29.9.22

It’s easy for whitepapers to fall into the trap of being nothing more than thinly veiled sales tools. Just a few pages in, it quickly becomes clear that the paper lacks authority and fails to provide anything new or meaningful to industry conversations.

Rather than eagerly pushing products and services, whitepapers should focus on problem solving – generating real value by helping, informing and inspiring their audience. From here, they have the power to create long-term, meaningful business leads and to set an organisation up as a thought leader.

So, how do you write a whitepaper that establishes your credibility and showcases your organisation as an industry front-runner?

Gathering your insights

From the outset, take a two-pronged approach to gathering your inputs and insights.

Use your subject matter experts for in-depth and refined details in your whitepaper – their daily experiences on the ground will offer valuable insights on the most pressing trends in the industry. Ask them: What’s affecting customers? What questions are they fielding regularly? What challenges are emerging in their market? This will help identify your customers’ key pain points as well as guiding the main topic and core sections of your whitepaper.

Next, consult your sales directors and use their input to steer wider market research. The sales team will provide ‘bigger picture’ context, supporting evidence and balance for the final paper.

Maintaining thought leadership

After you’ve gathered the content and inputs, make sure your unique perspective is present throughout the paper. Here are our top tips on letting your thought leadership shine through:

1. Show that you understand
   Your readers want to feel that you understand their pain points and the environment they’re operating in. Expand on their challenges and make sure you provide answers to the issues that are relevant to them.
   
2. Avoid overexplaining
   Don’t overexplain or spell out the obvious – readers will quickly find this frustrating, and it will undermine the level of understanding you’re trying to convey. Instead of wasting words on setting the scene, get stuck into your advice and ‘value add’. It’s fine if this means the paper is shorter – succinct and concise information that’s genuinely beneficial is better than pages of unhelpful detail.
   
3. Break down your advice step by step
   Explain your new ideas and the solutions you’re offering in the simplest, most concise way. Breaking down your recommendations into manageable stages will empower your reader and help them understand how they can implement your advice.
   
4. Minimising your sales talk
   You’ll quickly undermine your positioning as a thought leader if you mention products and services early in a paper. Thought leadership should first and foremost be about sharing advice, knowledge, expertise and insight. Keeping your brand’s solutions close to the end of the paper, and using a light touch approach, is the best way to ensure the value of your insights isn’t undermined by overt sales messaging.

To find out more about writing market-leading whitepapers, please contact us.

27.8.22

As a B2B content commissioner, a prime part of your role is to make sure internally and externally produced content speaks with your brand’s tone of voice – but what does that mean in practice?

All too often, corporate brand guidelines focus on a list of aspirational statements and are light on detail – the specifics of what you should be looking for when you review blog posts, whitepapers, brochures and eBooks. Vague, subjective pointers like ‘be inspirational’ aren’t always the type of practical guidance you need.

We’ve been interpreting and implementing global organisations’ tone of voice guidelines for over 16 years now, so here’s a brief rundown of our top tips…

1. Look beyond the aspirational aims

Use any tone descriptors to give you a flavour of how a brand aims to sound, but don’t get too hung up on trying to interpret them into concrete examples. They’re usually included to paint a word picture, rather than to provide hard-and-fast rules. Remember, too, that these descriptors are highly subjective: what’s ‘visionary’ for one person could well be exaggeration for another.

2. Take your guidance from the examples

Good tone of voice guidelines will include plenty of examples, usually demonstrating before and after scenarios. This is where you can really get to grips with the mechanics of tone, seeing it in action and understanding how it varies between different content types. Often you learn as much from what the brand team doesn’t want than from what it does.

3. Remember the constants of any brand voice

The brand voice may go through many updates, but the fundamentals of tone will remain the same:

• communicate clearly and directly, leading with the benefits for the target audience
• get to the point – take out any sentences that don’t add value
• cut the jargon
• beware of over claiming – it’ll devalue your message
• use an appropriate level of explanation – don’t assume and don’t patronise
• be led by your audience – the tonal shade that works for CEOs might not be right for colleague communications.

4. Get a second pair of eyes on it

Particularly in the early days of a brand voice update, it’s often useful to get a marketing colleague to review the tone of a piece of content. This way your team will quickly build up a shared view how your brand voice should be brought to life and will be ready to give constructive feedback to content creators.

5. Connect with your brand team

Your brand team have invested huge amounts of time into developing the tone of voice guidelines and they know them better than anyone else, so use your brand colleagues. It’s never helpful when marketing departments see brand as a hindrance to getting content out. Instead, see the brand team as a resource you can tap into for clarification and guidance. Bringing brand in on your first few content reviews, or on any tricky issues, is always a good idea and will deepen your tonal knowledge for the future.

