https://www.
redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes (archived at https://perma.cc/3GXE-
D83M)
17 McHugh, A (2019) What making a podcast taught us about branded content,
Red Hat, 6 March. Available from: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/what-
making-podcast-taught-us-about-branded-content (archived at https://perma.
cc/62FR-F7YX)
18 The Home Depot (nd) Give me an H. Available from: https://podcasts.apple.
com/us/podcast/give-me-an-h/id1321640155 (archived at https://perma.
cc/4SZR-6PWR)
19 Trader Joe’s (nd) Inside trader Joe’s. Available from: https://podcasts.apple.
com/gb/podcast/inside-trader-joes/id1375630453 (archived at https://perma.
cc/3CK8-ZQSR)
20 Lead Pages (nd) Podcast: The Lead Generation. Available from: https://www.
leadpages.net/blog/category/podcast-the-lead-generation/ (archived at https://
perma.cc/5R3X-UJLW)
 147

08

Content hubs: finding a home

for your stories

Finding the right location to house good-quality journalistic content

can be a challenge. If your organization is starting to develop regular
thought leadership or story-based content then it will need a dedi-
cated space that is potentially broader than a simple blogs page on a
corporate website. Your corporate stories require a taxonomy or
structured system that’s easy for users to navigate. This will help pull
audiences further into your site, increasing dwell time or time on site
and thereby building on your brand awareness and association
outcomes. Every audience member who has engaged with your
content and clicked back to your site is an opportunity for conversa-
tion and potential conversion.
A dedicated space, hub or microsite is a way to ensure you can
measure engagement and traffic to stories; you can also build an
audience interested in one specific area, industry or topic, or who will
build an affiliation with your brand or message. A dedicated content
hub will allow you to amplify via newsletter distribution and social
media posting, pushing audiences back to a content hub, rather than
simply through to a single story hosted on social or a non-proprietary
website where the potential journey through a site to sale is lost.
Many brands who are experienced in the content space have a specific
tab on their web navigation bar for brand stories. As companies have
moved through the content development and thought leadership matu-
rity curve, they are now more likely to badge these pages more creatively.
148 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

So we see Eniday (Eni), Insights (from Agilitylogistics.com), enterprise.

nxt (HPE),1 Knowledge Centre (from UPS)2, Walmart Today3 or
Perspectives (from Dell Technologies & IBM UK Think).4 Other brands
have content hubs for specific target audiences, specific divisions or
areas of content – see Txchnologist (from GE).

Taking the blog to the next level

Rather than simply publishing to a ‘blog’ site on your website, your
organization may choose to commit more resources, focus and
budget to a standalone site that is more like a publication – it may
be designed to look more like a digital magazine, or it might have an
approach to publishing that warrants the development of a stan-
dalone ‘site within a site’.
Either way the hub can be a home to your themed content that can
be badged or branded to align with your overarching brand values
and to engage your target audiences. Once you’ve built up a regular
flow of material and grown your audience, you have built a base on
which to develop paid and branded engagement. Interviewed for this
book, leading content strategist Robert Rose is emphatic about the
need for corporate commitment to content, in whatever guise:

The real key in my mind is that what most brands miss is they don’t
build a platform, they don’t build a publication, they don’t build a
centre of gravity around content. What they do is they build just asset,
after asset, after asset, that lives in a disaggregated format on their
website. And so content piece number 1 doesn’t work any harder
for them than content piece number 473. Building that library, that
magazine, that resource centre, that centre of gravity where content is
going to be discovered, is truly the most important part. People don’t
just subscribe to individual pieces of content; they subscribe to a regular
communication and insight. That’s the key to creating an audience,
and it’s what most brands don’t do. Instead they look at content as an
asset that drives a transaction, which for them might be a registration
or an entry into a marketing database – and they call that an audience.
 CONTENT HUBS: FINDING A HOME FOR YOUR STORIES 149

That’s not an audience, that’s just somebody who transacted for a piece
of content. A subscriber is someone who wants to get the next piece
of content. That shift in perspective is the most important aspect of
how to build an audience these days, versus just a transactional set of
marketing entries in your database.

The standalone brand name

By appropriating the look and feel of a magazine or online publica-
tion with a standalone brand name you not only map your themes
clearly for a more pleasing user experience, you also pull your user
through the site and encourage more engagement with your articles,
unfettered by other content that might distract on a c­orporate
website.
Sites like i-CIO (Fujitsu) or CMO magazine (Adobe) are good
examples of pure focus content hubs with clear audience value. The
sites are not dominated by highly visible branding but instead deliver
value in the insight and information they offer, albeit underpinned by

FIGURE 8.1 Approaches to story hub structure

CONTENT HUBS

STANDALONE BRAND NAME ON-SITE BRANDED ALTERNATIVES

These hubs are built to An aggregate space for your Other approaches include
resemble online magazines – content that sits within the hosting your content on a
visual, led with images, main corporate URL or simple blog page, seeding
tabular style, powerful appears to, using a vanity content throughout various
headlines, values-led URL. Often will be separately pages on your corporate
content. branded with a relevant website, or using your
These sites are built on a name. Regular updated landing page or home page
standalone URL and are low content drives traffic to the as a content window.
on branding. They often take main website, and encourages
considerable effort, time and audiences through the sales EXAMPLES
energy to build and maintain. funnel. McKinsey.com
EXAMPLES EXAMPLES BCG.com
Eni: Eniday Centrica: Stories
Aon: The One Brief Dell: Perspectives
TCS: Digital Empowers UPS: Knowledge Centre
MHI: Spectra
150 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

brand examples and a light touch or proprietary promotion. In the

main the content and stories within these sites – and others such as
the long-established GE Reports5 – are informative, high quality and
of standalone interest and value.
Most of these sites have a bold and impactful front page with
strong imagery in a mobile responsive design. The magazine is gener-
ally branded with a distinct name and is separate to the company’s
main website; ideally look to subtle branding (often this is on the
footer page or top right as a simple logo). If you do choose an online
magazine format, remember your front page is an opportunity to mix
bold imagery with some cracking headlines that not only encapsulate
your story but engage your user or reader.
These content hubs are often staffed like magazines – they’ll have
a dedicated content team led by an editor with a clear sense of mission
and purpose and a standalone budget with which to purchase or
commission content. Some of the best examples of these sites have
been in existence for many years and have built considerable audi-
ences in that time, attracted often by specialist knowledge and a
consistent tone of voice and quality of content. The standalone site
Eniday6 (described as a project by energy supplier Eni.com, with light
Eni branding) tells the stories of ‘new frontiers in the sector and of
the people who work every day to transform the Earth’s natural
resources into energy’. It is focused on promoting positive stories
around energy.
Aon’s magazine The One Brief 7 bills itself as a space that brings
audiences ‘thought-provoking perspective from experts from around
the world’. It delivers content on an expert, professional level, focus-
ing on an audience of business leaders. Senior Manager for Content,
Global Marketing, Venetta Linas Paris, says that the company
designed The One Brief as a ‘champion of brand journalism’ that
helps the company articulate more clearly their narrative across vary-
ing points of view to give a broad set of audiences insight on various
important topics.8 She wanted to shift the audience from a general
brand awareness of Aon to a clear understanding of the breadth of
topics that they cover.
 CONTENT HUBS: FINDING A HOME FOR YOUR STORIES 151

CASE STUDY
GE Reports

How do you tackle communicating with broad, worldwide audiences if you

are a company with a history of more than 120 years, and more than
280,000 employees around the world? This is the challenge for GE, which is
known for its innovative approach to content. Long thought of as the ‘poster
child’ of corporate storytelling, the GE Reports hub is at the heart of the GE
content marketing play, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers every
month with its Wired-style articles focusing on science, tech and innovation.
Editor in Chief, GE, Tomas Kellner, says he wanted to ensure that the
magazine tells people something new. He has spoken about focusing ‘100
per cent on storytelling’, creating stories with ‘real protagonists’ and ‘real
outcomes’.9 Kellner also dictates that all pieces published in GE Reports must
tell the reader something new that they won’t have known before. Kellner is
the author of many of the stories on GE Reports and travels the world to seek
them out and report on them, but the network of regionalized sites is also
supported by market-level agencies and partners to deliver more targeted,
localized content. Kellner writes:
It’s a news hub where thousands of readers come every day for news and
opinions about the latest technological breakthroughs and developments,
including the future of medicine, power generation and aviation. It’s also a
place where investors learn how GE makes money.10

On-site or standalone magazine?

The brands outlined above have committed to building an offsite
brand with a clear masthead. That’s a long-term commitment of
resource. Many other brands have chosen to house their content hub
on their main website – either independently branded (for instance,
the World Economic Forum’s Agenda site) or simply delivered as
Insights or Perspectives.
These sites might not have the benefit of being a standalone brand,
but nonetheless can be a suitable way to create a home for your brand
journalism.
152 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Establish clarity of vision and mission

Most of the hubs outlined in this chapter are well resourced and have
been in existence for some time. They’ve grown, engaged audiences
and proven their worth for communications and marketing teams.
As with all of your brand journalism, establishing a clear mission
for your output is important from the start. If you want to commit to
a regular, dedicated publication (whether niche in subject or broad in
interest) you will need substantial time and resources on the project.
Review the chapters on ‘establishing your strategy’ to understand
how you can map your aims and audiences, as well as your outcomes.
Whatever the nature, size or background of your audience, they
need to feel that the content that’s hosted on the site is relevant,
targeted and of value. Ensure you have done your groundwork before
you start on what areas are of interest. The content should tap into a
specific area of interest, niche or industry priority – or a story they
feel is relevant to them or their business – and it needs to offer a solu-
tion or insight. Carry out a competitor audit (discover how to in
Chapter 5 on story mining) before you start to map exactly where
there is a place for your focus or subject area.
UK-based energy and services company Centrica developed its
content hub – called Stories, and hosted on the main Centrica website
– with specific targeted audiences in mind, and a longer-term approach
to winning, as former Director of Digital Communications Laura
Price explained:

When we created our content hub, we never intended for it to be a

quick win; it was never going to be something where we did a couple of
stories and then we’d go back to our old methods of communication.
We took it really seriously, and it was going to become the mainstay of
our communications activity. The brilliance of this was that often, in an
organization, you are waiting for news to be delivered to you internally
by business units that you can then publish, or you are waiting for
something to happen. When you are commissioning and creating your
own content for your own content hub, you are in total control of what
you’re putting out and when you’re putting it out – it was always a
long-term play for us.
 CONTENT HUBS: FINDING A HOME FOR YOUR STORIES 153

Global IT multinational Tata Consultancy Services created its

­standalone content hub, Digital Empowers, as the heart of a single
campaign, launching it at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The
theme is the need to demonstrate where tech can ‘do good’, according
to TCS Chief Marketing and Communications Officer (Global
Markets) Abhinav Kumar:

We launched the Digital Empowers campaign and site to promote

a more progressive and positive view of the potential of digital
technologies. Too much of the current narrative on technology in
the media today is negative (job losses through automation, privacy
encroachment, cybersecurity breaches etc) and we wanted to also bring
out the other side of the coin – all the good that technology has enabled
for humans. The platform was focused on bringing out the stories
from us and our partners on where technology is being used to do
good. We built a mobile app for farmers and fishermen that gives them
access to information they might not have had in the past, for instance,
empowering them with pricing, market and weather information. Armed
with a better understanding of prices, they are able to secure better value
for their produce and reduce their dependence on intermediaries who
have historically preyed on them. We want to bring out the positive
impact of technology. Using stories to deliver messages is not a new
trend – we’ve known about the impact of stories since we were hunter
gatherers, and the emotional connection that stories can bring is not new.
We want these stories to capture people’s attention, and keep it.

Find the right stories

How do you find the right stories for your content hub? There is
more detail in Chapter 4 on ‘Finding the narrative’, but here is an
overview of how to get started:

1 Start with your business aims or priorities – where is the company

or organization going and what are the product areas, geographies
or services it is offering?
154 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

2 Map the interests of your audiences using a tool such as Onalytica,

Radarly or Pulsar. There are many other tools on the market, and
all will be able to segment what your target audiences are interested
in and what they are discussing online.
3 Create a list that represents a minimum of a dozen challenges that
your audience faces in their business lives where your viewpoint
would be welcomed or can service a purpose:
a. Think high level first:
–– How do they keep up with the changing landscape?
–– How do they ensure they have the right skills and knowledge
to succeed in the future workspace?
–– How do they understand some of the key challenges of their
industry? What are these challenges?
b. Move into more specific topics that are related to their specific
area of expertise or industry:
–– What are the key influences on the business landscape?
–– How are others responding to these influences and challenges?
–– What is best practice in this arena, industry or sector?
4 Once you have developed your headline narratives or areas of
interest you can build your editorial team or news team to support
story mining and story surfacing from within your organization.
You can read more about these techniques in Chapter 5.

High-quality content for specialist audiences

Successful content hubs are those that host stories with impact,
provide value for discrete audiences and signpost clearly what’s on
their site. A hub such as SAP’s D!gitalist11 offers a wide range of
content aimed at the C-suite and executives in the broad technology
space, but much of its content is broad, wide-ranging and of general
interest to a range of audiences. By creating stories that are simply
interesting and easy to read, the D!gitalist team has created a great
hub that offers ongoing value and a real reason to subscribe. Content
 CONTENT HUBS: FINDING A HOME FOR YOUR STORIES 155

ranges from high-level business insight tackling issues such as ­diversity

and the future of work, through areas of interest more closely aligned
to the broad technology sector (CIO knowledge, CFO knowledge)
through stories much more closely linked to SAP’s business offer such
as cloud and cybersecurity. Stories are segmented again on the site
using two indexed menus encompassing customer experience, the
digital economy, machine learning and the Internet of Things.
A site such as SAP’s D!gitalist leverages content from across this
huge organization, with contributors coming from all areas, sectors
and geographies and able to deliver content that can be relevant
across the wide range of topics covered by the site. Krista Ruhe was,
until recently, Editor in Chief of D!gitalist Magazine for SAP, and
explained the concept and approach of the site to me:

I think it’s essential to engage customers and potential customers in

ways beyond marketing to them with product and services information.
One of the approaches we take with the D!gitalist is to offer multiple
points of view that surround complex issues that our target audience is
trying to tackle. If we can give them content that they need to be better
informed and better at their jobs, we have added value to their lives.
That value builds trust, which grows to purchase consideration.
We do a yearly survey of our readership. In the survey, we ask
readers to compare the D!gitalist to other publications where they are
seeking information about digital transformation. They mentioned
publications like Harvard Business Review, Forrester, and McKinsey.
That’s great company to be in.
We [also] find that content marketing is a great way to build
credibility on a topic. You need credibility before you can successfully
engage in a sales motion or even a marketing motion for that matter.
Content marketing plays very effectively at the top of the funnel where
a person with purchase authority or influence is gathering credible
information to understand complex topics along their customer journey.

Sites such as Aon’s The One Brief12 are publishing upwards of three
stories per theme per month, building a robust and deep library of
material for readers. The site has no obvious published publication
156 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

dates, which can be helpful if your content is evergreen and you need
it to have an enduring shelf life on the site. If your content is timely
and needs to be current and up to date, it makes sense to insert your
date of publication and update any references, rates or currency
information on a regular basis.
Once you and your team have established your rhythm then stick
to it; plotting your resources across your year and managing budgets
accordingly will ensure that you don’t spend your entire resource or
budget in the first few months of the financial year.
Building a strawman, or a simple calendar, as you develop your
strategy will enable you to maintain your rhythm and plan specific or
targeted campaigns in addition to your drumbeat output.
According to Amy Hatch, the journalistic and editorial talent
behind SAP Hybris’ The Future of Customer Engagement and
Commerce (FCEC), the key to success with the site was providing
high-­quality, high-value articles that were produced consistently and
regularly.13 The website’s accompanying newsletter has open rates of
between 21 and 23 per cent, according to Michael Mischker, SAP
Global VP of Digital Marketing – but most subscribers will engage
with seven to eight articles on the site before choosing to subscribe.
They take the time to analyse if the content is relevant and of quality
and value to them before committing to signing up.

