With a slew of statics and recent articles championing the business value of visual content, it’s hard to deny the importance of visual design to any content marketing program. But all visual content is not equal, and inadequate design can hurt more than it helps. Before you begin fueling your B2B 2015 content marketing engine with design-driven marketing collateral, take a moment to go back to the basics of good design.
As we approach the end of the year, B2B marketers (and lots of other folks) are rolling out predictions for 2015. Much like the past few years, we are seeing a lot of talk about the increased use of analytics in marketing, and a trend toward holding marketers accountable for bottom-line results.
In July, Weird Al Yankovic released his latest album, Mandatory Fun. His approach was both successful and creative.
As SAP CMO Jonathan Becher famously stated, “…big glass buildings don’t buy software, people do.” So why do so many marketers still act as though they’re selling to big glass buildings? It’s time to humanize #B2B marketing. It’s time to create content that speaks to people and their needs, behaviors, and points of pain. Good marketing should provide value and offer experiences that make the audience want to look, want to read, want to engage.
Remember all those late-night conversations you had in college? What if you had a record of all the things you said, all the problems you solved, all the ideas that you couldn’t quite put back together the next morning?
Everyone wants to know what makes a good story. But a novelist is in a very different business than an ad copywriter. Stories in the context of marketing and branding are too brief to use techniques of classic storytelling like narrative arcs and character development. Effective branding stories are told obliquely; they still involve characters with problems to solve, but the narratives that exist are fragmentary and depend on the viewer to complete or even originate them. To coin a term, we could call them “microstories.”
