Why executive branding matters

#1 – It’s getting much harder to differentiate

#2 – Most solutions seen as commodities

#3 – Lack of relevance & personalization in B2B marketing

#4 – Ad-blocking & ad-blindness

#5 – These day people follow humans, not products or companies

 

Collage of business people, used to illustrate personal branding for executives.

And also why you need an easy system for B2B content.

Happy man relaxing after marketing audit

Show your credibility first…your solution can wait

Remember, you’re promoting your credibility…not your company or solution. You are showing (not telling) your domain expertise, and your awareness of current trends and their implications.

You are building credibility for yourself, which dovetails nicely with what you’re selling. To whom do buyers turn when they’re in-market? Credible people.

Next steps to an easy system for B2B content

Creating truly intriguing tech & SaaS content is not difficult. Think through this short exercise, jotting down a few bullet points.

 

  • Background: usually a recent trend in your industry, vertical or market space around this topic.
  • Current challenge: a tech or SaaS challenge is almost always framed around wasted effort and/or money. Or reducing headaches significantly.
  • Your experience: “we’ve seen this happen with some customers”.
  • Your recommendation: Consider taking these steps.

Example – content for IT professionals

Your firm sells file management software to certain verticals. Here’s how you would create a piece for an enterprise data storage audience.

Background: Industries using large volumes of rich data for complex workflows are growing petabytes of unstructured data, which must be stored and retrieved on demand. Industries like oil and gas, entertainment, life sciences, and software development. End users cannot access the files they need without engaging their IT departments. This leads to soaring storage and IT costs for those companies.

Challenge: Data storage costs are skyrocketing and overburdened IT staffs need a way to push file management down to the business user. Allowing end users to determine what, when and where to archive data for later retrieval will help migrate data to lower cost storage and save time and expense for IT teams.

Frustrate IT pro, used to illustrate article on easy system for B2B content.

Your Experience: Today, we are seeing interesting software solutions that solve this problem beautifully. With ROI focused architectures, these solutions are ideal for companies with complex workflows using rich data files.

Your Recommendation: Take a look at solutions that offer cloud file management across multiple storage locations. Create a bullet list that, of course, highlights your expertise without ever mentioning the name of your company or product.

 

What will be your content consumer’s conclusion?

There’s no longer a mandate for IT departments to keep adding costly near term storage. Nor is it necessary for IT teams to bear the labor brunt of mediating between business users of data and storage archives.

Offer your audience next steps:

  • review the number and types of requests IT has received from end users
  • estimate the costs of answering these requests
  • use a break-even model to see if a 3rd party solution could save money

With those simple bullet points you have an outline for an article. And you’re on the way to creating top tech or SaaS content marketing.

What’s next?

Once you’re happy with the bullet points it’s time to write the article or delegate to someone else. If you delegate make sure it’s someone with domain expertise! Otherwise, you’ll spend more time educating the creator than it may be worth.Cartoon Snoopy on top of his doghouse typing

For written posts aim for 1,000 to 1,500 words. That’s when search engines take your content seriously.

Next, look at what you’ve created and think of a headline that grabs attention and boosts SEO.

Potential headlines for this article could be:

  • Overwhelmed By Unstructured Data? Here’s Good Medicine.
  • Need Relief For Your IT People?
  • The Unstructured Data Tsunami. Here’s How To Manage.

Final thoughts

Finally, notice how easily this can be tailored for different verticals. With search-and-replace editing, you now have insightful content for:

  • life sciences
  • entertainment
  • oil & gas
  • software development

You also have a solid foundation for a video or podcast!