We are experts at creating B2B content in your brand voice. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about working together.

20.7.22

In B2B marketing, your content often revolves around sharing expert opinions with your decision-making audience. For many organisations, that means getting subject matter experts to write whitepapers, eBooks and blog posts.

Is there a better way?

Content written by subject matter experts only works if the experts in the target company are making the buying decisions, but that doesn’t happen often. It’s more likely that your decision-making audience are time-poor C-suite executives who need to grasp the value of your proposition quickly before saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

To get that ‘yes’, global organisations’ marketing departments often use content creators as ‘translators’ who make complex expertise simple and set it in the context of how it can help the business.

We’ve been translating expertise for over 15 years, and rely on a few key principles to generate successful content:

1. Value your expert

Always remember that the heart of your content is your expert’s knowledge, not the marketing you surround it with. They operate in a world of precise terminology, where using a term incorrectly could change the whole meaning or devalue your efforts to be a thought leader. Put time into understanding the language of the sector and ask questions if something’s unclear.

2. Capture your expert’s tone

Thought leadership content often needs the credibility of a named author. So, it makes sense to incorporate the individual’s turns of speech to create standout from your corporate tone. Listen out for favourite phrases or effective analogies when talking to your expert .Then, weave them into your clear, easy-to-read copy.

3. Ask the right questions

Expertise can be intimidating because you don’t have an equal level of knowledge. However, it’s important to remember that you’re not in the conversation to debate the finer points of the subject. Your job is to gather information, clarify your understanding and get an overall picture of the messages your expert wants to get across. Don’t be embarrassed to ask for simplistic explanations suitable for a bright ten-year-old, or to probe if you don’t get the point straightaway.

4. Clarify your parameters

Your expert’s knowledge is deep and wide, and there’s no way you can capture it all in one piece of content. Always start a project with a clear idea of the area you are covering, preferably broken down into sections by the expert or the marketing department in advance. An effective opening question is ‘what’s the key message you want the reader to take away from this content?’.

5. Be an intermediary

Successful content sets the thought leadership of expertise within a clear context of benefits for the reader’s organisation. Getting to this point involves tapping into your expert’s interactions with customers so that they share actionable insights rather than knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Always filter what your expert is telling you through the question, ‘how does this help our target audience?’.

We excel at making this whole process easy for both the experts and the marketing department. Get in touch if you’d like to find out how we could connect your customers with your expert’s insight.

18.6.22

Almost half of employees are now opting to work mostly from home and ‘sometimes’ from their usual place of work. So-called ‘hybrid working’, it’s more flexible than traditional patterns of working and can boost productivity, team wellbeing and work-life balance. But it can be tricky to get right. To make sure everyone has a great experience, including your clients, digital platforms have to effectively support the team’s coordination, leadership, communication, and client outreach.

At asabell, we’ve been successfully hybrid working for a while, so we’ve decided to take a closer look at how to make sure hybrid works. Here are some of our top tips.

1. Prioritise employee wellbeing
   A way of working that’s good for your clients and your people, is good for your productivity. Sitting down with the team and discussing how people and clients like to work, and the technologies that can best support them, is one of the most effective ways to make sure you’re doing hybrid ‘right’. And it’s important to look at the perspective of each department. Where one might prioritise client communication, another might have very specific data requirements – each team is best placed to know what they need.
   
2. Set-up training and mentoring
   One of the stumbling blocks of hybrid work is that it can become impersonal, leaving new starters, from graduates to senior leadership, without the hands-on experience that was key to learning a new job role. Making sure you have a robust training programme in place, and that every new employee is allocated a mentor, is a great way to overcome this and make sure people are initiated into the team. (A new-starter lunch is a great excuse for a get-together, too!)
   
3. Get your data secure
   No matter what industry you work in, your data is valuable. Don’t skimp out when it comes to security. Make sure you choose a security programme or provider that will keep you and your clients secure.
   
4. Invest in your connectivity and IT
   Working apart means we rely on digital technology to keep us together. As with security, it’s important to invest up-front in a platform that will provide everything your team(s) need. And it should be simple, seamless and secure for both clients and employees – otherwise it could cause some serious setbacks further down the line. Bonus points if you choose something that offers quick fixes when things go wrong – it’ll save you from frustrated team members and disgruntled clients as well as helping maintain your productivity.
   