Expanding corporate storytelling

A slightly different content hub model comes from a site such as BCG.
com from Boston Consulting Group. This site builds storytelling and
brand journalism into the entire site – starting with its home page –
integrating direct corporate headlines such as recent performance
results with brand journalism and thematic content and storytelling.
Whilst not technically a content hub, the Newsroom page of the BCG
website is more magazine than PR – with pieces on trends in fintech
and microfinance, tailored to the expert financial audience.
The BCG website14 has its insight and thought leadership content
front and centre – one image, and story, dominates the front page,
providing multiple angles and touchpoints from one piece of research.
Offering deep insight on the value of diversity, the impact of big data
 CONTENT HUBS: FINDING A HOME FOR YOUR STORIES 157

on corporate life, the disruption of retail, the team behind the Boston
Consulting Group Perspectives platform is working hard to pull out
engaging themes and insight from the global partnership. The stories
are distributed and amplified across multiple social media platforms,
building a high-quality organic audience to whom the company can
communicate.

Themes driven by audience

If you want to build real empathy with your audience, ensure you
are plugged into the stories that matter to them. If you look at the
content hub of Duke Energy (based in North Carolina, US), called
Illumination,15 it promises to deliver stories that ‘enlighten, inform
and inspire’. Launched in 2016, the site covers stories of energy saving,
energy delivery and efficiency advice, and a glimpse into the behind-
the-scenes life of those who work at the company. It feels empathetic
and authentic, growing out of an internal site aimed at employees.
Greg Efthimiou, co-Editor of Illumination at launch, said that brand
journalism is a way to connect directly with the company’s audiences,
driving growth through social media and an email distribution list.16

CASE STUDY
HPE Enterprise.nxt – a specialist audience
Hewlett Packard Enterprise launched its targeted enterprise.nxt17 content hub to
engage a specialist technical audience (namely ‘IT pros’) with the type of
magazine content that would appeal to this niche. Content on the hub stretches
from broad technical to specialist. Key to all of the content developed is
accessibility, vibrancy and an engaging tone – again, the writers and editors are
striving to make this content ‘relatable’ and relevant to those who are reading it.
The site bills itself as ‘the latest analysis, research and practical advice from
leading experts’ and boasts 1.2 million subscribers to its weekly email.
Subsections are focused on topics like emerging tech, containers and innovation,
and the content is developed with arresting visual images and punchy headlines
to appeal to readers and subscribers. Not only is the branding subtle, but the look
is stylish and classy and the tone of voice warm and engaging. Just another
example of where the tech/engineering sector has stolen a march on some other
industry sectors when it comes to brand journalism.
158 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Create a clear structure

To ensure that audiences are clear on what they will be reading and
seeing on your content hub on an ongoing basis, build a simple thematic
structure that can flex with your business needs and requirements.
Ideally start by segmenting your audiences and identifying their busi-
ness needs and requirements. Use your understanding of these needs to
develop those stories that are relevant and prescient, and that link back
to your core business. Aon, for instance, a professional services firm and
insurer, tackles the subjects of risk and innovation, people and organiza-
tions, and capital and economics on its hub, The One Brief.18 These are
broad enough themes to be flexible when required, and to allow content
to shift with any change in business priorities.
Build interest in your topic further – and demonstrate your cura-
tion credentials – by adding a right-hand navigation bar with further
reading from within your own content hub, and consider including a
further reading list of a handful of relevant articles at the bottom of
each article on your site. This could be your own proprietary content,
but it might also include links to external sites delivering more
in-depth insight within mainstream media, such as Fortune magazine
or the Washington Post.
The benefits of developing a standalone brand magazine are multi-
ple, but the commitment in terms of time, focus and budget should not
be underestimated. As with any product in today’s digital environment,
readers will expect an ongoing, two-way conversation and regularity of
content upload. If you pursue this approach, prepare for a reasonably
long-term commitment and an investment in decent content, whether
you source that internally or externally. Those brands who have commit-
ted to this type of content have benefited, certainly, but they have gained
senior buy-in to a serious and substantial investment to do so.

Notes
1 Hewlett Packard Enterprise (nd) enterprise.nxt. Available from: https://www.
hpe.com/us/en/insights/topics.html (archived at https://perma.cc/9CW8-N3EL)
2 Ups (nd). Available from: https://www.ups.com/us/en/services/knowledge-
center/landing.page (archived at https://perma.cc/9JT5-WYG7)
 CONTENT HUBS: FINDING A HOME FOR YOUR STORIES 159

3 Walmart Today (nd). Available from: https://blog.walmart.com/ (archived at

https://perma.cc/A5FF-5ACS)
4 IBM Perspectives (nd) IBM. Available from: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/think/
uk-en/category/perspectives/ (archived at https://perma.cc/E7LT-NJPX)
5 GE Reports (nd) GE. Available from: https://www.ge.com/reports/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/7U8G-7XUW)
6 Eniday (nd). Available from: https://www.eniday.com/en/ (archived at https://
perma.cc/JF62-MFUH)
7 The One Brief (nd). Available from: https://theonebrief.com/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/3KNQ-XGCV)
8 Johnson, A (2018) Aon shares why its content scorecard is a must, Content
Marketing Institute, 3 August. Available from: https://contentmarketinginstitute.
com/2018/08/aon-content-scorecard/ (archived at https://perma.cc/AZA2-FPPD)
9 Lazauskas, J (2015) ‘We Believe in Stories’: GE Reports’ Tomas Kellner reveals
how he built the world’s best brand mag, The Content Strategist, Contently,
11 February. Available from: https://contently.com/2015/02/11/we-believe-in-
stories-ge-reports-tomas-kellner-reveals-how-he-built-the-worlds-best-brand-
mag/ (archived at https://perma.cc/JT82-8YUN)
10 Kellner, T (2015) GE Reports makes best branded content list, GE, 28
December. Available from: https://www.ge.com/reports/ge-reports-makes-
contentlys-best-content-marketing-of-2015-list/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
AP38-GNNW)
11 D!gitalist Magazine (nd). Available from: https://www.digitalistmag.com/
(archived at https://perma.cc/735F-C66P)
12 The One Brief (nd). Available from: https://theonebrief.com/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/3KNQ-XGCV)
13 Papandrea, D (2017) How SAP Hybris’ content marketing drives conversions,
leads + ROI, Newscred Insights, 17 May. Available from: https://insights.
newscred.com/sap-hybris-content-marketing/ (archived at https://perma.
cc/7UUA-T36K)
14 BCG.com (nd). Available from: https://www.bcg.com/ (archived at https://
perma.cc/86LT-X3WJ)
15 Duke Energy (nd) Illumination. Available from: https://illumination.duke-
energy.com/ (archived at https://perma.cc/U2MB-USR5)
16 Boraks, D (2016) Duke Energy feature site aims to build brand, Duke Energy,
23 February. Available from: https://www.wfae.org/post/duke-energy-feature-
site-aims-build-brand#stream/0 (archived at https://perma.cc/R4CJ-TFQ8)
17 Hewlett Packard Enterprise (nd) enterprise.nxt. Available from: https://www.
hpe.com/us/en/insights/topics.html (archived at https://perma.cc/9CW8-N3EL)
18 The One Brief (nd). Available from: https://theonebrief.com/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/3KNQ-XGCV)
160

THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

 161

09

Distribution and amplification:

growing loyal audiences

There’s no point creating content that’s well researched, carefully

crafted, expertly written and properly produced if it doesn’t actually
get consumed. Your aim is for your brand journalism to reach the
audiences it is intended to be seen by. Better still, it then gathers its
own momentum, having been spread across to other people’s
networks on your behalf by bought-in and highly engaged readers. In
other words content needs distribution, and then amplification.
Content needs to gain its own traction; it needs to find its own routes
to audiences, and ideally expand on these as it travels.
Distribute your content well (including through paid means – see
later), and the chances are you’ll gain ‘earned’ amplification organi-
cally, as the people you initially distribute to move it on. Ideally you
will kick-start the ‘frictionless system of sharing’ that will encourage
your content to do the B2B equivalent of ‘going viral’.
You can start your distribution approach by leveraging the simple
power of organic engagement and sharing across your primary plat-
forms, growing it with the support of targeted SEO and a fleshed-out
approach to search. Social media amplification across channels relevant
to you will boost audiences, and paid promotion will turbo-charge
volumes again, and help deliver your content to very specific audiences.
162 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

FIGURE 9.1 Distributing your content

Build with PAID media drives • Syndication tools

paid engagement and • Native advertising
interactions • Organic platform
engagement with targeted
quality messaging
SOCIAL MEDIA • Paid advertising and
Max out on amplifies and promotion
social media shares • Influencer relationships

SEO supports and • Integrated SEO terms

drives organic • Tactical snippet creation
Integrate engagement and • Story structure, headlines
search success and tagging
• Targeted, quality story
creation and research
• Refinement and constant
OWNED content - success review
Optimize
all formats • Distribution via lists
organic
• Amplification via internal
network and staff
• Right platform, right
content

Optimize organic distribution

As recently as just a few years ago it was enough to produce high-
quality pieces of content that worked by themselves and gained
organic traction, but today, with very limited exceptions, you need to
target specific audiences with each chosen platform early in the
process, and then encourage these audiences to act as your extended
distributors for you.
To do this, you must of course create content that fulfils the needs
or interests of the audience and be of value to them (see Chapter 4,
‘Finding the narrative’). You must also expect your audience to grow
over time (aided by supplying a regular flow of content to your
content hub). The beauty of optimizing organic growth is that your
readers do the hard work of amplifying your content for you. But
they will only do it if you meet their own expectations and fulfil
their needs. Here’s what you need to know to ensure organic growth
happens.
 DISTRIBUTION AND AMPLIFICATION 163

Create consistently high-quality output

It’s obvious, but you almost can’t bang this drum enough. As author
Jonah Berger wrote, in his book Contagious: How to build word of
mouth in the digital age: ‘People don’t want to share things that look
like ads. They don’t want to look like they are a walking advertise-
ment for a company. But they will share really engaging content, even
if that content happens to relate to a brand…’. He adds: ‘You need to
design content that’s like a Trojan horse. There’s an exterior to it
that’s really exciting, remarkable and has social currency or practical
value.’1

Leverage your lists

Strong, original and ongoing thought leadership and content has
significantly more chance of growing organically if your initial distri-
bution networks and mailing lists are second to none.
Since 2018 (with the introduction of the GDPR regulation that
curtailed the storage of people’s personal details without permission),
many publishers have had to rebuild their lists from scratch. Those
that already target content to largescale audiences will have already
segmented their list to ensure they are carefully targeted. Having
done this though, the one advantage of the regulations is that market-
ers can at least segment any new content on a regular basis to each of
these different audiences.
The process of aligning certain pieces of content to particular lists
should underline the fact your lists are powerful data sets in their
own right. It’s well worth analysing which are the most successful
stories to bundle or deliver to certain groups.
Part of the success of a list will be how stories are initially presented
in email blasts to users in the first place. Click-through rates for email
are still higher than for many other distribution approaches (ranging
from 6 to 16 per cent depending on which sector you are in2), so
remember to keep newsletters tight, with the introduction and story
descriptions contained within them short. Stick to a simple format,
with minimal images and, of course, ensure it’s optimized for mobile.
164 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

You could do worse than learning from what other B2B organiza-
tions are doing in terms of newsletter distribution. Most of the brand
journalism industry leaders keep their newsletters simple, clean and
effective. Make people feel they’re being spammed and that’s when
you’re giving your audience ample opportunity to opt out.
Brand journalism roundup newsletter examples from the B2B
space include:
●●
Global oil and gas conglomerate Eni sends a three-story email
(normally on broad energy topics, including renewables), each week
for its brand journalism activities called the Eniday Newsletter.
●●
McKinsey distributes a weekly ‘Shortlist’ of its content, neatly
summarized as ‘Our best ideas, quick and curated’.
●●
Aon’s The One Brief will often promote only one main story in its
regular newsletter, focusing on one of the key stories from its
content hub.
●●
SAP’s customer service team sends out two to three selected high-
lights as well as contributor profiles with picture.
●●
Redshift by Autodesk delivers two key stories in its weekly round-
up, with images and one promoted video.
●●
The Forecast by Nutanix has an editorial introduction followed by
links to the key stories of the week.

Revise and re-surface

Not every piece of your content needs to be original, and nor does it
need to be absolutely ‘new’ in terms of the ideas that it is encapsulat-
ing or harnessing. Any content strategy that needs volume (especially
if you have developed a content hub with multiple streams of content),
should always include a plan for re-surfacing older material that is
evergreen in nature.
Luke Kintigh, Head of Content Distribution and Social Media at
Autodesk, the company behind the online magazine Redshift, says
most of the content it produces is surfaced more than once. ‘Our
strategy is not to break the news’, says Kintigh. ‘Our strategy is to
 DISTRIBUTION AND AMPLIFICATION 165

find the white space in a trend. We are not creating a lot of real-time
event coverage, it’s more thought-provoking in-depth content, and a
lot is evergreen.’3
To ensure recycled content is a booster of audiences, make sure
you:
●●
Establish a system for surfacing repeat content: use your data and
apply a consistent retrospective scan (after one month, three
months or six months, for example), to source and discover content
that can be re-posted.
●●
Audit each piece: it may well be that time references and/or any
references to names or titles are now out of date or irrelevant.
Consider how news events might have changed the context or any
of the commentary.
●●
Re-work pieces: particularly those that are strong on numbers but
probably need freshening or updating. Changing the headline,
updating references, replacing imagery or key statistics or includ-
ing a new interview can all revitalize a piece and give it a second
bounce with new readers.

Use your staff to amplify

Never underestimate the value of one of your best amplification
tools: your own staff. It can be a challenge to encourage staff members
to share your content consistently to their networks, but employees
are a particularly fruitful place to amplify organic content. Here is
how to get started:
●●
Find the evangelists: first analyse your teams to understand who are
the key thinkers and influencers in your organization. Who is shar-
ing their story, their ideas and their writing in a successful way?
●●
Share internally: use your internal communications hub or internal
newsletters to share links and ideas for stories as you push them
out on social media or hubs such as Facebook Workplace.
●●
Develop a toolkit: for launches, campaigns and strategic pushes,
you could consider developing toolkits incorporating template
166 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

content, messaging, images and ideas to support people’s personal

posting.
●●
Training sessions: share your knowledge and insight of what works
well on social media to the rest of your team(s) and individuals
keen to get involved. Devolve the training, record it and share it
via internal collaboration tools to amplify the message internally.
●●
Implement a tool: large organizations should consider using tools
such as LinkedIn Elevate, or an SaaS tool that will support multi-
platform sharing for your own content internally.
●●
Brainstorm sessions: at your story-mining brainstorm sessions,
encourage staff to report on how individual pieces of content have
performed, and what feedback they have received when they have
distributed stories.
●●
Gamify the process: encourage sharing by using gamifying where
you can, building in targets and goals. Create competitions and
give out rewards for successful sharing.

Integrate search
Two organizations feature regularly in this book – The World Economic
Forum and SAP. It’s with good reason. Both have been extremely
successful in using brand journalism content for many years to drive
an organic audience.
In particular, their content creation teams ensure that it’s as easy as
possible for content to be found by search – which means clever
application of data and use of SEO (search engine optimization).
These are just some of the considerations they make sure they address:
●●
Writing and re-writing headlines: the best creators think innova-
tively about how they frame your headlines, including using lists
where possible. One tip is to include long-tail search terms where
possible.
●●
Deep research to deliver better topics: easily found content has
been well researched with a target audience in mind. Use Quora
 DISTRIBUTION AND AMPLIFICATION 167

queries and Google searches to find how people are searching for
content, to help you come up with new ideas or new thinking/
approaches.
●●
Stay informed: top-notch content creators watch the content their
audience is watching, go to the events they speak at, and read the
subjects they are blogging or re-posting on.
●●
Newsjack: in Chapter 2 I outlined how you can newsjack to create
and deliver great story ideas. Review some of those suggestions for
your own content.
●●
Event coverage: content creators review largescale events by
industry (or, even better, attend them) to develop their own content.
They hear what industry thought leaders are talking about and
discussing and use these insights as starters for their own content.

