It’s no secret that B2B marketing can be difficult — after all, you’re marketing to a niche audience with often limited budgets. But the challenge of cutting through the noise and making an impact with your target market is compounded yet again in the digital era: attention spans are shorter than ever before and audiences are increasingly flooded with brand messages from multiple sources at once.
So how can you make sure your message stands out?
One way to help separate yourself is by using entertaining content in B2B campaigns — it will captivate your audience’s attention, differentiate your material from competitors, reach a larger & wider set of prospects and engage them on different levels.
And in this podcast, we’re going to unpack, ‘Emailing with the Stars’, a series of entertaining webinars led by Ollie Whitfield, Demand Generation Team Lead at VanillaSoft.
Who they are: Ollie Whitfield is Demand Generation Team Lead at VanillaSoft
A bit of background: Straight from School Ollie got a job at a marketing agency and has been learning and refining his craft on the job ever since. Right now, he’s been with VanillaSoft for close to three years and looks after their demand generation activities. He also co-hosts The 0-5 Million Podcast.
Where you can find Ollie:
Connect with Ollie on LinkedIn
Webinars are a great tool for b2b marketers to connect with their target audience and promote their products or services. However, they can easily become un-engaging if not done properly. Poorly structured webinars with too much content or little interaction can lead to a boring experience for the people watching it. To ensure an engaging webinar, b2b marketers should focus on providing entertaining content that is engaging and interesting.
Ollie adds;
‘You know what it’s like with webinars, most people don’t sit there and stare at it for the whole duration. They’re kind of like clicking on something else, they’re typing, they’re in their emails, or….it’s background noise instead of the radio.’
So rather than following the same webinar formula and template, and getting the same mediocre results, Ollie wanted to create something that cut through the noise, kept the viewer entertained but also added an educational element.
▶︎ Further Reading; 10 Best Interview Questions to Ask a Demand Generation Marketing Manager
Emailing with the Stars is a webinar based on the format of the popular TV show “Strictly Come Dancing”. The show involves two contestants who compete against each other in two rounds of timed email writing, where they have to write a convincing sales email to a given scenario. The contestants are judged by a panel of judges and the winner is announced at the end of the webinar.
One of the biggest challenges B2B marketers face when creating content is coming up with creative and original ideas.
But as Ollie suggests, ‘I’m a really big believer that there is nothing new. So for instance, in my market, in this format, Emailing with the Stars is new, but it’s literally a rip-off of several shows that are internationally known.’
He goes on to explain, ‘So you don’t have to go outside the box necessarily. You just have to go sort of around the edges and you’ll find stuff that hasn’t been done. So I watch a lot on YouTube where they do a lot of challenges for example. That’s a really big thing. Could we do a challenge video? Probably. Yeah. You could do the cheap sales tool versus the expensive one or the cheap data provider versus the expensive one. that would be a good test to see the disparity in the data quality.’
And as with any piece of B2B content, it’s important that you;
▶︎ Further Reading; The Complete Hiring Guide for B2B Content Marketing Jobs
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If you’re marketing to the C-Suite, find out how to get their attention through expert-based positioning.
In this podcast, we talk to to Ant Leung about how to turn your long-form content into short-form gold.
