This week, I attended my first in-person meeting with one of our clients. As I sat in the parking lot double-checking the meeting time for the third time, I wasn’t sure what to expect.
After spending the last year and a half as a B2B journalist in the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) industry, I was a bit nervous about how I would handle writing for clients rather than about them.
Shortly after taking my seat in the meeting room, I realized the change wouldn’t be as drastic as I thought. This client made it very clear that they focus on sharing customer experiences and setbacks instead of pitching them a product. As someone who received countless press releases and PR “fluff” in my previous role, the conversation was a breath of fresh air.
It also struck a chord with me: Why aren’t other companies taking a similar approach to their marketing strategy? In my opinion, they underestimate how smart their audience is. They may not realize it, but their readers can smell a product pitch from a mile away. Even worse, they’ve learned to scroll right past it.
A Content-First Approach
Put yourself in your readers’ shoes. Would you want a product pitched to you every time you open a LinkedIn newsletter? Probably not, especially when you’re hoping to find trends and insights that are relevant to your business.
If your company seeks to establish itself as an industry leader, think about what your audience really wants to read. In the indoor agriculture space, the stories that resonated most with our readers shared the mistakes other growers made and how they fixed them. People want to hear about other people; they want to see their own experiences reflected in others. They don’t want to hear about a new product launch every time they turn around.
In some instances, these growers would use a new piece of technology to solve their problem. But in most cases, they used resources they already had. In both scenarios, a real-world example of human experiences proved to be far more valuable than any product pitch.
To create content that resonates like these real-world grower stories did, it’s essential to apply journalistic principles to your writing.
Applying Journalism to B2B Marketing
The grower stories we wrote ended up being some of the most successful on our website. We understood who our audience was (greenhouse growers and indoor farmers) and what they wanted to read. B2B marketers would experience similar success on their blog posts if they understood their audience and the content they look for (and look forward to reading) in their inboxes.
In other words, they would approach content how journalists do.
As we say in The Media Mindset, interviewing your audience is a “cheat code” in both journalism and marketing. As any journalist knows, having candid conversations is the most effective way to understand your audience and the challenges they’re facing. It also gives you context and a window into the way your customers actually think.
You can do the same – you just have to change the way you think.
Think Like a Journalist, Create Engaging Content
If you’re guilty of pitching a product to your audience over educating them, it’s not too late to switch gears. In The Media Mindset, Encore360 offers a simple five-step framework to start thinking like a journalist and curating more engaging articles for your audience:
- Pick three audiences or “buyer types” you want to reach.
- Interview five of your existing customers.
- Track where your audience talks in a separate document.
- Write headlines based on actual audience phrasing.
- Review the top 10 pieces of content on your blog and determine whether they’re company-first or audience-first. Rewrite at least two of them with your reader in mind.
As I pulled out of the parking lot after that client meeting, all of my nerves had subsided. Writing content for clients isn’t all that different from writing about them as long as the audience comes first.