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Can B2B brands tell their story?

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Many business-to-business brands – not just in Asia, but worldwide – face the problem of successfully articulating their stories. They know their product or service can and has solved customers’ business needs. Their frontline sales staff can clearly demonstrate the solution offered, and clients are willing to give glowing testimonials. And yet these organisations’ marketing and business development collaterals are uninspiring and clunky.The information is there, but it doesn’t engage with the reader.These brands face the problem of storytelling. The art of telling stories is itself a skill. And storytellers who understand the market, can uncover a compelling narrative angle within the business solution and intelligently engage with an industry-savvy demographic, are an increasingly valuable commodity.B2B brands are responding to this need in a variety of ways. Some are bringing brand name storytellers in-house. US brands have increasingly wooing respected journalists away from traditional publishers. Michael Copeland, senior editor at Wired magazine, joined Andreessen Horowitz last year to head the venture firm’s content strategy, and eight-year Forbes veteran Tomas Kellner, left to run GE Reports, General Electric’s blog on technological innovation.While journalists have regularly swapped the beat for PR and marketing, it is rarer to find brand journalists at Asian B2Bs. There are, however, exceptions.Equinix, the global data centre and computing infrastructure supplier, has a Singapore-based director of global content and digital media, Tejaswini Tilak. Her role involves generating both thought leadership and new business opportunities for network service providers and mobile operators. This investment in brand content has enabled Equinix to produce a mix of both product-focused content and insights on Asia- and industry-specific topics, such as big data in the Asia-Pacific insurance industry.In-house brand storytellers are important, but to deliver the required scale of volume and reach requires dedicated content creators and appropriate platforms. If B2Bs turn to content creation agencies, the level of industry knowledge within the agency must be the equivalent of the brand’s target demographic. Asia’s B2B brands should look for those content creators that have demonstrable industry knowledge and a track record of understanding and articulating the key business needs and solutions.When HSBC wanted to move businesses’ perception of it from being a transactional partner to a strategic partner, it worked with various external vendors, including content creation agencies and content distributors and publishers, to roll out its content strategy. This strategy integrated the bank’s own thought leadership portal Global Connections, and a 13,000-member strong LinkedIn group: HSBC Global Connections. This investment saw increased engagement on both platforms, with its LinkedIn pages reporting over 40,000 interactions with Global Connections content in over 50 countries.It’s an old cliché in marketing that you should be where your customers are. Increasingly, for B2B content marketing that means being on LinkedIn. Widely regarded as being the most effective B2B content distribution platform, LinkedIn drives more traffic and generates more leads for B2B brands than any other social media platform.However, there are some uniquely Asia-specific issues to consider when using LinkedIn. While it has opened up its publishing platform to allow around 25,000 members to create long-form content on the platform, there are currently no plans to roll this out beyond the US.That means Asian B2B brands that want to tell their stories on-platform have the option of utilising individual member profiles, Company Page posts or groups. Citibank’s Connect: Professional Women’s Network group, and Adobe’s showcase pages, which focus on different aspects of the business, are both extremely effective platforms. Adobe reported increased brand uplift after a campaign of supporting Sponsored Updates, but both initiatives required considerable investment in time and resources.The challenge of telling a story that resonates with your customer is considerable. But it can be met. Asian B2B brands need to have someone in-house with both the ownership of brand content output and the seniority and scope to integrate that content with the organisation’s existing outreach, be it marketing or social media.To scale up, it is worthwhile considering working with either an existing publisher or a content creation agency. Unlike working with a freelance model, a dedicated content creation agency or publisher can deliver editorial creativity, quality control and publishing processes – in the required volume and depth.Lastly, distribution is key. Part of any B2B’s spend must consider how to amplify the message beyond organic growth. Facebook is not a natural B2B platform, but if brands now want to reach more than 2% of their fans or followers – they need to pay to connect. Spend wisely on the platforms the target audience visits, but optimise your own website and blogs. Owned real estate is the space where any brand has the creative and functional control.Joseph Jones is managing editor at Novus, where he leads brand content creation. 

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