Five Surefire Ways to Boost Your B2B Marketing Content’s Readership

Forestville: March 7, 2019

A father bear, mother bear, and their baby bear arrived home yesterday afternoon to find that a young girl had broken into their home and was sleeping in the baby bear’s bed. Investigators said the girl, whose name they disclosed is Goldilocks, was last seen running from the site of the break-in after jumping out a bedroom window after having been awakened by the bears. Prior to falling asleep, Goldilocks ate all of the baby bear’s porridge and broke his chair, authorities alleged.

An elective course Allen took in college was an introduction to news journalism. Among the assignments in courses like this is to write a lead paragraph (the “lead” or “lede”) using a well-known children’s tale as the news item. Lead paragraphs are written to provide the reader a preview of the story to come, summarizing it with only basic facts—the “who, what, when, and where.” The objective of the lead is to prompt readers to continue on to get the details.

We led this article with that thought to make the point that if you want your business-to-business (B2B) marketing content to gain readership, the first thing you must do is think like a news journalist.

In this age of information overload, it’s critical to be able to quickly grab your reader’s attention with the key points you want them to take away. That way, even if they read only the first few lines of your marketing message, they’ll immediately grasp the most critical things you want to communicate. And, hopefully, if you’ve done a good job setting the stage, they’ll continue reading to pick up more of the specifics in your marketing content.

Content marketing is used by over 91% of B2B marketers; but only 37% of marketing organizations have a documented content marketing strategy and only 20% describe their approach to content marketing as “very successful,” according to a survey by MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute.

That’s because, as the survey noted, over 83% of those on the receiving end of online marketing messages reported being overwhelmed by both the amount and the length of communications. They want the content shorter, to the point, and prescriptive—as in “just give me a solution.”

Solution in mind, and aside from thinking like a news journalist as you take on marketing content initiatives, what are four other surefire ways to optimize your efforts?