Are your articles created with SEO in mind? Best practice includes:
●●
Having a keyword focus: choose keywords as part of your overarching
content strategy – what themes are you focusing on and what areas of
those themes will be a priority for you? If, for instance, the impact of 5G
on telephony is a subject area you are interested in, create headers and
content that reflect that search term. It’s possible to build an audience,
especially for your evergreen content, using long-tail search approaches
like this. SAP’s FCEC content hub dominates in more than 250 specialist,
long-tail search terms through consistent focus on quality and
commitment to key themes and topics. For more information, Neil Patel
writes at length about the benefits of long-tail keywords4 for SEO.
●●
Sourcing key terms: there are many tools out there to help you source
information about topics that are trending and which are of interest to
your audiences. You can find instant guidance on search terms on
Google Analytics or Google Trends. Other tools such as BuzzSumo, Pulsar
and Parse.ly offer a wealth of data that is limited only by knowing how
to best use it to answer the questions you have. Half of the battle is
knowing what questions to ask.
●●
Using meta descriptions: write a meta description that clearly
identifies what’s in your piece and leverages your SEO terms.
168 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Max out on social media

National Public Radio in the United States famously created the
acronym ‘COPE’ – or Create Once, Publish Everywhere – and it’s a
neat way to consider your approach to stretching your content as far
as possible both on your own content hubs and on social media.
There’s a very good reason why this is relevant. According to
research by DemandBase and DemandGen (in their 2018 B2B Buyers’
Survey Report5), more than half of B2B buyers say they rely on social
media to research vendors and solutions. In addition to this, more
than a third said they asked for suggestions and recommendations
from other social network users, and specifically connected with indi-
vidual thought leaders directly to ask their opinions about issues.
Before you start, you will still need to create a coherent brand story
across all of your amplification channels as you seek to drive maxi-
mum returns from your high-quality journalistic content. Return to
your audience personas to understand where they are, how they digest
content and what platforms they prefer in the various geographies in
which you wish to engage with them. It’s likely also that your toler-
ance for risk and innovation will play an important part of which
platform(s) you choose to use for your social media amplification.
Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia, a full-service advertising
agency,6 has built his own ‘reverse pyramid’ approach to taking content
and re-purposing it for multiple platforms. His team took just one of
his keynote speeches and re-purposed it into more than 30 pieces of
further content for distribution on his social media channels, which
subsequently reached more than 35 million views.

FIGURE 9.2 The content distribution flow

Audience analysis Platform choice Content creation Distribution

• Where is your • Primary channels: • Take your • Upload and share

audience (regions, choose your cornerstone according to your
geographies primary channels content – blog, content calendar
behaviours)? according to long form, • Review
• Which platforms audience and podcast, video etc performance and
are they on? location • ‘Atomise’ and re- repeat/schedule
• Secondary version into repeats as
• What are the
topic areas they channels: add snackable content required
are interested in? secondary for distribution • Engage with
channels if time
audience to drive
and budget allows
conversation
 DISTRIBUTION AND AMPLIFICATION 169

To do this yourself, each channel will need a specific approach or

hook to engage your audience, whether you are creating organic posts,
organic posts with ad support, or straight adverts. Our learnings on
how to craft these messages include:
●●
Headline refinement: work hard on your headlines to ensure they
are short, clear and punchy. Keep sentences active and use action
words at the start of both headings and main text.
●●
Images: faces work well, so do clear, bold and powerful images.
Don’t use distant wide shots. Use charts and statistics, which work
especially well on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
●●
Play around with length: the length of posts depends on your chan-
nel and will need to be tested as you build and grow your activity.
Facebook posts can be kept short and sharp, but you might want
to test longer posts on Instagram, potentially up to 200 words with
further links to read more.
●●
Trackable shortlinks: if you are a larger brand and are distributing
large amounts of content you can look into creating a ‘personalized
shortlink’ that includes your brand name. If budget prohibits this,
there are plenty of providers who can deliver shortlinks for sharing
across platforms.
●●
#hashtags: where appropriate – especially for platforms such as
Instagram – use all relevant and useful hashtags to build audience
engagement and drive engagement with your content. If working
with influencers, or named individuals with their own followers or
audiences online, then @reference them also.

Create multiple assets that tap into different news lines, or pull out a
statistic and create a matching graphic. Use pull quotes from a range
of key people quoted or referenced in your article.

Build with paid distribution

Organic audiences will grow over a tracked period of time, but if you
are in a hurry, or you have a very targeted campaign or project to
170 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

promote, you will need to grow your audience using paid content
distribution. Because it can be challenging building an audience from
scratch, the benefit of using a paid approach is that you target audi-
ences very tactically and then focus on growing your organic audience
after that.
My main recommendation is to use a selection of channels and
build them up in parallel, testing as you progress. Over-focusing on
one channel is not a sensible strategy; in social media marketing,
nothing stays the same for very long, so it’s far better to test and
learn. Remember you are building your audiences on rented plat-
forms and you will be at the mercy of the platforms if they change or
tweak their algorithms.
Don’t forget to also set a clear budget before you embark on your
social paid strategy. At least with testing, you can turn off the chan-
nels that don’t deliver the results you need, and boost activity on
those channels that do show results.
Table 9.1 shows the key platforms to consider for both organic
and paid B2B growth.

TABLE 9.1 Key platforms for organic and paid B2B growth

Detail Activity: Organic Activity: Paid

Facebook 54 per cent of B2B Organic reach has been Choose posts that are
marketers use declining since 2014, but performing well
Facebook as a tool the average organic reach for organically and
for their business a Facebook post is 6.4 per appeal to your
and the age of the cent of a page’s likes – so audience and boost
average Facebook there’s still engagement to these posts,
user is rising. Best be had. Average engagement potentially running a
used as part of a with a post (comment or number of
broader organic and share) is 3.9 per cent. Use campaigns
paid approach. native video if you have it, sequentially to
along with text and image determine the best
posts; Facebook stories and performer. Consider
FB Live are also options for re-targeting to
B2B coverage. lookalike audiences
with FB ads.

(continued)
 DISTRIBUTION AND AMPLIFICATION 171

TABLE 9.1 (Continued)

Detail Activity: Organic Activity: Paid

LinkedIn More than 550 Use your company pages to Use your budget to
million professional amplify your brand promote specific
users are now active journalism material on a posts to target
on LinkedIn globally, regular schedule or calendar, audiences, specific
sharing information, using either text-based people or job titles or
news and personal content, video or live video if geographies.
updates. Use for available.
quality brand Companies like PwC,
amplification and WeWork and Siemens are all
engagement with using their own native
themed brand versions of social video, live
stories. video or animations to
deliver messaging on the
platform.

Instagram The photo- and Use video where you can, Use paid ads and
video-sharing app but don’t overlook text and download
has a billion monthly bold imagery to draw clickthrough
users and benefits attention to your B2B brand. promotions to share
from the growing Take a look at the deeper material, to
appeal of video and Economist’s channel, GE, or encourage sign-ups
image-based the Harvard Business Review and downloads, or to
content. Use it to Instagram channels to see grow subscriptions.
deliver short-form how to deliver intelligent
versions of your content in a short-form
thought leadership version. Do not shy away
and brand from longer text posts
journalism. Don’t accompanied by bold,
overlook it as simply arresting images. Use Stories
for B2C audiences. for live events.

Twitter You will need high As your tweets do not reach Create paid
volumes of social a high percentage of the campaigns targeted
media posts on available audience, build a at key audience
Twitter to engage robust repeat schedule groups.
your audience and without over-promoting or
drive meaningful over-repeating. Include
traffic – per post clickable, tweetable quotes
engagement. in your copy for ease of
sharing, as well as adding
social sharing bites to each
article, video or content hub.
172 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

CASE STUDY
Redshift: Building a quality audience with a targeted paid approach

Redshift by Autodesk is an online content hub that publishes high-quality

brand journalism about the ‘future of making’. Redshift’s mission is to ‘explore
how products, buildings, and cities will be built tomorrow, and into the future’.
Its head of content distribution and social media at Autodesk is Luke Kintigh,
and in an interview for this book, he explained how, in his view, you need to
build on a paid audience to grow engagement at the start of any volume
content play:
At Autodesk we aim to publish a target of three articles a week. Initially you
have to use paid amplification just to start building the audience.
I recommend using paid at first, but with the aim of using paid dollars to
gradually convert every paid reader into a repeat reader – for instance
through email, or you can get them to subscribe to your list. That person
could then become your customer.
The trick is to look beyond the numbers. At Autodesk the personas are clear
in terms of the people we are trying to acquire. We are trying to use tools
and data to understand our audiences – for instance, out of 10,000
views, are we reaching the people we want to influence? I think that
some content marketers only think about traffic, rather than who is behind
the numbers.

Other paid strategies

Broaden your reach with native advertising
Native advertising allows you to publish your brand journalism on
the platforms of traditional publishers through paid agreements.
A publication like BrandVoice from Forbes takes editorial content
from brands and publishes it within the Forbes magazine online.
Crucially though, it’s separated from the non-branded editorial content.
Many other traditional publishers – the New York Times (T Brand
Studio), Wall Street Journal (Custom Studios) and Washington Post
(WP BrandStudio) are also offering this sort of service, often with
in-house studios or newsrooms creating the multi-platform content for
 DISTRIBUTION AND AMPLIFICATION 173

brands in close alignment to the content they are publishing for the
un-­sponsored section of their newspaper, website or publication.
Generally brands that are creating native advertising are looking
for amplification to targeted audiences who they know will have an
affinity for their messaging. By publishing on a third-party platform
instead of their own, brands will benefit from both the wider network
and the differentiated amplification this can offer. Many traditional
publishers offer this type of placement (or a version of it), including
the Guardian and the Financial Times in the UK.
Advertisers in Forbes include Siemens and Mitsubishi Heavy
Industries, which have their own mini content hubs on the site to
engage directly with the Forbes audience, featuring high-quality
stories. The native advertising technique is similar to brand journal-
ism, with the journalists focusing on stories that build on the intersect
of the audience’s interests, with the brand’s focus or business priori-
ties. It’s worth noting, however, that placement and production will
involve a substantially higher budget commitment than publication
on your own platforms.

The rise (and rise) of influencer marketing

Another channel to consider for your brand journalism creation and
amplification is the B2B influencer. There have been many question
marks about the legitimacy of influencers for marketing purposes in
the B2C space, but they can have a role to play in your marketing
arsenal, especially with today’s focus on thought leadership and one-
to-many engagement.7
Often these people will be users or advocates of your business
already – and in this instance, I am thinking of influencers who are
outside of your organization, rather than internal. But as well as the
more established and high-profile individuals in your industries,
you might find influencers within your own company ranks who
you can encourage and who will thrive with support and guidance.
For more information on internal influencers, see Chapter 10 on
thought leadership.
174 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Global marketing speaker and author Neal Schaffer explained

to me:
One promising area that most companies overlook is the potential that
engaging with influencers can have for your business, even if you are a B2B
brand. Working with influencers in the B2B space usually is either content
related (guest posting, interviews, etc) or is event related (invite to attend,
moderate, or even speak at an event), but both methods can generate
fantastic results for the smart companies building relationships with and
collaborating together with B2B influencers for a win-win relationship.

Whilst the majority of the high-profile spend on influencer marketing

of the moment is in the B2C space, there are many B2B brands who
have been using influencers and specialists to engage for some time.
A tactical alignment can position your brand with authentic and
honest reviews, thought leadership and insight. It can also serve to
help your brand with amplification of your message during a time of
crisis – but this can only work if you have built a relationship and
established a connection. Authentic, specialist influencers are a
prerequisite; this is about depth and substance.

CASE STUDY
VMWare Influencer Network 8

The software company has a group of highly technical, engaged and active
bloggers and evangelists who write and comment on their products. The
network tends to discuss highly technical information, delivering insight and
helping problem-solve to a wider group of users. The VMW are community site
aggregates all chat with influencers across multiple social platforms. Top
influencers are ‘rewarded’ with access to beta tests and enhanced relationships
with product teams, along with site visits.

Influencer relationships might come in a range of guises:

Hosting your content: consider using an influencer, author or jour-

nalist who is a respected insider in your space to host a podcast or
video, or Q&A.
 DISTRIBUTION AND AMPLIFICATION 175

Testing your service or product: approach an influencer to consider

using your product. Ensure that person is a good fit for you (both
culturally and professionally)9 and that they are open to your brand
or product.
Creating content: approach B2B thinkers – internal or external – to
partner on articles or pieces of content, or videos on behalf of your
brand, or to become a brand ‘ambassador’.
Discussing your product: you can migrate your engagement with an
influencer from offline to online with round-table discussions,
event attendance or speaking.

CASE STUDY
Adobe Influencer Network

Adobe has been using influencers for some time as part of its marketing mix,
using experts across the breadth of the business. More than 50 influencers –
including high-profile journalists, marketers, writers and bloggers – were
brought to the recent Adobe Summit in 201910 and encouraged to post content
throughout the event. ‘We don’t necessarily set individual influencer goals,’
said Rani Mani, Head of Social Influencer Enablement at Adobe, on a recent
podcast.11 ‘Program by program or department by department, there are
different goals that each department has, and that each influencer contributes
to in a variety of ways. Our main objective is to play to the individual influencer’s
strengths.’

Ultimately, any partnerships should be approached carefully, and

strategically – think about high-quality, credible engagements that fit
with your brand aspiration. These are people who might have
knowledge and credibility within technical and specialist audiences –
they may be journalists or analysts. But also look around elsewhere.
You might well find other influencers engaging on Reddit, and on
chat rooms or industry forums.
176 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

SEEKING OUT AND ENGAGING WITH INFLUENCERS

Influencers can bring life to otherwise technical content or insights. They

can give a more practical, meaningful vector on your offering or product
but they need to be aligned in their goals with those of your brand
otherwise the relationship is unlikely to work.

Social media marketing consultant Mark Schaefer is Executive Director

of Schaefer Marketing Solutions and author of, most recently, Marketing
Rebellion, in which he espouses the importance of a new approach to
marketing that is human-centred and always starts with the customer.
Schaefer believes in the multiple benefits of an influencer outreach
programme. When done well, he argues, they can help to grow trust by
creating authentic advocacy and developing faster traction with a
message. In our mistrustful world, the influencer can make content
‘social proof’, as well as providing brands with immediate awareness.12

BUILDING B2B INFLUENCER RELATIONSHIPS

Step 1: Discovery
Use social channels, internal team members, external research to find
influencers and micro-influencers who are interested in or engaged with
the topic you are focused on. Ensure you are working with credible,
thoughtful people. Often those that are active in the online space might be
journalists and analysts who already have affiliations or publications that
they push their content to.

Step 2: Qualification
Work through your long list of potential influencers and analyse their depth
of expertise; ensure the influencers embody your values and have a solid
presence on social media. Match influencers or practitioners to the key
fields you are seeking partners for. This might break down to specific
divisions or groups in your organization, so specific expertise may be
required across each of these groups.

Step 3: Approach
Consider why or how this influencer could be relevant to your brand.
Approach in a respectful and measured way to start the conversation. Be clear
 DISTRIBUTION AND AMPLIFICATION 177

from the start what your expectations are and what you will want from your
influencer team. This is part of your marketing mix and, if it’s their livelihood,
your experts should be paid a fee for their time, experience and expertise.

Step 4: Engage
Once you have determined who you need, have approached them and got
your influencers on board, you should be creative about the work you are
expecting them to undertake on your behalf. This includes whether – or
how – you want them to endorse your brand. Ideally this will be done in as
subtle and transparent a way as possible – as with any content campaign, see
this as a long-term relationship that will deliver benefits as it grows organically
and reaches maturity over time. Ideally ensure your influencer sticks to his or
her authentic messaging and areas of interest to maintain authenticity.

Other paid approaches

Search engine marketing: if your budget allows, and you want to
deliver a tactical boost to a piece of content into a new market or
audience arena, you might consider using search engine marketing
for key pieces of content or groups of content in particular areas.
Syndication to publication platforms: services such as Taboola and
Outbrain will take your content and post it on other websites that
you can choose. The content will be marked as ‘paid’ or promotional,
and will be posted alongside other brand content from advertisers.
Partner advertising or banner advertising: if you are really keen to
drive an audience to a quality piece of content, you could always
consider delivering targeted ads or ads on partner sites.