5. Revisit team leadership
   Similar to training and mentoring, team leadership is a whole new ball game in the hybrid workplace. Managers who were fantastic in their roles for many years previously might find it hard to find their footing in a hybrid space. Equally, there are plenty of employees who are finding it tough to not have a physical support network around them during their workday. Thinking about how leadership, support and teambuilding will work should happen early in your hybrid journey so there’s a clear structure in place to make sure everyone’s happy with their work-from-home set-up and to ensure a seamless, high-quality experience for clients, no matter where their point of contact is working from.
   
6. Have a quiet, private space to work
   Parents, flat-shares, house-by-a-building-site, my partner’s working shifts, the girl next door’s a rock musician – we hear you! If you’re one of those (many) people still wearing noise-cancelling headphones and working from a kitchen bench, dining-room chair or on an ironing board in the cupboard, sorry. At least you don’t have to listen to Dave’s radio choice all day now though, right!?

So, there you have it! Our top tips for making hybrid work. To find out more about how we make sure we produce the best work, while also remaining responsive and accessible to our clients, please get in touch.

B2B is better together for logistics

16.5.22

B2B marketing in the supply chain and logistics industry is in a state of flux. After a year of considerable challenges, marketing might have shifted right down your list of urgent priorities.

As we mentioned in our recent blog, it’s time to enter a new phase. This year, the industry needs to take marketing off the backburner and focus on building great business relationships that will weather the uncertainty of the coming years.

So where do you begin if B2B hasn’t been on the agenda for a while?

Get your marketing started

Often, you need an outside pair of eyes. A partner who can assess where you’re at – what’s working and what’s not. From there, it’s important to discuss your business goals and put together a plan that’s tailored to achieving them.

For lots of organisations within the supply chain and logistics industry, technology solutions are core to their campaigns. The successes many businesses have enjoyed after implementing new technologies evidence how innovative, agile and forward-thinking they are. In a market still peppered with uncertainties, these qualities are just what clients are looking for.

If you’ve had some business wins, like successfully optimising the factory floor through IT/OT convergence, or digitally optimising your supply chain, that’s a great place to start gathering material for your next campaign. Case studies, expert opinions, revamping your social media channels and reviewing your brand identity are all good starter for tens, too.

For more information on how marketing can help you achieve your business goals this year, keep an eye out for our latest whitepaper. It’s tailored to your industry, and it’s full of insights into how to drive more value from your marketing.

And, as always, let us know if you’d like any help or guidance. We’ve work with lots of businesses in your sector, creating a range of materials from articles to whitepapers, animations, infographics, and web pages. Tell us what you want to achieve and we’ll deliver the content to get you there!

Don’t let marketing become your last mile

28.4.22

More than any other industry, supply chain and logistics is familiar with the last mile. That final step of the journey where a product is delivered to the customer’s door. It should be the easy home straight, but it’s often the most expensive and time-consuming part of the supply chain process.

It’s important not to let your marketing fall into this trap. You’ve done the hard yards and survived the pressures of the past few years. That’s taken innovation, agility and a lot of hard work. Keeping your partners and customers up-to-date should be the easy part. That’s why you need an effective, efficient B2B marketing strategy. One that consolidates your success and expands your business prospects.

There are loads of ways that B2B marketing can help you strengthen relationships and win business:

• A strong content strategy identifies your business goals and the best content to get you there.
• A clear brand identity sets your unique voice apart from the competition and keeps your messaging on track.
• Expert led content showcases the knowledge in your organisation and outlines your presence as a thought leader in your industry.
• A strategic social media presence actively connects you with the right audience and presents your brand in the right way.
• Focused value communication shares your core principles and aspirations with clients, both current and potential.
• Powerful storytelling turns your business solutions into engaging content that boosts your industry credentials.
• A consistent presence shows clients you’re an organisation they can rely on, with joined-up thinking that supports your business goals.

To find out why marketing is so important to the supply chain and logistics industry right now, keep an eye out for our latest industry-focused whitepaper. In it, we look at your unique challenges and provide lots more insight into the marketing strategies that will help drive your business over the coming years.

Don’t let marketing become your last mile! Have a read and let us know if there’s anything we can help with – our account team would be more than happy to discuss your business goals.

Our key recommendations for standout B2B blog content

21.4.22

Every day, the amount of content being produced for B2B blogs continues to soar. Which means creating articles that stand out from the crowd and capture the attention of your target audience is only getting harder and harder.

Yet, a flourishing blog is a great channel of communication with your target audience and will generate meaningful conversions for your business.

Here’s our key recommendations for B2B blog content success:

Understand what appeals to your specific audience

Ask your salespeople and customer service staff about the common questions and concerns they hear from prospects and customers. Listen and find out what information might appeal to your target market and match it to what your organisation offers.

