Mascola B2B Marketing Blog, B2B Advertising Agency
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Repurposing and Repackaging B2B Content to Keep Your Audience Engaged

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repurposing content magic cubeYour brand has many needs: developing products that meet the needs of your clients, keeping your clients happy and satisfied with your offerings, maintaining a steady workflow between your marketing and sales teams, staying one step ahead of the competition… the list goes on and on. So when it comes time to develop content like white papers, blogs, bulletins, newsletters, and more, it’s no wonder that task can often fall by the wayside. Your brand’s own content can sometimes take a backseat to the hundreds of other priorities you and your team manage on a day-to-day basis.

You Should Know Two Things About Your Struggle with Content:

  1. It’s okay!
  2. There’s a way to create new content to distribute to your audience without actually creating new content.

You Might Be Thinking… “That Makes No Sense.” But Hear Us Out:

By taking existing long-form content you’ve created, like white papers, tech bulletins, or published studies and turning them into shorter, eye-catching, digestible content like blogs, infographics, and videos, you’re still creating new content without putting in as many man-hours that the former requires.

Writing something like a white paper takes a significant amount of time, research, and understanding of the subject. Your audience appreciates these types of content, but in an age where “content is king” and attention spans seem to shrink by the day, sometimes they don’t always reach the audience they should. By taking your extensive white paper and breaking it down section by section, you’re providing your audience with the same content, just in a form they haven’t seen yet. So you might capture the attention of someone who doesn’t have the time or patience to read a full white paper. As an added bonus, when you create these types of content and post them on your website and various social channels, you can link back to the longer-form content (and require an information capture to reveal it), so you’re accomplishing two goals with one post.

So How Do You Evaluate B2B Content for Repurposing?

Choosing the kind of content you want to turn into social-friendly posts is the biggest challenge you might face. When starting out, you’ll want to evaluate your library for two things. The first being, ease of digestion. What we mean when we say that is: how complicated is the message we’re trying to get across, and how difficult will it be to convey that in an infographic, video, or blog? The second thing to evaluate is time. How long will it take us to turn this white paper into something we can get out to the masses?

If you need to hold multiple brainstorming sessions, followed by multiple rounds of development, followed by multiple rounds of edits, it might be best to leave that content as-is. If you have something that you already know can be broken down easily (and quickly!), start there. As time goes on, you can hone your skills, and eventually tackle those harder-to-understand pieces. But for now, start slow, and be sure you’re crafting messages that will resonate with your audience.

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B2B Monday Myth: B2B Copy Should Be All Business

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b2b copy tips

This may be a myth you’ve heard debunked before. It’s not a new concept: B2B doesn’t need to be boring. And it 100% should not be. Especially if you want to stand out in a sea of B2B mediocrity.

Because even though the All-Business-All-the-Time Myth has been debunked many times, there is no shortage of stiff, unreadable B2B copy in the world today. In fact, that describes the majority of B2B copy.

Now how much you can loosen up depends largely on your audience. While you want to be conversational, you also don’t want to take any guidance from say, your favorite stand-up comedian. But most likely, what resonates with your audience will fall somewhere in between where you are now and Stand-Up Johnny’s saltiest script.

Here Are a Few B2B Copy Tips to Get Started: 

  1. Look to Your Audience First. A little research can go a long way. Talk to some of your key salespeople, staff members and customers to establish a brand voice and messaging that will resonate with your target. Once the brand voice is established, make sure that voice appears everywhere. You don’t want someone to click on an ad and discover a website that looks and sounds like a completely different company.
  2. Write Like You Talk. Pretend you’re having a conversation with a friend. Whether your audience is reading a blog post, an ad, or your website, they need to feel like you are talking to them. They might be looking for ways your brand can help or empower them. But, just like your friends, they don’t want to hear you bragging about yourself.
  3. Tap Into the Emotions of Your Potential Buyer. It turns out that B2B buyers are not that different from the average retail consumer. The purchasing process is not devoid of emotion; in fact, emotion is often what drives the process.
  4. Include Calls to Action. Ads need them. Emails need them. Websites and landing pages REALLY need them. Even direct mail. The Call to Action. It’s almost like the holy grail of copy. Why? Because that’s how your prospects will know what to do after they’ve read your friendly B2B copy. That’s how you convert them. And that, most important of all, is how you’re going to know which channels work, and which ones don’t. Which brings us to…
  5. Reevaluate and Refine. Today’s analytics can tell you a lot about what’s effective and what’s not. You can test messages almost anywhere. Banner Ads. Paid Search. Subject Lines. If you test which messages are most effective at converting your prospects into customers, you’ll be able to become consistently more effective with your messaging.

So What Now? Where Do I Begin?

Pull a few different pieces from your marketing arsenal – both online and off. Read them out loud. Have your significant other read them too. Does the copy sound strained or boring? Time to breathe some new life into your brand voice.

Does it sound smooth and conversational (but not too salesy)? Maybe it only needs a few tweaks here and there. Either way, a simple review is an exercise worth going through. You might start by hiring a professional writer or an ad agency to help you evaluate and get your brand headed in the right direction.

One thing is for certain – in today’s competitive environment, you can’t afford NOT to have effective copy.

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