The above is by no means an exhaustive list and even as I write, some

of the main social media channels will no doubt be tweaking their
algorithms or changing their advertising methodology to reflect their
changing business aspirations.
But the aim is unchanged: with a boost of judiciously located paid
spend you can really kick-start engagement and build a powerful
base from which to grow and build your outreach.
178 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Notes
1 Wharton (2013) ‘Contagious’: Jonah Berger on why things catch on,
Knowledge at Wharton, 13 March. Available from: https://knowledge.
wharton.upenn.edu/article/contagious-jonah-berger-on-why-things-catch-on/
(archived at https://perma.cc/NB4L-4QEW)
2 Constant Contact (2019) Average industry rates for email as of June 2019,
Constant Contact, 9 July. Available from: https://knowledgebase.
constantcontact.com/articles/KnowledgeBase/5409-average-industry-
rates?lang=en_US#compare (archived at https://perma.cc/Z9C3-ZWUF)
3 Quote from interview, carried out Friday 7 June, 2019
4 Neilpatel.com (nd) 5 Steps to building a successful organic traffic pipeline.
Available from: https://neilpatel.com/blog/5-steps-to-building-a-successful-
organic-traffic-pipeline/ (archived at https://perma.cc/76PH-VPY5)
5 Demand Gen (2018) 2018 B2B Buyers Survey Report,
Demand Gen Report, 2018. Available from: http://e61c88871f1fbaa6388d-
c1e3bb10b0333d7ff7aa972d61f8c669.r29.cf1.rackcdn.com/DGR_DG081_
SURV_B2BBuyers_Jun_2018_Final.pdf (archived at https://perma.cc/
5UKZ-KYCY)
6 garyvaynerchuck.com (2019) The Garyvee Content Strategy: how to grow and
distribute your brand’s social media content. Available from: https://www.
garyvaynerchuk.com/the-garyvee-content-strategy-how-to-grow-and-distribute-
your-brands-social-media-content/ (archived at https://perma.cc/5ML8-AFHT)
7 Weed, K (2018) The only solution to fake follower fraud is total eradication,
Marketing Week, 18 September. Available from: https://www.marketingweek.
com/2018/09/18/keith-weed-fake-follower-fraud-total-eradication/?cmpid=em~
newsletter~breaking_news~n~n&utm_medium=em&utm_source=newsletter&
utm_campaign=breaking_news&eid=6199809&sid=MW0001&adg=85454879-
9956-450A-B43D-B0A487FD0D56 (archived at https://perma.cc/V6HV-2DLK)
8 Troyer, J M (2017) The top 50 overall VMware influencers, Medium, 7 March.
Available from: https://medium.com/influence-marketing-council/the-top-50-overall-
vmware-influencers-7fc7ec32500e (archived at https://perma.cc/GN89-XDBR)
9 Convince&Convert (nd) How to Create a Thriving B2B Advocacy
Community, Convince&Convert. Available from: https://www.
convinceandconvert.com/podcasts/episodes/how-to-create-a-thriving-b2b-
advocacy-community/ (archived at https://perma.cc/3ZH2-4TRH)
10 Adobe Blog (nd) Introducing the 2019 Adobe Summit Insiders. Available from:
https://theblog.adobe.com/introducing-the-2019-adobe-summit-insiders/
(archived at https://perma.cc/N7EP-WYAX)
11 O’Shea Gorgone, K (2019) A B2B case study in influencer marketing: Adobe’s
Rani Mani on marketing smarts, Marketing Profs, 29 August. Available from:
https://www.marketingprofs.com/podcasts/2019/41716/b2b-influencer-adobe-rani-
mani-marketing-smarts?adref=nl082919 (archived at https://perma.cc/VP85-V24E)
12 Schaefer, M W (2015) The Content Code: Six essential strategies for igniting
your content, your marketing, and your business, Grow Publishing, p 130
 179

10

Thought leadership: insight

from your people

‘Thought leadership’ is an over-used phrase that often promises a lot

but delivers little. Much of what is called thought leadership is actu-
ally nothing of the sort – it’s neither well thought out, nor leading
edge. But innovative thinking that makes your people or your brand
stand out is an obvious addition to your marketing and communica-
tions plan that can work especially well as content at the top of your
sales funnel.
Insight and information delivered by leaders and experts who
command respect in their respective fields has an impact and punch
that other content does not. As a 2018 Edelman/LinkedIn survey
recently found, 45 per cent of the 1,000 decision makers polled said
they would invite an organization to bid on a project when they had
not previously considered them, after engaging with thought leader-
ship content.1 Some 55 per cent also regarded thought leadership as
a useful way to vet potential providers.
Innovative thinking makes your people or your brand stand out,
and excellent thought leadership should be just this – clever, insight-
ful and message-carrying in nature. As recent research from Forrester
has shown, empathetic and authentic content is trusted much more
than other sources.2
180 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Establish your vision and outcomes

Plenty of good thought leadership isn’t this at all – and even worse
news is the fact that readers will recognize poor thought leadership.
The same Edelman survey found only 18 per cent of the thought
leadership they encountered was of ‘excellent’ quality.3 Edelman
found poor-quality thought leadership not only damages an organi-
zation’s reputation, but damages its potential to win business too.
Both statistics are clear proof that any strategy for thought leadership
creation and delivery must be carefully planned. Like any type of
content, success can’t happen without significant time, energy and
investment.
According to research by Barry and Gironda,4 thought leaders are
often described as people who can do one or more of the following:
●●
drive conversations around shared passions;
●●
champion new directions or ideas;
●●
harness intellectual firepower;
●●
provide consistent education on relevant matters;
●●
provoke new mindsets for addressing upcoming challenges;
●●
communicate with clarity how big ideas turn into reality;
●●
develop actionable strategies.

Those people who are described as thought leaders aren’t ‘go-to

resources in their field of expertise’ for no reason. Ideally they should
be the foremost authorities on industry issues. They must have some-
thing new, or perhaps different, to say. They must also have a stature,
view or experience that means they will be trusted.
Thought leadership content must serve a purpose – it could be
answering customer pain points; it could also involve presenting a
solution or tactic that can help audiences solve a business challenge,
or be a wider narrative or ‘purpose led’ narrative that supports the
views or beliefs of the broader business.
Whichever one of these alternatives you choose, understanding
what great thought leadership should do is essentially an exercise in
answering a number of important questions, reflecting the strategy
development approach outlined in Chapter 3:
 THOUGHT LEADERSHIP 181

●●
Why are you creating thought leadership?
●●
Who are you talking to?
●●
What will you say?
●●
How will you deliver it?
●●
How will you sustain the flow?

Developing your talent pool

Great thought leadership can build brand engagement for your company
early in the customer journey, before a real need has even emerged. As
we’ve read, this is something that is incredibly important in B2B,
­especially where sales journeys can last many months or even years.
It’s worth saying from the outset that in the corporate world,
thought leadership does not have to originate from someone in an
executive role. However, it does require someone who can build
energy and engagement around their thinking. Corporate thought
leaders can be grouped into the following broad segments:

Visionaries Technicians Reflectors

Wide-ranging ideas, broad Those with technical insight, Those people who reflect on
thinkers who provide insight specialist knowledge and their own experience,
by tapping into the zeitgeist. innovation. thinking or work to deliver
advice or pull together other
people’s thoughts.

Skills you need to be on the hunt for won’t just be good writing – and
the written word is not the only format I advocate for delivering
great thought leadership. Arguably the greater challenge is finding
thinkers who can build sustained relationships with your target audi-
ences. Here’s how I suggest you go about this:
●●
Find ready-made evangelists: it makes utmost sense to build on
those people who have already established themselves as thought
leaders in your organization. If they are a specialist technical
182 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

person, they may also have a ready-made network or audience

passionate about their technical area. Finding them might be as
simple as looking round the room, but in larger organizations
identifying such people could be a much more labour-intensive
operation. To help, search for prolific publishers from your
organization on LinkedIn and Twitter and reach out to divisions
and managers to recommend thinkers or team members.
●●
Turn to your C-suite: whilst not all CEOs will be engaging, charismatic
or innovative in their thinking, there may be someone else in the
senior team who you can support and encourage to become a thought
leader. Look further afield than just the obvious. Seek out new and
different voices that reflect the values of the organization in an
authentic way. They don’t have to create their own content – it may
well be that you can pair them with a content producer who can
interview them and turn what they say into a Q&A or blog post.
●●
Grow your own: map and analyse those of your team who have high
follower numbers on their social media channels, strong engagement
or successful publishing profiles. Encourage them to create more
content and work with them to create narratives and streams of
content that really matter to them. Nurturing talent across the
organization will help drive engagement, sharing and distribution of
your content. Ideally you should aim to find voices from all areas,
geographies and levels that can represent your organization.

Employees hold the key

Sarah Goodall is a leading consultant on leveraging the power of
employee advocacy and employee influence; she feels that too often
thought leadership work is limited to the marketing department: ‘We
come from a culture where marketing owns the content, yet market-
ing – and I can say this because I am a marketer – are so far removed
from the source of great content, which is employees and customers’,
she tells me. Sarah believes that marketers must look into the company
to find the experts to create key content, as those people are the clos-
est to the customer pain points: ‘The knowledge experts are the ones
 THOUGHT LEADERSHIP 183

that you want to identify first, and then you can start to help them
build their social brands and become visible experts, not just internal,
hidden experts.’
Sarah points out that expert-written content is more likely to be
shared by peers than content that is from the organization directly,
and that companies should be looking to find effective ways to acti-
vate their wider workforce:

I really believe that employees hold the key to creating that human
content, that brand journalism. If you start putting purpose behind the
activity, and help the employee voice come out, then it’s much more
authentic, it will get higher conversion rates and the content will drive
more traffic to your website. It is all about human-to-human contact.

Thought leadership inspiration

In addition to this ability to reflect the ‘human side’ of the business,
what other qualities should you look for in thought leadership?
Ideally our thought leadership would deliver consistent and ongoing
original thinking, but in reality there are few standout leaders who
can deliver authentic and sustained enlightenment in a ready-to-
digest form. That said, there are some tools and questions you can
ask of your thought leaders that can help with ideation:

Reference a personal story. Many of today’s business leaders bring

their own authentic stories to the workplace, building empathy
and helping them ensure their teams and staff can relate to them.
Great examples of those who have brought the personal into their
professional lives include the current CEO of Microsoft, Satya
Nadella. He has written and spoken extensively about his family
life and its impact on him and his work. Whilst bringing this level
of candour into the public domain might not suit everyone, it will
help create empathy and trust.
Get involved in the global conversation. When thought leaders read
industry news and imbue themselves with the sorts of wider
narratives that are vexing business and governments alike, they
184 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

can quickly plug into the themes that set the context for all our
lives. Being familiar with foundations and charities can also ensure
thought leaders add to their understanding of a topic. Seeing what
content competitors and suppliers have also published can be
beneficial too.
Use life events to trigger innovative thinking. Virgin Group founder
Richard Branson consistently delivers original content and thinking.
A technique often used by his team is to create content triggered by
a particular life event – for instance, he’s just seen in the New Year
(time for fresh thinking); or has just welcomed a new grandchild
(time to reflect); or just launched a new product (the changing
nature of customer need), etc. The point is, these articles and blogs
are not simply PR announcements; they are turned into stories that
feel more engaging and relevant because they are woven into real
life, and are full of character and personality.
Use company events to create content. If the idea of reflecting on
their personal lives doesn’t suit your thought leaders, events they
might be more comfortable creating content around are those
related to the company itself. Content should be less about pushing
an event as a PR exercise, but more using it as a ‘jumping-off point’
to another story or personal reflection.

HOW TO USE A PRODUCT LAUNCH AS A ‘JUMPING OFF’ POINT

A product launch is the perfect event to consider using as a jumping-off

point. To make it impactful, you could use any of the following questions as
a basis from which you can develop personal product stories:
●●
How long did a product take to launch and who was involved?
●●
Where did the idea first emerge?
●●
How has it changed over the development period?
●●
Who drove that change and why?
●●
What did the launch team learn along the way?
●●
What are their personal stories?
 THOUGHT LEADERSHIP 185

●●
What challenges were encountered?
●●
How did you, or they, overcome them?
●●
How did teams who developed the new product collaborate?
●●
How many different teams were involved, in how many countries?
●●
How far did they travel to achieve this goal?

Use secondary research as a jumping-off point. If your next company

event isn’t for some time, it’s possible to use other people’s research
or insight to create an alternative jumping-off point. New industry
research is great, because it gives you the freedom to pull out an
insight or new fact that is of interest or relevance. From here,
thought leaders can build out a wider article, adding their own
thinking or that of their C-suite target. A recent World Economic
Forum Agenda blog – ‘Wind farms now provide 14% of EU
power – these countries are leading the way’5 – is a perfect example
of this in action. So too is another article it has produced: ‘7 of the
world’s 10 most polluted cities are in India’,6 which was based on
research by the World Health Organization.
Use original research as a story base. Why use someone else’s research
when you can use your own? Original research is a fantastic
starting point for a series of thought leadership pieces based on the
findings of solid and in-depth research. Not only does it raise your
organization’s credentials, it is a good way to get traction across
multiple platforms. In addition to hosting the main report, thought
leaders have the opportunity to break it down into digestible
sections or shareable images, quotes and articles. When research is
original, thought leaders can legitimately appropriate the insight
to contextualize wider arguments or point they want to make.
Take a personal journey or moral framework. What was your biggest
failure? What have you learned during your career? When did you
find yourself pushing the boundaries? How have you had to flex to
succeed? Audiences love to be told the answers to these sorts of
questions.
186 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Use a passion or mission to educate. A benefit of really knowing your

thought leaders well is that you can unearth potential interesting
side interests or passions they might have that they are confident
and articulate on. Even though their passions might only be
tangentially linked to the business, opening up about something
different demonstrates they have depth. Jeff Weiner, CEO of
LinkedIn, posts on his social media channels about themes such as
leadership, strategy and vision as well as culture in the workplace.
His posts are heartfelt (sometimes only brief) and readers seldom
get the sense they’re being created by someone else on his behalf.
They’re authentic and in a human voice.
Aggregate originality. If thought leaders are struggling to come up with
original research, or an angle that is radically new or different in their
industry, they might consider developing thought leadership based
on aggregating other people’s thinking. By taking on the role of a
curator of other original thinking, thought leaders can still build up a
body of work they can comment on that is relevant and interesting.

Content success factors

By considering the previous advice and only producing content when
it meets one or some of the criteria, your thought leadership will
automatically stand a much better chance of achieving cut-through.
You should also consider the following guidance when creating your
own content, or working with your senior team members to help
them produce their own.

1 Be authentic and heartfelt

The need to be authentic cannot be overstated. Research indicates 80
per cent of consumers say ‘authenticity of content’ is the most influ-
ential factor in their decision to become a follower of a brand.7 In
terms of how this translates to thought leadership pieces, the
­watchword is that content must try to connect – and do so in a
 THOUGHT LEADERSHIP 187

‘human’ (ie not overly corporate) voice. If there’s any suspicion at all
that content isn’t authentic in some way then it will dilute its impact.
It may well be that a blog is ‘ghostwritten’ after a detailed interview,
or the talking points are mapped out for a podcast, but even here, it’s
essential all original emotion remains. Thinking must be that of the
thought leader, whatever format it’s delivered in.

2 Ensure leaders connect their passions with their target audience’s

needs
While it’s possible to leave the creation of content entirely to your
subject matter experts (and many organizations do), it’s likely that if
an expert thinks about their subject all of the time, they may not
translate it in a way that readers find engaging, or which addresses
problems in the here and now. So it’s essential their passion connects
with audiences, and does so in a coherent way.
Many senior executives have great ideas, and great insight, but
they lack the time or skills to make them interesting written narra-
tives. This is when having a marketing department, a communications
team, an external agency or a professional writer can help. These
people can interview your thought leaders to uncover raw, uncut,
unpolished nuggets of insight that can be built on and developed into
content. This is where the art of brand journalism really comes into
its own – taking unrefined ideas, spotting their potential, and know-
ing what needs to be done to broaden them out into great stories.