Get the most out of the resources you have

Your people know your target market best, so it makes sense that they should play a big part in ‘speaking’ to them. Pull together a team of contributors who can use their expertise to connect with customers.

Don’t just blog for the sake of it

Make sure every article puts across a clear point; don’t be tempted to post something that’s all puff and no substance, just because you’ve got a schedule to meet. Satisfied readers who feel they’ve got something out of your article will return for more.

Devise a plan

Step back and think ahead. Make strategic decisions now about what you’re going to be blogging about over the next six months. It’ll make you think objectively about what you’re putting out and make sure you never get caught short.

Be dependable

Try to post strong content regularly; this will make checking your blog a good habit for your readership — giving you regular opportunities to ‘speak’ to your audience. Try getting blogs written ahead of schedule so that other commitments don’t get in the way.

Spread your message

Promote your articles online to support your content. Make the most of your social media platforms to reach your audience wherever they are.

If you’d to speak to us about devising your own unique B2B blog campaign strategy, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Supply chain and logistics – what’s on the agenda?

13.4.22

For the supply chain and logistics industry, the past few years have a been a journey defined by roadblocks. While returning to business-as-usual has been given a tentative green light, that doesn’t mean there won’t be bumps in the road.

Here’s a rundown of some of the obstacles the industry has been up against, and how we can help you turn them into opportunities:

1. Supply chain challenges
   The challenge: Less access to raw materials, higher shipping costs and growing demand for faster fulfilment. Supply chains have always faced pressure, but with the pandemic changing consumer habits even the most robust supply chains have suffered disruption. To rebuild resilience, many organisations will be looking to significantly optimise their fleets, unlock previously untapped data in the warehouse, and tighten up their multi-channel inventory management.
   
   The opportunity: Industry players are hyper-alert to the businesses that are coping well in today’s market. Whatever your secret is – from digitally enabled supply chains to strong business relationships – make sure your industry knows about it. Turn the strategy that’s made your business so resilient into your next marketing campaign. Your potential clients want to know they’re in a safe pair of hands as they face supply chain uncertainty.

2. Evolving customer expectations
   The challenge: New fears, new habits, new hobbies, new restrictions – customer behaviours are constantly changing. Today’s shoppers have so many options at their fingertips, only the most standout and seamless experiences will keep them coming back. Keeping pace across all platforms is key – whether that’s through increased personalisation, same-day delivery, or frictionless shopping journeys.
   
   The opportunity: Staying competitive requires innovation and a ceaseless drive to stay one step ahead of the end customer. From exciting new eCommerce platforms to digitally optimised same-day delivery strategies, there are lots of ways to stay ahead of developing customer wants. And for the businesses you want to work with, these initiatives are what make you stand out from the crowd.

3. Sustainability solutions
   The challenge: Low emissions, recycled packaging, ethically sourced materials, a carbon-neutral future – customers want to purchase from companies that are environmentally friendly. And more than half will ditch brands that aren’t taking the climate emergency seriously. As environmental accountability grows organisations need optimised processes that make operations more efficient and environmentally friendly.
   
   The opportunity: Whether you have an iron-clad sustainability roadmap or you’re starting out on your sustainability journey, it’s vital to share that. As customers vote with their feet, brands are looking to boost their sustainability credentials through environmentally friendly B2B relationships. Good for the planet is good for business, so get your sustainability kudos out there.

4. Digital transformation acceleration
   The challenge: Faster innovation, faster product development, faster manufacturing, faster delivery. Businesses that want to stay competitive are already exploring transformative technologies to get ahead. Solutions like industrial IoT, advanced automation, artificial intelligence and robotics will all be make or break in this rapidly evolving landscape. Opening your doors to game-changing solutions is going to be critical for survival.
   
   The opportunity: The companies embracing digital transformation are seeing greater efficiency, productivity, and sustainability. But the business gains shouldn’t stop there – sharing details of your solutions with customers and prospects can consolidate your investments and drive business wins..

Your success is just the start

You’ve navigated countless industry challenges and have a few success stories to show for it. Don’t keep these to yourself. Whether you’ve seen productivity gains from digital transformation or boosted your sustainability credentials through a new initiative, get more out of these efforts by sharing your story.

B2B marketing is the best way to get the word out there and turn your successes into exciting new contracts and clients.

Keep an eye out for our latest whitepaper. It’s all about the supply chain and logistics industry and how marketing can help make the next few years your best yet.