NEWSROOM TIP
Look for a news peg

Journalists in newsrooms look for a news ‘peg’ – the reason a story is

relevant for our audience at this particular moment. Great content finds a
different angle or a different approach to a story that people are already
discussing. If you find this difficult to do, use search trends tools, including
AnswerThePublic or BuzzSumo to assess which topics are popular now, so
you know how to move them on. This does not have to be linked to a major
event or happening – it could simply be because there is a broad interest or
resurgence in interest in a subject, theme or product.
188 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

3 Keep on posting
Regular thought leadership posting is crucial for building, main-
taining and developing your audiences. If your readership enjoys
your content they will come to expect that it will be delivered
predictably and regularly. This doesn’t mean you have to publish
daily, but whatever your schedule is, ensure you stick to your
planned publication dates.

4 Invite comment
IBM’s Passion Projects8 or Microsoft’s Research Blogs9 both also
invite wisdom in from their crowd. The Microsoft blogs demonstrate
the depth and engagement of their people with in-depth interviews
that reveal the human behind their work. In the case of Passion
Projects, articles themselves are not written by individuals per se; in
most instances, their insight and thinking is delivered through inter-
views developed into blogs using first person quotes.

5 Choose the right format

If your CEO or other cast of thought leaders perform incredibly well
on video, then take advantage of these skills and make use of this
format rather than simply focusing on text output. There are excep-
tions, but most people are not at all relaxed or incisive on video, nor
do they exude any real energy, so don’t shoe-horn your thought
leaders into formats they’re not comfortable with. Play around
though, to at least see what they like or dislike and what works best
for your content.
Thought leadership comes in many guises – Microsoft Research,
for instance, has developed an insightful series of podcasts interview-
ing a broad range of its people about their work and their broader
interests.10 Titles include broad, values-based subjects, such as
‘Making the Future of Work Work for You’ and ‘Speech and Language:
the Crown Jewel of AI’.
 THOUGHT LEADERSHIP 189

6 Don’t do the hard sell

Given that all brand journalism has the purpose of bringing in
­advocates (and ultimately new business), at some point down the
line the temptation can be to make thought leadership a hard-sell
affair.
Remember that the main goal of effective thought leadership is to
demonstrate knowledge and insight about your subject area or area
of focus – and to do it without demanding a direct follow-through
from your reader. Articles, podcasts or videos should simply align the
personality or the brand to effectiveness in a particular arena or
sector. In this way, thought leaders can support brand awareness for
your organization, demonstrating that your senior people are think-
ing more innovatively than the competition.
As global co-head of brand and content strategy at Goldman
Sachs, Amanda Rubin, says, the point of its own content is to create
‘value exchanges’ in the digital environment, so audiences will think
more positively about the Goldman Sachs brand.11 Goldman Sachs’
website has its own Exchanges podcast platform that delivers wide-
ranging insight from leading thinkers and advisers from the business.
Titles include everything from ‘What’s Keeping Insurers Up at
Night?’12 to ‘How is Tech Reshaping the City Skyline?’13 These
in-­depth pieces are delivered on a regular and accessible platform,
hosted by Goldman Sachs’ Global Head of Corporate Communications,
Jake Siewert.

NEWSROOM TIP
The open question

An open question is designed to deliver a full and detailed answer when

you interview someone for either video or text content development. An
open question will start with a ‘what?’, ‘why?’, ‘how?’ or ‘who?’, to ensure
you don’t receive a host of ‘yes/no’ answers.
190 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Ideation and creation support

Already in this book we have discussed how brand journalism content
can be outsourced if it saves time or improves standards. Because
thought leadership is more personal in nature, some suggest this
particular type of content is less suited to being outsourced. The main
concern is that the ‘real person’ (their connection, empathy, passion)
becomes obscured through the filter of another person’s writing. In
reality many of the world’s most high-profile thought leaders will use
a communications team, ghost writer or agency to support their
ongoing content creation in some guise.
If you are delegating thought leadership content to internal team
members, or if you are looking to use an agency to create this type of
content, Table 10.1 shows a process you can follow to help you to
create and deliver ongoing content that is authentic and taps into the
organization’s offer and messaging without compromising honest
delivery and output.

TABLE 10.1 A process for thought leadership content

1 Research and ideas Research the environment and the work or activity of your target
development thinker. Develop a series of potential story ideas that you can
flesh out with your interviewee or subject matter expert.
These ideas should ideally come directly from your interviewee
themselves, but sometimes – especially if they have limited time
available – this can be a challenge.
Develop a series of potential topics that can be covered and sign
these off with the executive and/or her communications or PR team.
2 Questions Once you have decided on the topics you will cover it’s important
to have your questions signed off by your interviewee so they can
prepare properly.
Ideally work to your article abstract or video structure (or
whichever format you are choosing) to ensure you elicit the
correct information in your answers.
If your thought leadership is in video interview or podcast format
then supply questions beforehand to allow your interviewee to
prepare; ideally you will do the same with your text interviewees also.
(continued)
 THOUGHT LEADERSHIP 191

TABLE 10.1 (Continued)

3 Logistics Ensure you set up your interview well ahead, and that it is
scheduled with enough time for a real dialogue or discussion to
happen.
Leave enough time locked into the diary to give you the option to
cover all areas that are relevant. This will also take the pressure off
interviewees.
Consider bundling two sets of article questions together to give
you source material for additional blogs, articles or insight pieces.
Make the most of the time you have.
4 Interview Interviews to source information for writing text articles can be
done over the phone or face to face. Whether you are in-house or
external, a face-to-face interview is always preferable.
When you are in the room with an interviewee it builds rapport
and leaves less room for misunderstanding.
Whether on site or on the phone, record the interview and mine it
out for additional story ideas – either for your thought leadership
or wider content plan.

Depending on the aims and outcomes sought for each piece of

content, once created, distribution of insight pieces can be via the
individual’s social channels or website, as well as via the corporate
sites and channels, amplified across your corporate social channels.
You should also consider third-party sites for publication or
re-publication of text articles, such as Medium,14 that can help
amplify your output, as can publishing or syndicating to sites such as
Forbes, Inc and Huffington Post. Ultimately, selling is a human-to-
human experience, and tapping into the rich seam of thinking inside
your organization – no matter how large or small – will help build
longer-lasting relationships with your target audiences.

Notes
1 Edelman (2019) 2019 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study, Edelman, 5
December. Available from: https://www.edelman.com/research/2019-b2b-
thought-leadership-impact-study (archived at https://perma.cc/7SLF-DVLJ)
192 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

2 Ramos, L (2017) Peer stories and credible data attract and engage B2B
buyers use short-form interactive content to capture customers’ attention,
Forrester, 7 September. Available from: https://on24static.akamaized.net/
event/16/73/65/8/rt/1/documents/resourceList1528136053847/
forrestercomplimentaryreportpeerstoriesandcredibledata1528152417373.pdf
(archived at https://perma.cc/6E6G-HW53)
3 Edelman (2019) 2019 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study, Edelman, 5
December. Available from: https://www.edelman.com/research/2019-b2b-
thought-leadership-impact-study (archived at https://perma.cc/7SLF-DVLJ)
4 Barry, J M and Gironda, J T (2017) Operationalizing thought leadership for
online B2B marketing, Industrial Marketing Management, 81, pp 1–22
5 Fleming, S (2019) Wind farms now provide 14% of EU power – these
countries are leading the way, World Economic Forum, 6 March. Available
from: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/wind-farms-now-provide-14-
of-eu-power-these-countries-are-leading-the-way/ (archived at https://perma.cc/
K33P-B42U)
6 Thornton, A (2019) 7 of the world’s 10 most polluted cities are in India,
World Economic Forum, 5 March. Available from: https://www.weforum.org/
agenda/2019/03/7-of-the-world-s-10-most-polluted-cities-are-in-india/
(archived at https://perma.cc/CR9M-P2US)
7 Sweezey, M (2015) 5 content engagement questions answered, Slideshare, 16
December. Available from: https://www.slideshare.net/MathewSweezey/5-
content-engagement-questions-answered (archived at https://perma.cc/
Q4KM-E894)
8 IBM Passion Projects (nd) Available from: https://www.ibm.com/thought-
leadership/passion-projects/ (archived at https://perma.cc/AJT8-SE3V)
9 Microsoft (nd) Microsoft Research Podcast. Available from: https://www.
microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/category/podcast/ (archived at https://
perma.cc/8Y5X-4DJN)
10 Ibid
11 Baker, D (2017) How finance brands like Goldman Sachs use content to build
trust and win customers. contently, Contently, 20 April. Available from:
https://contently.com/2017/04/20/goldman-sachs-build-trust-win-customers/
(archived at https://perma.cc/6CSR-T2PR)
12 Siegel, M (2019) Episode 124: What’s keeping insurers up at night? Goldman
Sachs, 7 May. Available from: https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/
podcasts/episodes/05-07-2019-mike-siegel.html (archived at https://perma.cc/
XB66-U54T)
13 Garman, J (2019) Episode 120: How is tech reshaping the city skyline?
Goldman Sachs, 1 April. Available from: https://www.goldmansachs.com/
insights/podcasts/episodes/04-01-2019-jim-garman.html (archived at https://
perma.cc/7GD9-8XRT)
14 Medium (nd). Available from: https://medium.com/ (archived at https://perma.
cc/XW24-39BH)
 193

11

Measuring impact: building

a metrics framework

We have covered how to develop and distribute your brand journalism

content for maximum impact, but successfully tracking the results
remains a real challenge. If you are lucky enough to work with an end-
to-end content management system, or an integrated single channel,
then your measurement will be relatively straightforward, but the real-
ity tends to be a mixture of various channels, tools, and a lot of data
that you need to make sense of.
As well as the complexity of multiple channels of content, there’s
also the challenge of mapping where your content ends up. Sharing
and distributed networks mean we cannot always track how our
content and messages end up landing with our audience. Measurement
needs to be undertaken using a bespoke solution, developed specifi-
cally to work for one brand, or brand channel. It doesn’t have to be
complicated if you are dealing with limited paths of activity, but it
must be consistent, and tracked against time to demonstrate longer-
term trends, as well as short-term successes or engagement.
Your focus on metrics should be driven by the specific goals you
are targeting and judged accordingly. Often marketers are in a short-
term cycle, looking for instant results from posts and content
upload – you can certainly use key metrics to measure that type of
activity, but it won’t give you the full picture, not least because your
content (if carefully and strategically targeted to your audience’s
needs) will keep on having an impact on aspects of your strategy such
as SEO well after it is uploaded and shared.
194 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

The content teams of tomorrow are not just top-of-the-funnel sales

enablement teams. They are not just SEO-focused teams driving brand
awareness. They are not just customer support organizations, managing
how-to videos or customer events. Tomorrow’s content teams are the
experts in delivering audience value at every stage of the customer’s
journey.
Robert Rose, content marketing author and
Founder of The Content Advisory1

Any measurement approach must assess success as you see it, based on
your own precise content goals, as outlined when you developed your
strategy and approach to content creation. I would recommend you
take a broad, holistic approach to measuring your results, and assess-
ing the data. As content strategist and consultant Rebecca Lieb writes:

Measuring only for sales and leads – or simply relying on volume or

vanity metrics such as ‘likes’ and ‘views’ that contain little business
value – undermines and devalues investments in time, media, employees,
technology and vendor relationships.2

Investing for the long term

Marketing expert Michael Brenner outlines his approach to ROI in
an interview for this book, taking as his starting point the concept of
content marketing as an annuity – something you invest in for a
longer period of time that delivers value at the end of a cycle:

If you publish consistently, like a publisher does, you see an increase

in traffic over time and it’s a compounding increase in return. If I write
customer-focused content that can attract an audience of people and
then if I can engage them more deeply in my brand, perhaps with gated
offers, newsletter subscriptions, or a course, or book, then I can generate
leads that can ultimately convert to revenue. That’s an annuity, it’s a
financial asset. In order to get that annuity, that return on investment at
a compounded rate of return, you have to invest consistently.
 MEASURING IMPACT 195

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has integrated its brand journalism across

a range of its global communications on its owned sites (on its corpo-
rate website, MHI.com, as well as on its content hub, Spectra3) alongside
native advertising and content partnerships on global publishing plat-
forms such as Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
There are multiple approaches to measurement of this type of content.
MHI’s global content activity is supported by local, discrete campaigns
and paid activations where needed. Thought leadership material on
Spectra is focused on ‘making the customer smarter’ by offering insight
on relevant subjects such as global manufacturing, the changing nature
of the workplace and broad energy and environmental challenges.
Where possible, media relations opportunities support campaigns and
activations that are running on paid and earned channels.
By closely integrating marketing and communications planning,
Global Marketing Communications Director Dan Lochmann is
ensuring all content and stories are working hard to build brand
awareness, whilst also being leveraged (as part of lead generation and
conversion material) further down the sales funnel:

It’s important that you are very clear on the objectives for your content
from the start and that those objectives tie closely to your business
strategy. If the business objective is to rapidly globalize a company, for
instance, then you need to start communicating that in a global way.
For MHI, we want to go deep into the story of what we do, what we
produce, and content is a perfect way of doing that.

In terms of measurement, we need to be focused on outcomes that deliver

a strong return on our investment. For me, if I can prove that what I
would call a ‘top of funnel’ piece of content, a piece of thought leadership,
has engaged a customer who has then gone through the customer journey
and in the end bought an MHI product or recommended one, that is
perfect return on investment. But, at the same time, you are also building
reputation [with that content] and brand value.

No silver bullet
What’s clear is that there is no simple way to solve the measurement
challenge. The modern marketing landscape is a complex one, as
196 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

noted by Dzamic and Kirby,4 who wrote about the ‘MarTech

tsunami’, with thousands of operators already in the space and more
to come. This fragmentation of the environment has led to a massive
variety in measurement techniques and approaches, with none
providing a catch-all solution that works for each client. As IBM
stated in their report 2019 Marketing Trends, we are seeing the emer-
gence of Marketer 4.0: the tech-savvy martecheter.5
My experience is that each software provider believes its platform
or solution can measure everything you need as an agency or client –
but none has ever delivered. Ultimately we find ourselves in a situation
where we must ‘pick and mix’ results to fit our aspirations or outcomes
to get anywhere near a true picture of return on investment, or
perhaps more explicitly, a ‘return on objectives’.6
The solution is to develop a hybrid approach to measurement that
will capture what it is you are trying to achieve with your various
audiences. Our view would be that ‘less is more’ – be clear about
what you want to measure and why, and distil that to as few meas-
ures as possible.
Start with your goals, and for each activity or campaign choose a
handful of metrics and measure against those; review and update
your metrics to your chosen KPIs on a regular basis.

Organic story success

You can measure everything, sure, but not all the data you measure will
be relevant, and – if you’re not careful – you will end up heading down
multiple measurement routes. Paid campaigns will deliver refined results
that can demonstrate information ranging from who digested your
content, where and how much you paid for each engagement across
your chosen paid platform or execution. Ongoing organic engagement
can be more complicated to measure, and much of your brand journal-
ism may sit in this organic space with little or no paid support.
For Melanie Deziel, former journalist, founder of StoryFuel, and
adviser to many leading global organizations on content strategy, it’s
important to measure brand journalism in a different way. In an
interview for this book she explained:
 MEASURING IMPACT 197

Many times the instinct is to measure content and storytelling initiatives

in the same way we measure our ad campaigns, and that often falls
short. Our content, in its consumer-facing form, is more like journalism,
and so we should try to measure it in similar ways to how other
content creators measure their stories. This means we likely focus less
on conversion metrics like clicks or sales, and focus instead on more
awareness and engagement metrics that signal our content is reaching
our intended audience and causing them to pause and spend time with
us. I’d recommend looking at things like reach, views, engaged time,
social engagement, comments, replies, and other indicators of audience
approval.

In any case, it’s absolutely key to have a conversation about

measurement and key performance indicators before starting any
content initiative to ensure that everyone is on the same page, that we’re
optimizing the content for the intended goal, and that we have the
infrastructure in place to measure the appropriate metrics.7

The World Economic Forum’s digital editorial team measures and

maps story performance every weekday during the internal review
meeting and daily editorial meeting. Trends are also measured at
weekly review meetings and strategy sessions.
This is an opportunity to understand which stories have ‘travelled
through the network’ and been successful with the target audiences.
Topics that are popular can be focused on in more detail; approaches
and sentiment that are successful with audiences (for instance, opti-
mism and positivity) can be logged. Formats that work well with
audiences can be tracked.
Key to the success of the Forum’s brand journalism and approach
to volume publishing is this constant, close monitoring of the output
and tweaking of the system and content/topics accordingly. It isn’t
feasible for everyone to spend this type of time and resource commit-
ment on topics and themes, but a regular (weekly or monthly) review
can serve the purpose of surfacing the best editorial themes for your
target audiences.
198 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Individual stories: what do you measure?