Get a head start with a great headline

17.3.22

So, you’ve written your article. It’s thrilling. Maybe even ground-breaking. But without a great title to represent it, people are far less likely to read it.

So, how can you write a great headline that engages readers right from the start?

Leave headlines until last

Generally speaking, ignoring the fact you have to do something is a pretty strange way of getting it done. But instead of stressing about your catchy title from the beginning, start by simply noting a short topic sentence (sometimes called a ‘working title’) at the top of your piece. This is designed to help you, not engage your readers. Then, use it as a reminder of what you’re trying to achieve through the piece you’re writing.

For example, for this blog, my working title was ‘how to create a title that will grab their attention’. It’s a simple reminder of what this blog needs to say, which you can then focus on improving once you’ve finished the main body of the piece.

Grab some friends

It’s time to call in the reinforcements and have a collective thought shower. A useful way to go about it is to discuss the piece and have a think about key words; then throw about ideas, create a mind-map, doodle on your notepad, write a list, whatever works for you.

The aim of the game is to get as many catchy phrases and great words jotted down as possible. Best case scenario, you come out of the meeting with a catchy title. But more often than not, you’ve got plenty of material to work with to create one.

Keep it real

There are some practical considerations to consider before writing your headline. The first is to be accurate and keep it realistic. Respect your readers. If you lie to them or mislead them in the title, you’ll lose their trust.

Keep it short

• Concise and clear is important. Generally, six and eight words generates the best click-through.
• Use strong language.
• Include numbers and lists where possible.
• Try interesting adjectives.
• If you can, use a good pun.
• Try a little hyperbole (but remember not to stray from the truth).
• Use your title to solve a problem – i.e. ‘How to manage business accounts’.

Know your audience

You need to know what is likely to be compelling to your readers.

If you don’t intuitively know your audience, there are ways to get an insight. Google Analytics can reveal your best-performing pages and outline what your readers like. You can also track onsite queries and use Google AdWords Keywords to find out what terms are popular.

Whatever audience you’re trying to capture, find out what matters to them, and shape your title (and your writing) around that. It makes you part of their group, and many of us can’t resist an in-joke, so it’s a great way to get people clicking.

But be careful. You can easily get into a black hole of trying to make a bunch of keywords work as a title, and this can end up distracting from the flow of your writing. If you’ve got a catchy title, that follows the tips I’ve outlined above, don’t worry too much about trying to wrap it around a keyword generator.

Here at asabell, we specialise in creating content for our clients that captivates audiences and generates conversions. If you’d like to find out how we could you with your next B2B marketing campaign, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Marketing will redefine retail in 2022

Retail, logistics and consumer goods have had to throw out the rulebook over the past few years. As the business landscape shifts yet again, let’s take a look at the pressures shaping the industry – and why it’s time to talk about successes.

A new marketplace for the 20s

Emerging from the worst of the pandemic, retail, logistics and consumer goods had high hopes for 2021. But although a successful vaccine rollout allowed high streets to reopen, shoppers failed to flock back to traditional bricks and mortar retail. Instead, the boom in online ordering continued, and 36.3% of total UK retail sales in 2021 were digital – up from 21.8% in 2020.

This change in consumer behaviour was magnified in October 2021 when UK stock levels reached their lowest since records began. Widespread concern around product availability and fulfilment meant many Black Friday campaigns were as much about offering fast and reliable shipping as deals and discounts. And consumer behaviour continues to evolve, increasingly moving towards more sustainable choices, with environmental interests at an all-time high.

These pressures continue to shape the industry in 2022, so, if you work in retail or logistics, how can you turn them into opportunities?

What’s your new year’s resolution?

With the marketplace changed forever, organisations are exploring new approaches – reviewing their operations and looking for ways to safeguard supply chains, create more sustainable operations and meet changing customer expectations head on.

Maybe you’re looking at:

• Reducing your carbon footprint, increasing transparency across your supply chain, and being more economical with raw materials.
• Refining your logistics operation to support a robust supply chain and keep customers happy by delivering on time, every time.
• Accelerating your digital transformation, by adopting new innovations and establishing your reputation at the forefront of the industry.

Redefining your brand

Whatever your strategies for 2022, it’s vital to share your breakthroughs and successes. More than ever, your organisation needs to demonstrate to clients that you’re innovative, sustainable, robust and reliable. And working with the right B2B marketing agency can help you achieve that.

Keep an eye out for our whitepaper ‘It’s time to redefine’, to find out more about the challenges retail, logistics and consumer goods are facing. And don’t hesitate to get in touch to find out more about how we can help your organisation put its best foot forward into 2022.