You can learn a lot from your organic success and metrics if you are
not supporting your brand journalism with paid engagement across
your social and search channels:
●●
Topic success: is one particular topic or area of discussion more
successful than others?
●●
Individual influencers: are specific people in your team gaining
more traction with their content? Is that down to topic, or network
and sharing capability?
●●
Dwell time: do certain articles pull people in for longer? Can you
learn anything in terms of either topic, writing style or content
format as a result?
●●
Comments, likes and shares: what content (format, topic) is getting
engagement either on your hub or on your social? What are people
saying and are they developing some quality discussion?
●●
Viewing time: which videos are being viewed and shared multiple
times across your channels? How many are dropping off after the
five- or ten-second mark, versus a full view?

Content is the means, not the ends. The goal isn’t to be good at content.
The goal is to be good at business because of content.
Jay Baer, Convince & Convert8

Measurement throughout the customer journey

Measurement simply for awareness may not be enough for your
organization or for clearly demonstrating ROI on brand journalism.
Another approach is to match your results to the stage at which your
content is ‘working’ within the customer journey. That might start
with growing awareness, and move through building interest, grow-
ing trust and encouraging a sale or conversion – with brand
journalism content you can continue to measure results and ROI
post-sale, when advocacy remains important.
 MEASURING IMPACT 199

TABLE 11.1 Measurement throughout the customer journey

Stage in customer KPIs: What is the role of

journey our content or stories? Metrics

Awareness Our content needs to ●●

Views of specific pages, articles and
REACH the right people videos (including dwell time)
●●
Overall direct traffic to your website
●●
Earned media mentions
●●
Audience growth rate across owned
social media platforms
●●
Article reach on social media
platforms
Interest Content needs to ●●
Engagement rate: article/post/
ENGAGE people in order podcast/video shares and comments
to build brand recognition ●●
Website: time on page, page views
per visit, bounce rate
●●
Social media post-engagement:
likes, comments, clicks to site, social
shares
●●
Social share of voice: comparison
with key competitors or campaigns
●●
Social follower growth across all
platforms
Consideration To become a real ●●
Email subscriptions and engagement
consideration, brands rate
need to prove they ●●
Conversion rates and click-through
UNDERSTAND a person’s rates
needs and beliefs ●●
Blog subscriptions, podcast
subscriptions, video channel
subscriptions
●●
In-page surveys on brand sentiment
Intent To build trust, brands and ●●
Key page visits on website –
individuals must SHARE subsequent journey through site
values, beliefs and ●●
Article and content item views,
expectations comments, shares
●●
Time on site, time with specific
articles, bounce rate
Evaluation To make a sale, brands ●●
Ongoing and repeat traffic to key
need to CONVINCE pages on website/content hub
people of their value ●●
Landing page downloads
●●
Webinar and event sign-ups (offline
and online)
(continued)
200 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

TABLE 11.1 ( Continued)

Stage in customer KPIs: What is the role of

journey our content or stories? Metrics

Purchase Brands need to REASSURE ●●

Online sales
people they’ve made the ●●
Tracked sales conversions (via your
right decision by CRM)
exceeding expectations ●●
MQLs passed to sales teams
through actions
Post-purchase Brands need to NURTURE ●●
Content served to returning visitors
this new relationship ●●
Reviews and community comments
using empathy ●●
Ongoing engagement activity on
social media such as likes,
comments, shares
●●
Continued article/content shares,
comments, actions

Marketing automation and measurement tools can save you time and
effort. Often posting and monitoring tools (such as Buffer or
Hootsuite) include analytics dashboards to allow you to measure all
of these metrics and more; social media sites also supply all the data
you need. If you don’t have subscriptions to these tools then build
spreadsheets to track and analyse your numbers.

CASE STUDY
Red Hat

The $3 billion software company Red Hat is a leader in the content marketing
field; over the last few years, the company’s global director of content, Laura
Hamlyn, has driven the growth of a broad team creating content assets for the
senior management team, the website and sales teams. She told me:
Our approach depends on the purpose of the story and the measurability of
the content type. If it’s to create awareness, we can measure brand affinity
before and after people engage with our content. With videos, we can also
measure view completion and we can also measure subscribers to channels.
With our podcast, we measure time spent listening (completes) and
downloads and subscriptions. We can also measure sharing and social
 MEASURING IMPACT 201

sentiment. My favourite use of social is to share relevant content, and it’s

such a great feeling to see fans sharing our content. They actually
recommend it.
We believe evergreen content and campaign content can work together well.
For example, organic traffic to our website actually converts over time and
creates some of our most valuable leads. We have increased the value of
organic site visitors by 105 per cent year over year from 2018–19.
Our teams have aligned to messaging via what we call ‘sales conversations’.
These are themes we identified via research that our customers and prospects
have identified as challenges/opportunities for their business.
We align with these themes across all of our marketing teams so sales,
marketing, and our prospects and customers are all exposed to the same
terms and concepts. Evergreen content builds trust, educates, and becomes a
reliable source of information from day to day or month to month. Campaign
content is more dynamic and fluid and can serve to create brand awareness
via paid media, or function as a call to action, telling the prospect what action
to take next. As our data and MarTech gets more advanced, we can
personalize any of this content dynamically to reflect our customer and
prospects goals and user profiles.

A broader measurement framework

Some will want to take a broader approach to measurement of
success, especially if the aspiration is for the building of longer-term
brand awareness. In her book, Content: The atomic particle of
marketing, Rebecca Lieb outlines a compass approach to measure-
ment that integrates a series of potential business outcomes that are
broader than simple marketing or communications outcomes or
funnel/journey metrics.
Broadly speaking this approach measures wider business impact of
content, including:
●●
Brand health: a measure of attitudes, conversations and behaviours
directed towards the brand within communities of potential
customers or clients.
202 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

FIGURE 11.1 The business value of content strategy

Innovation
Collaborating with Brand health
customers to drive future A measure of attitudes,
products and services conversation and behaviour
towards your brand

Customer experience
BUSINESS Marketing optimization
Improving your
GOALS Improving the
relationship with
effectiveness of
customers, and their
marketing programmes
experience with
your brand

Operational efficiency Revenue generation

Where and how your Where and how your
company reduces expenses company generates revenue

Reproduced with kind permission of Rebecca Lieb.9

●●
Marketing optimization: an umbrella term encompassing activity
that supports wider marketing campaigns or outreach.
●●
Revenue generation: with a complex sales journey it’s often
difficult to track precisely where a lead has converted – is it the
last-touch piece of content, or the previous four engagements
with content that you measure? Direct statistics can be gathered
further along the sales journey from measurable activity such as
collateral downloads, gated content engagement and webinar
sign-ups.
●●
Operational efficiency: streamlining production to deliver operational
efficiency in certain marketing areas.
●●
Customer experience: content can demonstrate value in the realm
of customer support and service, a significant cost centre in most
organizations.
●●
Innovation: content can be used to solicit ideas and engagement
and therefore contribute to broader organizational goals.10
 MEASURING IMPACT 203

CASE STUDY
Tata Consultancy Services, Digital Empowers

Abhinav Kumar, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Tata

Consultancy Services, has seen the broad benefit of the purpose-led content
that TCS has delivered on its content hub, Digital Empowers.11 As he explained
in an interview, it’s not just about simple metrics:
The point is to engage the community, analysts, investors and others – and
ultimately the benefit is demonstrated when we take soundings through
our brand audits. There are many things you can measure but this field is
both a science and an art. There is the science part – where measurement
is key – and data has made that easier, but there also has to be room for
instinct and gut layered onto that. We created short-form social videos for
many of our stories on Digital Empowers and our frontline sales force has
access to those. Many of them use these videos at events or if they are
talking to the customer they will use those as part of their presentation.
I have spoken to many people about this over the years. What they say is,
when you’re having a commercial conversation with a customer and you start
the conversation with these stories, it creates a very different engagement
and connection with that customer. It appeals to their emotions and it helps
also position us as a responsible company that is doing good for society and
that’s an important concern for all businesses.

Stretching the value

Original content is an investment in terms of money and time, so it’s
important to ensure your material works as hard as possible within your
organization. Top-of-funnel thought leadership or brand ­ journalism
content can be re-worked as sales and lead-generation material. For
instance, aggregation of blog content into white papers, reports or insight
papers for distribution via email or printed for live events.

Media relations and outreach

Often brand journalism content at the top of the funnel will be
digested by numerous audiences (and paid promotion can obviously
204 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

FIGURE 11.2 Content supporting wider communications and sales outreach

Brand journalism
supporting wider Media
communications and relations and
sales outreach outreach

Lead
Investor Brand generation and
and analyst
relations
journalism demand
and storytelling generation
collateral
material

Account-based
marketing
research and
collateral

target key audiences if you wish to get their precise attention). Ask
the following questions as you create your brand journalism:
●●
Have you been liaising with your PR team to map your content
against broader communications aspirations and campaigns?
●●
Have you delivered leads or pick-ups or any coverage from your
brand journalism?
●●
Have you briefed your brand journalists to look for great news
lines that can be offered to the PR team to build a media relations
campaign or interest?

Ideally you will be working closely with the PR team to dovetail

your PR activity with your publication and gain maximum traction
from that. This can be as simple as scheduling brand journalism
story p
­ ublication at the time of a key global event (for instance, a
 MEASURING IMPACT 205

global political event on sustainability or the UN Sustainable

Development Goals).

Lead-generation material
Sales teams who are looking for specific leads can often reference brand
journalism and published stories. Success of key articles can guide deci-
sions on what audiences are interested in and might respond to.

Account-based marketing research and collateral

Targeted, quality ABM activity is supported by deep research and
high-quality content. You can use your brand journalism stories to
support your ABM campaigns as a jumping-off point for additional
material, or re-purpose content you already have with a specific
target customer in mind. Content hubs can be used to house your
ABM material, with targeted paid or organic social media content
amplifying your targeted storytelling.

Investor and analyst relations collateral

Your high-quality content can be aggregated or re-worked with mini-
mal effort into longer-form investor or analyst material that can be
digitally delivered to key targets, or printed for distribution at sales
meetings or live events where key influencers, partners or analysts are
in attendance.
There is no one simple solution to measurement of your brand
journalism assets – there are multiple tools and approaches and that
situation is only likely to become more complicated. There are enough
examples from the market, however, to demonstrate that leaders in
the field are developing and deploying hybrid approaches that
successfully measure activity and success to demonstrate ROI inter-
nally. Ideally you will review and test your approach frequently as
circumstances, tools and targets change, to enable your brand jour-
nalism stories to deliver both in the short term and from a longer-term
point of view.
206 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Notes
1 Rose, R (2019) Your 2020 mission: a unified strategy for content in your
marketing, Content Marketing Institute, 28 January. Available from:
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/01/unified-content-marketing/
(archived at https://perma.cc/N2YG-46LD)
2 Lieb, R and Szymanski, J (2017) Content – the Atomic Particle of Marketing:
The definitive guide to content marketing strategy, Kogan Page Publishers,
p 165
3 Spectra (nd) Available from: https://spectra.mhi.com/ (archived at https://
perma.cc/6HDN-7PZK)
4 Dzamic, L and Kirby, J (2018) The Definitive Guide to Strategic Content
Marketing: Perspectives, issues, challenges and solutions, Kogan Page
Publishers, p 193
5 IBM (2018) 2019 Marketing Trends. IBM, December. Available from:
https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/RKXVLYBO (archived at https://perma.
cc/HMM2-9BJM)
6 Silvers, J (2007) Return on Objectives (ROO), juliasilvers.com, 27 October.
Available from: http://www.juliasilvers.com/embok/return_on_objectives.htm
(archived at https://perma.cc/7EYH-TFDG)
7 Email interview direct to author, 24 June 2019
8 Baer, J (nd) A field guide to the 4 types of content marketing metrics, Convince &
Convert. Available from: https://www.convinceandconvert.com/content-
marketing/a-field-guide-to-the-4-types-of-content-marketing-metrics/ (archived at
https://perma.cc/F4N5-4AHS)
9 Lieb, R and Szymanski, J (2017) Content – The Atomic Particle of Marketing:
The definitive guide to content marketing strategy, Kogan Page Publishers,
p 166
10 Ibid, p 181
11 Digital Empowers (nd). Available from: https://digitalempowers.com/ (archived
at https://perma.cc/XC4S-FXC3)
 207

12

Bringing your newsroom to life

By now you will have a grasp of the role brand journalism can play
in your content marketing, what stories your company can tell and
how to go about publishing and creating your content, as well as
distribution challenges and processes to deliver audience success. You
have the strategy, the plan and, we hope, the resources – now you just
need to make it happen.
Brand journalism is not a quick-hit approach to marketing success;
it’s part of an increasingly interesting and accessible set of tools that
the modern marketer can leverage to build brand awareness and get
a company noticed. If your budget can stretch to a large spend on
internal staff then that’s a great place to start; if not, there are other
approaches to making your content happen.

There are plenty of jobs for journalists nowadays, they’re just not in
journalism anymore.
Mark Jones, Head of Digital Content, World Economic Forum.

Finding the smarts

As we read in Chapter 4 on developing your narrative, there are
­various ways that companies are choosing to create content, whether
outsourcing it, developing it in-house, or blending the two approaches.
Whichever way you choose to create your brand journalism approach,
people, as ever, are crucial.
208 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

If you want to create a newsroom, it makes sense to bring in journal-

ists to support you with this aim. Those who have worked at the
coalface producing minute-by-minute news – whether text, online,
video or radio news – have a true understanding of what it takes to tell
a story effectively and efficiently, often with limited resources. If your
output does not warrant having a dedicated team of journalists, think
about using freelancers, or recruiting people who have journalistic
attributes – look for inquisitive, smart and bright writers that you can
support and grow as internal ‘journalists’ of your own. You can also
‘grow your own’ team of resourceful and inquisitive writers from your
internal staffing; increasingly it’s about finding team members who are
happy to take on technical and data-mining skills, alongside those
more traditional writing and story development abilities.

Outsourcing of content
Some organizations, especially larger, global companies with dispa-
rate teams and a range of products, use external agencies to create
content for them. Many of those people I have interviewed for this
book use freelance teams, or have longstanding relationships with
one or two agencies.
If you choose to use an external agency for your brand journalism
creation, here are my thoughts on what needs to be in place to deliver
success from that relationship:

Set the tone: the first few pieces of content the agency creates for you
may not be spot-on in terms of tone of voice. Learning to speak a
brand’s language – in all of its layers, and with all of its nuances –
will take time.
Iterate: test and learn as you go, and flex your approach in turn. Ask
to try different writers or producers if those you are working with
at first aren’t working for you or your content.
Link communications with content: content marketing and brand
journalism can only benefit from being closely mapped to your PR
and media relations campaigns; both will benefit from being linked.
 BRINGING YOUR NEWSROOM TO LIFE 209

Build a process: set up a regular commissioning and delivery process

with your agency; consistency and routine will build efficiency,
especially if you are creating large volumes of content across
multiple platforms.
Map the red flags: be clear from the start where the issues might lie
with certain narratives, commentaries or viewpoints.
Long-term commitment: as the agency and your team get deeper into
the content, the messaging, and get to know the personalities and
people of their client more intimately, the content will always
improve.
Keep innovating: it’s important to experiment with new approaches,
especially in such a changing environment as that of digital marketing.
Insist on a consistent team: ideally your agency will commit a number
of named writers to your account, as well as the client team, thereby
ensuring that you maintain consistency of flow and approach.

The perfect team

Whether you recruit an agency that develops a team for you or your
brand, or recruit and manage a team internally, you need to recruit
the right range of skills. The team members you need will be deter-
mined by your strategy and approach to content creation – for
instance, if you are curating more than you are creating your needs
will be different from a company building and posting 100 per cent
original material.
One approach to team structure involves segmented functions
working to the vision of an Editor in Chief. The skills can be amalga-
mated into fewer team members, or supplemented with freelancers if
your headcount is limited.

Reflecting the newsroom structure

We don’t all have unlimited budget to hire multiple people to drive
and manage content. The key team member that you need is your
210 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

FIGURE 12.1 Outline newsroom structure

Editor/Editor-in-Chief

Editorial board: flexible team, might include communications teams, sales, PR,
marketing

Writing Video and visuals Social media

Writers – generalist, Video creation: filming, Social media post-

niche or industry or tool management and/or creation
vertical focus editing

Freelance commissioners Post-production Graphics and post-

including graphics production
(flat, animated, 3-D),
Subbing and review team animation etc Data analysis and review

Strategy development, quality control and cross-team data analysis

Financial management / Managing editor / staffing and recruitment

version of the Editor in Chief to manage and drive all your content
and coverage.
Around that key role, there are other tasks that need to be done
that can be fulfilled by freelancers, internal team members, or agency
staff. All newsrooms are different, but here are some of the roles that
you might find in such an operation:

Editor/Editor in Chief: in a traditional newsroom, these senior

journalists decide how a news operation prioritizes its news output
(what it wants to publish), what the key stories are and which
narratives are worth pursuing given what the audience wants and
likes. They coordinate the resources to decide where the focus will
be, and which stories should be covered by which teams.
Reporters/writers: these are the journalists themselves on the frontline,
gathering the story information and pulling together articles, long-
form features, infographic and video or graphic scripts.
 BRINGING YOUR NEWSROOM TO LIFE 211

Subs: writers and subs will review the content of your writers and
reporters, ensuring it fits the brief, is well written and reflects the
tone and approach of the brand. This is also the quality control for
your output. You may choose to have a team to review all pieces
before they are published – sometimes called ‘final eyes’.
Producers: producers might turn their hand to many pieces of
editorial work in the newsroom. They might be creating and
posting a range of social media content created from your brand
journalism stories or they might be editing footage, sourcing
information, source imagery or researching an infographic.
Data teams: with the sheer range and complexity of platforms,
approaches, formats and metrics available to us today, a data
analyst and a social media expert (whether in-house or outsourced)
are a crucial part of your team.

The need to nurture your internal talent to be storytellers where

possible, with additional journalistic support, is a common thread
amongst those brand journalists I have spoken to.
Melanie Deziel founded StoryFuel, an agency working with organ-
izations to tell their own stories more effectively; interviewed for this
book she explains how she advises her clients to structure their teams:

It’s important for brands to remember that storytelling is a skill that

often requires specialized talent, not unlike the technologists and
technicians they likely have internally developing their own products.
Often, the first step is to bring in the right talent from the worlds of
journalism, communications, and other creative fields to bring the right
skills in-house.
After that, I always encourage brands to look internally to their own
talent and experts, to see how we might help them share their stories.
Everyone has what I call their ‘first content language’, or the format
that they prefer to communicate in, whether it’s speaking, the written
word or something else. If we can take an internal expert, and pair them
with a talented storyteller, then we can get that expert to share their
experience in a natural way and have the storyteller reframe that in the
most useful format for the intended audience.
212 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

Hire the right journalists

Creating a brand journalism team is not as easy as just hiring a few
journalists; it’s important to take on team members who understand
which skills they need to leverage in the business content world, and
which habits it’s best to leave behind in the newsroom.
Most journalists who have spent any substantial amount of time in
a deadline-driven environment are used to fitting into a production
system; they become adept at working in systems where process and
detail focus is necessary to generate stories and consistent coverage.
That ability to produce regular, high volumes of content under time
pressure is a skill that non-journalists sometimes struggle with.
However, not all journalists fit naturally into the corporate world.
Some will not fit comfortably with new roles which take them away
from editorial independence, into a situation where they are paid by
a brand that will have a product or service to sell.
Mark Jones is a former journalist himself, and is now Head of Digital
Content at the World Economic Forum, which has a team of experi-
enced journalists at the heart of its publishing operation, and brings in
additional agencies and freelancers to support that central team:

Being able to get audiences to read what you’ve written, to listen to

what you’ve said, to watch what you’ve produced is something that
almost all organizations now are having to learn how to do, and no
organization outside the media world is really a natural at that kind of
activity. You need people with agile minds.
We’re all busy, there are massive numbers of distractions around in
the world – what is the gem within this content that will make it catch
on? Some journalists are above all that and don’t think it’s a worthy
thing to do. Others are intrigued by that challenge.

Data and project management skills

In today’s content creation team you will need access to analysts or
experts who can work with all of your data (across social media and
content development and sharing) to understand and optimize
performance of campaigns or story sharing. You will also want to
 BRINGING YOUR NEWSROOM TO LIFE 213

recruit team members who are flexible and open to learning about
new platforms and tools as we see so many come and go in the
content marketing space. They need to analyse which will work and
which is appropriate at any given time.
According to research by Altimeter1, the majority of content crea-
tors use website analytics as their primary source of information to
determine content strategy. The most commonly used data sources
for content creators and commissioners are:
●●
website analytics;
●●
customer surveys and reports;
●●
social media metrics;
●●
customer service and call centre records;
●●
third-party databases;
●●
CRM systems.

At the software giant Red Hat, Global Director of Content Laura

Hamlyn has built an editorial team that coordinates wider content
marketing activity. This internal marketing communications team
acts as a hub for all marketing content activity. She tells me:

We provide core resources that global teams can use to serve as an

extension of our team. Our internal team knows the business intimately,
and we form relationships with our marketers, sales teams and subject
matter experts. That gives us a real advantage in that we can quickly
get to relevant ideas that might take agencies a little longer to develop.
My team likes the model because if they know the subject matter well,
creative ideas come all the time. I also hire journalists, systems thinkers,
researchers, PhDs and academics, athletes, bilinguals, data nerds. I love
finding people who have the patience to think deeply about a topic and
research it. A writing team should be eclectic. Especially as we think
of connecting back-end content strategy, front-end content strategy,
story development, transcreation, and data analytics. All of these
things happen on our team. This team alignment provides a consistent
brand voice which is critical for our business as a trusted, innovative
tech brand.
214 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

So it’s not simply about recruiting the right person with the right
skills – as ever with your team members it’s as much about attitude
as anything else. According to Dietmar Schantin of the Institute for
Media Strategies,2 the modern newsroom needs:
●●
People who are willing to learn and change.
●●
Those who are ‘flexi-storytellers’: ‘Digital media and new formats
provide an endless repertoire of tools to tell stories in a compelling
way.’ Schantin adds: ‘The goal is to develop an editorial department
with a storyteller-with-new-tools mentality.’
●●
Staff who have an analytics mindset and a focus on the audience.

Supported by technology
As a brand journalist you will need to leverage – and continue to
review – marketing technology tools within the entire span of
work that you do. There is no point creating content and not
getting it to the right audiences, or delivering the outcomes that
you need. Your brand journalism ‘MarTech stack’ (group of soft-
ware components) will be crucial at every stage of content strategy,
creation, delivery, sharing and monitoring. You might be in the
lucky position of having such a large volume of content, and the
size of operation that means you can create your own editorial
insights engine or tool to determine your content success, but
many of you will need to purchase a tool, or use a free tool at each
stage of the process.
There is a mind-boggling array of marketing technology tools out
there on the market, and the details regarding this range are beyond
the scope of this book. There are available a range of free options in
each of these categories and it is by no means always necessary to pay
for an enterprise-grade toolkit until you are dealing with high volumes
of material or content.
 BRINGING YOUR NEWSROOM TO LIFE 215

TABLE 12.1 Brand journalism technology tools

Content analysis and strategy Content performance analytics

Audience (web and social media) analysis tools
Audience analysis Web personalization and testing tools
Content performance tools
Content creation Automated video creation tools
Graphics tools for image, GIF and video creation
Content calendars and scheduling tools
Hub creation Interactive hub development
Social media management Social media management and performance
Social listening tools
Content management Digital asset management systems
Content marketing platforms

It can be too easy to get carried away with IT-based analysis alone
but it’s also important to analyse and engage with the softer side and
outcomes of your brand journalism and storytelling, and how those
stories resonate with the real people you are trying to connect with.
Here’s Mark Schaefer’s view from our interview on data and its
power in marketing – what we should and shouldn’t take note of:

I think the biggest problem that companies have right now is that
they’re obsessed with technology. Technology has become the enemy
of great marketing, not because technology is evil or bad, it’s because
it’s so good. It’s so easy. It’s so inexpensive. It’s so intoxicating. And so
we keep adding to our MarTech stack, we keep investing even though
the research shows 80 per cent of CMOs don’t even understand the
technology that they already have.

We’ve got our heads in dashboards, we’re trying to look for the
‘marketing easy’ button that just doesn’t exist anymore. We need to
get our heads out of the dashboards and get off the technology and get
back to our customers to create real human relationships, to get out
there and talk to our customers, listen to our customers. We’re just too
really intoxicated with technology and the key to building trust is to
create really human-centred marketing, and that starts with connecting
with the needs of your customers and building emotion with your
customers.3
216 POWERFUL B2B CONTENT

The only certainty in digital marketing today is change, and the range
of technology available to marketers across the brand journalism
journey is only going to get broader. Whatever you choose to support
your planning, storytelling and distribution, ensure this is an iterative
process, with a test-and-learn approach at its heart.

Notes
1 Altimeter (nd) The 2018 State of Digital Content, Prophet. Available from:
https://insights.prophet.com/2018-state-of-digital-content (archived at https://
perma.cc/329P-MLEV)
2 Schantin, D (2018) 4 characteristics of newsroom employees ready for digital
transformation, INMA, 18 July. Available from: https://www.inma.org/blogs/
media-leaders/post.cfm/4-characteristics-of-newsroom-employees-ready-for-
digital-transformation (archived at https://perma.cc/N6XL-M5GW)
3 Schaefer, M (2019) Interview with Gay Flashman, May 2019
 217

INDEX

academic research 70, 84, 213 attribution (references) 65, 117, 119, 120,
account-based marketing research (ABM 139, 165, 169
activity) 204, 205 audience 34–36, 46–49, 68–69, 100–03,
accuracy 27–28, 117 111–12, 128, 142, 154, 157, 187
active sentences 117 analysis of 168, 215
Adobe (Adobe Summit) 54, 149, 175 broad 43, 50, 73, 76
advertising 7–8, 11, 15, 162, 168, 172–73, mapping of 46–49, 154
177, 195 see also younger audiences
agencies 59, 85, 90, 134, 138, 187, 190, audience bounce 111
207–09, 212 audio content 100, 126, 140–44
see also StoryFuel; VaynerMedia see also podcasts
Agenda 31, 37, 54, 55, 57, 70, 110, 140, audits, competitor 93–96, 152, 165
151, 185 authenticity 119–21, 128, 130, 179, 183,
aggregated information 74, 85, 105, 115, 186–87
140, 186, 203, 205 authority 73, 112
see also listicles; VMWare Influencer Autodesk 72, 73, 75, 164–65, 172
Network awareness, brand 11, 43, 48, 67–68, 127,
agility 31–32, 60, 212 135
Agilitylogistics.com 85, 148 Axios 111–12
AI (artificial intelligence) 76, 130–31, 140
AIDA 10 banner advertising 177
alpha audience 35 BCG (Boston Consulting Group) 149,
Altimeter 45, 47, 213 156–57
American Express 45 Benioff, Marc 14, 71
amplification 41, 43, 53, 54, 55, 78, 96, 129, biographies 143
161–78 blogs (bloggers) 2, 47, 53, 65, 96, 101–02,
see also content hubs; social media 111, 115, 149, 188
analogies 64, 106 Bloomberg 72
analysis 36, 94–96, 168, 210, 215 Boden, Anne 14
analyst relations 205 bold text 119
animations 130, 140 brainstorming 82, 166
AnswerThePublic 31, 187 brand alignment 53, 173
Aon 49, 140, 149, 150, 155–56, 158, 164 brand awareness 11, 43, 48, 67–68, 127,
arresting the scroll 23, 36–37, 64, 65, 135, 189, 199
117–21 brand colours 139
see also attention brand health 201, 202
articles 53 brand journalism, defined 21–23, 25, 81,
Aspen Institute 85 207
atomizing content 55, 168 brand mentions (referencing) 77–79
attention 2, 8, 25–26, 64–65, 68, 106 brand objective 41
see also arresting the scroll; authenticity; brand purpose 8–10, 13–17, 45, 69, 71–72,
brand awareness; images (imagery); 83, 86
videos BrandVoice 172
attention economy 15 Branson, Richard 184
218 INDEX

broad audience 43, 48, 50, 73, 76 consideration stage, customer journey 43,
broad content 68–77 199
B2C 16, 59, 127, 129, 173, 174 consistency 31–32, 33, 88, 209
Buffer 200 Content (Lieb) 201–03
bullet points 116, 118, 143, 144 content advisory groups 59–60
Business Trends and Insights 45 content analysis 215
buyers, and research 4–5 content archetype approach 45–46
buzz articles 100, 104, 111–12, 139 content audits 95, 165
buzz blogs 96 content creation 58–60, 163, 168, 175,
BuzzFeed 6, 111 186–89, 215
BuzzSumo 92, 101, 167, 187 see also ideation
content distribution flow, social media 168
c-suite 12, 113, 154, 182, 185 content hubs 147–59, 205, 215
cadence see publishing cadence (frequency) content management 215
CAGs 59–60 content objective 41
calendars 156 content strategy (storytelling
calls to action 58, 96, 132, 144, 201 strategy) 34–61, 64–65, 153–57
campaigns 52, 53, 57–58, 74, 170, 171, content sweet spot 13
195–98, 201 content themes 48–49, 54–57, 66, 95
see also Digital Empowers contextual content 68–77
Capgemini 139 COPE 168
‘Capital & Economics’ (Aon) 49 core audience 48, 100
captions 133 corporate events (internal events) 57, 91,
case studies 9, 37, 64–65, 77, 102, 119 136, 137, 184
centralization 89 corporate myopia 63–64
Centrica 41–42, 76, 107–08, 116, 140, 149, corporate websites 149, 195
152 cortisol 106
challenges 74, 154 Cox, Jim 22, 85–86
chapter headings 134 credibility 3 6, 45, 65, 117, 155, 175
charts 112, 139–40, 169 cross-team collaboration 16–17
Chatham House 85 curated material 53–54
Cisco 137 currency 45
clear white space 94 Custom Studios 172
click-bait 110 customer engagement 16
clicks (click-through rates) 23, 163, 197 see also Future of Customer Engagement
close-up framing 134 and Commerce (FCEC)
CMO 54, 149 customer experience 202
collaboration 16–17, 36, 89, 111, 174 customer journey (customer decision
colour 139 journey) 9, 10–12, 16, 41–44,
Command Line Heroes 141 101–02, 198–203
comments 47, 188, 198 customer pain points 47, 58, 67
commissioning 58–60, 209 customer touchpoints 10, 16
commitment 31–32, 209
communications, internal 88, 144, 165 data 1, 4, 27, 60, 138, 212–13, 215
communications teams 17, 85, 87–90, 187, data teams 211
190, 209–14 deadlines 28, 212
community 45 Delayed Gratification 114
company events see corporate events Dell 76, 143, 148, 149
(internal events) Deloitte 85
compass measurement model 201–03 demographics 34, 102
competitor audits 93–96, 152 see also Gen Z; younger audiences
complexity 1, 10–12, 17, 72, 155 desk-research 92
concreteness 64 Deziel, Melanie 22, 196–97, 211
connection 9, 12–13, 16, 106, 141, 153, digital communication 10–11
174, 190 Digital Empowers 107, 108, 149, 153, 203
 INDEX 219

D!gitalist 67, 76, 154–55 Fink, Larry 14

distribution 96, 161–78 first content language 211
distribution lists 163–64 5G 94, 139, 143
dopamine 107 flexi-storytellers 55, 214
‘down the barrel’ eyeline 134 font 132, 139
drama 37, 107 Forbes 24, 172, 173, 191, 195
drumbeat content 52–53 Forecast 77, 87, 164
Duke Energy 157 format 51–52, 95–96, 99–146, 188
Dun & Bradstreet 45 Forrester 4, 5, 155, 179
dwell time 115–16, 140, 147, 198 Forum, The see World Economic Forum
frictionless sharing 23, 50, 52, 161
editing, video 132 Fujitsu 49, 72, 149
editorial boards 59–60, 88, 93, 210 Future of Customer Engagement and
editorial teams 82, 84–85, 154, 197, 213 Commerce (FCEC) 27–28, 32, 49,
Editors in Chief 51, 87, 93, 151, 155, 209, 50, 78, 79, 156, 167
210
education 11, 46, 74, 88, 180 gamification 166
email 4, 43–44, 101, 157, 163–64 Gartner 136
emotion 15–16, 65, 107, 119–21, 128–29 GE (GE Reports) 51, 111, 148, 150, 151,
emotion economy 15–16 171
employees 9, 77, 165–66, 182–83 Gen Z 6
engagement rates 199, 203 General Data Protection Regulation
Eniday (Eni) 148, 149, 150 (GDPR) 4, 163
Eniday Newsletter 164 ghost writers 187, 190
enterprise.nxt (Enterprise Community Give me an H 144
hub) 67, 148, 157 Global Innovation Index 112
Ernest 114 Global Intelligence for the CIO see i-cio
evaluation stage, customer journey 199 global stories 83–84, 183–84
evangelists 24–25, 60, 84, 89, 165, 181–82 see also planet stories
events goal setting 40–44, 193–94
corporate (internal) 57, 91, 136, 137, 184 Goldman Sachs 133, 189
industry 29–30, 71, 74, 136, 167 Goodall, Sarah 182
life 184 Google 16, 31, 167
sponsored 136 governance 59–60
evergreen content 32, 57, 58, 84, 109, 138, grammar 117–18
156, 201 Grammarly 118
examples 113 graphics 116, 132, 139–40
see also human stories groundbreaking content 70
Exchanges 189 Guardian 114, 173
experimentation 36, 100, 126, 209
see also innovation; testing Hamlyn, Laura 57–58, 120, 141, 200–01,
experts 29, 51, 92, 133, 150, 176, 179, 213
182–83, 187, 211 hard selling 189
explainers 77, 86, 127, 130, 133 Harvard Business Review 155, 171
#hashtags 169
Facebook 4, 6, 54, 94, 115, 129, 132, 169, Hatch, Amy 27, 50, 68, 156
170 headlines 37, 111, 112, 118, 150, 156, 166,
Facebook Live 130, 135, 137, 170 169
Facebook Stories 126, 170 heroes, and villains 37, 77, 106–07
Facebook Workplace 165 Hewlett Packard 67, 157
facilitation 89 high level business challenges 154, 155
fake news 3, 6–7 Hiscox 111
final eyes 211 Home Depot 144
Financial Times 173, 195 home pages 149, 156
220 INDEX

honesty 9, 119, 144, 174 jargon 117, 118–19

Honeywell 108 Jones, Mark 26, 207, 212
Hootsuite 200 journalists (journalist mindset) 23–25,
hosts 142, 143, 174, 189 27–28, 90, 92, 207, 212
‘how to’ approach 109, 111 journey to sale concept 10
hub and spoke model 59, 89, 93 jumping off points 76, 109, 184–85, 205
Hubspot 24, 101 Juniper Networks 137
Huffington Post 191
human stories 9, 37, 86, 106, 119 Kaplan, Ken 77, 87
see also people stories (personal stories) Karr, Douglas 143
Kellner, Tomas 51, 151
i-cio 49, 72, 149 key terms 167
IBM 15, 148, 188, 196 keywords 31, 47, 116, 167
ideation 82, 190–91 Knowledge Centre 148, 149
see also content creation KPIs 87–88, 196, 199–200
Illumination 157 KPMG 85
images (imagery) 37, 96, 125–26, 137–40
content hubs 150 landing pages 149, 199
social media 169, 170–71 language 50, 76, 117, 131, 211
text 100, 103, 118, 120 see also jargon
videos 131 lead-generation 68, 78, 127, 195, 204, 205
in-house content production 59 Leadpages.net (Lead Generation, The) 144
see also communications teams legislation 3–4, 15
industry bodies 84, 85 Lenovo 10
industry events 29–30, 71, 74, 136, 167 life events 184
influencer relationship building 176–77 likes 170, 194, 198
influencers 23, 165, 173–77, 198 LinkedIn 35, 54, 64, 94, 120, 169, 171, 179,
infographics 138–39 182, 186
information volume 2–3 LinkedIn Elevate 166
see also technical information LinkedIn Live 126, 129, 130, 135, 136, 137
innovation 74, 75, 88, 202, 209 listening 31, 113, 215
Inside Trader Joe’s 142, 144 listicles 76, 104, 109–11, 115, 133
insight articles 103–04 live videos 128, 130, 135–37, 171
Insights (Agilitylogistics.com) 148 local news organizations 6
Insights (Bloomberg) 72 localization 50, 89, 151
Instagram 47, 125, 126, 129, 132, 133, 137, Lochmann, Dan 195
169, 171 long-form content 105, 114–16, 129
Intel 32, 87 see also Stories (Centrica)
intent stage, customer journey 199 long-tail search 3, 78, 166, 167
interactive graphics 140 longevity 81, 82
interest stage, customer journey 43, 199 low brand references 78–79
internal communications 88, 144, 165 Luminaries 143
internal events (corporate events) 57, 91, Lyons, Dan 24
136, 137, 184
internet 3, 10, 110, 125 magazine format 93, 149–50, 158
Internet of Things (IoT) 76, 140, 155 see also CMO; D!gitalist; Eniday (Eni);
interview videos 130, 133–37 enterprise.nxt (Enterprise Community
interviews 89, 90, 130, 131, 133–37, 189, Hub); Forbes; GE (GE Reports);
190–91 One Brief, The; Redshift; Spectra;
inverted pyramid storytelling 28, 106 Think:Act
investor relations 151, 203, 205 MailChimp 50
iQ 32, 87 mailing lists 163–64
 INDEX 221

management consultancies 85, 89 ‘off camera’ filming 134

see also BCG (Boston Consulting Group); on-site branded content hubs 149, 151
McKinsey; Roland Berger Onalytica 94, 154
mapping, audience 46–49, 154 One Brief, The 49, 149, 150, 155–56, 158,
marketing optimization 202 164
marketing research 204, 205 one plus one/one plus two interviews 134
marketing teams 17, 59–60, 85, 182, 187 Open Forum 45
MarTech stack 58, 196, 201, 214, 215 open questions 113, 189
McKinsey 10–11, 42, 45, 149, 155, 164 operational efficiency 202
measurement (metrics) 60, 96, 193–204 opinion 117, 119
see also comments; KPIs; likes; shares organic distribution 162–66, 170–71,
media (media relations) 6–8, 204–05, 207 196–198, 201
Medium 191 original research 185
medium close-up framing 134 Outbrain 177
Meltwater 94 outsourcing 59, 90, 190–91, 207–09
message framework 65–67 see also agencies
meta descriptions 167 oxytocin 106
Microsoft 4, 183, 188
mid-and bottom-of-funnel content 105, 129 paid media 36, 162, 169–77, 195, 196
Milken Institute 85 pain points 47, 58, 67
millennials 6,10, 101, 127 Parse.ly 115, 167
mission 66, 152–53, 186 part in-house content production 59
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI.com) 75, partner advertising 177
173, 195 Passion Projects 188
see also Spectra passions 186, 187
mobile devices 102, 125, 163 passive sentences 117
see also smartphones ‘People & Organizations’ (Aon) 49
Monck, Adrian 12–13, 55, 57 people stories (personal stories) 37, 69,
moral frameworks 185 73–74, 83, 183, 185
multiple interviewee interviews 134 see also human stories
music 131–32 personalized shortlinks 169
personas 34–36, 46–47, 168, 172
Nadella, Satya 14, 183 Perspectives (BCG) 157
narrative arc 114, 127, 139 Perspectives (Dell) 76, 148, 149
National Public Radio 168 Perspectives (Dun & Bradstreet) 45
native advertising 172–73, 195 photos 125–26
navigation bars 147, 158 pillar model 55
network audience 48 planet stories 69, 70–71, 83
networks 24–25, 90, 92 planning 82 , 134–35
New York Times 47, 172 see also resourcing plans
news meetings 86 podcast pages 144
news pegs 187 podcast series 120, 142
news sources 2–3, 6–7, 29 podcasts 101, 102, 120, 140–44, 174, 188,
newsjacking 30–31, 167 189, 190, 200
newsletters 29, 43, 51, 86, 156, 163–64, 165 see also Forecast
Newsroom 156 politicians 7–8
newsroom values (approach) 21–38, 75, Politico 111
207–16 post length 169, 171
no brand references 78–79 post-purchase stage, customer journey 44,
‘no’ words 50 200
NowThis 6 PR 59–60, 81, 85, 204–05, 207
Nutanix 77, 87, 164 pre-awareness stage, customer journey 43
222 INDEX

preparation 113 academic 70, 213

presence 45 by buyers 4–5
privacy 4, 10 marketing 204, 205
problem solving content 77, 174 see also aggregated information
process stories 69, 74–76, 83 Research Blogs 188
producers 143, 182, 211 resolution/drama approach 107
product launches 184–85 resourcing plans 60, 156
product stories 69, 76–77, 83 responsiveness 30–31, 36
product testing 174–75 retrospective scans 165
profiles 77 revenue generation 202
see also employees reverse pyramid approach 168
project management 212–13 revising material 164–65
promotion 12, 26, 54 reward systems 87–88
proof points 66, 67, 82 ‘Risk & Innovation’ (Aon) 49
ProWritingAid 118 robots 109
‘psychology of social sharing’ 47 ROI 60, 194, 198, 206
publication schedules 56 Roland Berger 78, 115
publishing cadence (frequency) 32, 52, 57, round tables 105, 114, 175
95, 188 Ruhe, Krista 155
see also quality vs quantity
pull quotes 96, 116, 118, 143, 169 SaaS 166
Pulsar 94, 154, 167 Saint Elmo Lewis, Elias 10
purchase stage, customer journey 44, 200 sales conversations 58, 200, 201
purpose 8–10, 13–17, 45, 69, 71–72, 83, 86 sales funnel 10, 42, 101–02, 105, 129, 195
Purpose and Profit 14 sales teams 17, 60, 85
Puttnam, Lord 7 Salesforce 14, 71
PwC 85, 171 SAP 164, 166
see also D!gitalist; Future of Customer
Q&As 104–05, 112–13, 129, 133, 137 Engagement and Commerce (FCEC)
qualitative research (analysis) 35, 94 Schaefer, Mark 35, 143, 176, 215
quality vs quantity 32–33, 54, 95, 143 scripts, video 131
see also publishing cadence (frequency) scrolling graphics 116, 139, 140
quantitative research 35 search engine marketing 177
questions 92, 113, 135, 189, 190–91 search engine optimization (SEO) 161, 162,
Quora 92, 166–67 166–167
quotas 87–88 see also long-tail search
quotes 96, 116, 118, 143, 169, 171 secondary research 185
Selling with Purpose 14
Radarly 154 SEMrush 92
raincatcher content 68–77, 83 sensitivity 31
readability 96, 118–19, 143 sentence structure 117, 118
reading lists 158 shares (sharing content) 23, 35, 74, 88, 96,
recognition 88 111–12, 198, 199, 200
red flags 209 short-form social videos 129–33, 203
Red Hat 57–58, 141, 142, 200–01, 213 shortlinks 169
Reddit 73, 92, 175 Siemens 171, 173
Redshift 72, 73, 75, 164–65, 172 Siewert, Jake 189
references (attribution) 65, 117, 119, 120, sign-off, storymining 82
139, 165, 169 simplicity 64, 117
reflectors 181 single soundbite interviews 133
relevance 82, 84, 117, 152, 158, 187 Slack 111
reliability 9 SlideShare 120
research 35, 36, 84–85, 91–92, 105, 138, Smart Brevity 111
166–67, 185, 190 Smarter with Gartner 136
 INDEX 223

smartphones 10, 91, 102, 108, 128, 135, syndication 177, 191
136 system governance 59–60
social listening tools 94
social media 6, 24, 47, 112, 161–62, T Brand Studio 172
168–69, 191, 210, 215 Taboola 177
comments 47, 188, 198 Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) 107, 108,
and influencers 176 149, 153, 203
likes 170, 194 teams 16–17, 60, 84–85, 87–90, 187, 190,
metrics 198–200 209–14
shares (sharing content) 23, 35, 74, 88, editorial 82, 154, 197
96, 111–12, 198, 199, 200 marketing 59–60, 182
and videos 129, 130, 133–34 technical information 50, 129
see also Facebook; Facebook Live; technicians 181–82
Facebook Stories; Facebook technology 214–16
Workplace; Instagram; see also AI (artificial intelligence); digital
LinkedIn; LinkedIn Elevate; LinkedIn communication; internet; Internet of
Live Things (IoT); websites
social proof 176 templates 50, 89, 93, 94, 165–66
social responsibility (issues) 14, 71–72 testing 100, 130, 169, 170, 174–75, 206,
soundbites 131, 134, 135 207, 216
Spectra 109, 110, 129, 149, 195 text content 100, 103–21
spelling 117–18 themes 48–49, 54–57, 66
sponsored events 136 Theofilou, Bill 13
spreadsheets 47, 200 Think:Act 78, 115
Sprout Social 101 thought leadership 9, 11, 45, 73, 77, 95,
stakeholders 1, 25, 39, 41, 44, 60, 86, 91, 104, 133, 179–91
136 3 Things 133
standalone brand names 149–53, 158 titles 113, 139
Starling Bank 14 tone 49–51, 95, 207
statistics 139–40, 169 toolkits 88, 89, 165–66
stills 131 touchpoints 10, 16
Stories (Centrica) 41–42, 76, 107–08, 116, Trader Joe’s 142, 144
140, 149, 152 training 166
Stories (Facebook) 126, 170 transcripts 135, 143, 144
Stories (Instagram) 126, 137, 171 translation 50
story culture 87–88 transparency 5, 13, 14, 45, 51, 177
story groupings 69–77 trends 74
story mining 81–97 troll farms 3
StoryFuel 22, 196–97, 211 trust 3, 5–8, 10, 26, 27, 35, 36,
storytelling strategy (content 45, 176
strategy) 33–61, 64–65, 153–57 TV news channels 6
strawmen 156 Twitter 6, 92, 94, 115, 171, 182
streaming methods 136–37 Txchnologist 148
style 49–51, 95–96
sub headers 118 unexpectedness 64
subs 211 Unilever 14
subscribers 148–49, 156 UPS 148, 149
subscriptions 29, 86 Urban Air Mobility 108
subtitles 131, 133
success stories 74, 88, 119, 198 value 9, 15, 36, 45, 47–48, 54, 67–68, 95,
summaries 118 156, 203–08
support, content as 46 value exchanges 189
sustainability 15, 144, 205 vanity metrics 194
224 INDEX

Vaynerchuk, Gary 55, 168 Wikipedia 117

VaynerMedia 168 window, content as 45
videos 52, 100, 103, 114, 126–37, 171, 190, Wired 151
198, 203, 210 workplace stories 91
villains 106–07 World Economic Forum 12–13, 26, 32, 45,
Vimeo Livestream 137 112, 132, 137, 166, 197, 212
virtual round tables 114 see also Agenda
vision 152–53, 180–81 World Health Organization 185
visionaries 181 ‘World’s most pressing business issues’
visual content 52, 125–40, 210 (Aon) 49
VMWare Influencer Network 174 WP BrandStudio 172
vocabulary 37 writers 95, 207, 209, 210–11
volume 2–3, 53, 95, 164
yellow vests (gilets jaunes, les) 8
Wall Street Journal 51, 172, 195 ‘yes’ words 50
Walmart Today 148 Yitbarek, Saron 142
Washington Post 25, 158, 172 younger audiences 5–6, 102, 103
websites 136–37, 149 see also Gen Z; millennials
Weiner, Jeff 186 YouTube 130, 134, 137
WeWork 171
‘What if’ approach 108–09 Zak, Paul 106–07
WhatsApp 73, 126
 225

THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

226

THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

 227

THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

228

THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK