How to Achieve Video Content Dominance in B2B

B2B tech companies are addicted to getting you to subscribe to their corporate echo chamber newsletter graveyard, where they dump their latest self-love notes. It's a cesspool of "Look at us!" and "We're pleased to announce..." drivel that suffocates originality and murders interest. Each link, each event recap and each funding announcement is another shovel of dirt on the grave of what could have been engaging content. UNSUBSCRIBE What if, instead of serving up the same old reheated corporate leftovers, your content could slap your audience awake? Ego-stroking company updates are out. 1. The pain point deep dive: Start by mining the deepest anxieties, challenges and questions your audience faces. Use forums, social media, customer feedback and even direct interviews to uncover the raw nerve you're going to press. 2. The unconventional wisdom: Challenge the status quo of your industry. If everyone's zigging, you zag. This could mean debunking widely held beliefs, proposing counterintuitive strategies or sharing insights that only insiders know but don't talk about. Be the mythbuster of your domain. 3. The narrative hook: Every piece of content should tell a story, and every story needs a hook that grabs from the first sentence. Use vivid imagery, compelling questions or startling statements to make it impossible to scroll past. Your opening should be a rabbit hole inviting Alice to jump in. 4. The value payload: This is the core of your content. Each piece should deliver actionable insights, deep dives or transformative information. Give your audience something so valuable that they can't help but use, save and share it. Think tutorials, step-by-step guides or even entertaining content that delivers laughs or awe alongside insight. 5. The personal touch: Inject your personality or brand's voice into every piece. Share personal anecdotes, failures and successes. 6. The engagement spark: End with a call to action that encourages interaction. Ask a provocative question, encourage them to share their own stories or challenge them to apply what they've learned and share the results. Engagement breeds community, and community amplifies your reach. 7. The multi-platform siege: Repurpose your anchor content across platforms. Turn blog posts into podcast episodes, summaries into tweets or LinkedIn posts and key insights into Instagram stories. Each piece of content should work as a squad, covering different fronts but pushing the same message. Without impressive anchor content, you won't have anything worth a lick in your newsletter. 8. The audience dialogue: Engage directly with your audience's feedback. Respond to comments, ask for their input on future topics and even involve them in content creation through surveys or co-creation opportunities. Make your content worth spreading, and watch as your audience does the heavy lifting for you. And please stop with the corporate navel-gazing. #newsletters #b2btech #ThatAshleyAmber

Great content need guardrails. What content resonates with your audience? In order to deliver great content, you must be able to articulate what "great" content looks like. After two years of working with partners, sponsors, and guest presenters, we have a good sense of what content will perform well with Exit Five. Now, of course, there are always surprises and you don't always know for sure what will work or flop, but one of the best things about publishing regularly - and IMO - one of the tricks in this content game, is having lots of reps with content and knowing what your audience wants. I can often predict which content will be successful before we ever publish it now - this comes from hundreds of posts in our community, on social media, webinars, podcasts, etc. I wrote down some guidelines. We'll call these Guidelines for Content That Resonates with Our Audience. Or as the young kids might say, "Will This Slap?" 1. B2B Marketer Insights: Everyone's looking to level up. Dive into how we can enlighten our audience on key B2B topics, making them the smartest people in the room. Help them be more successful at work. Bring in experts with unique insights, not the same things you can read online for free. 2. Value Over Pitch: Winning isn't about the hard sell; it's about overwhelming your audience with value. Demonstrate your expertise, stand firm in your unique approach, and subtly introduce your company/product as the key to solving their challenges. You happen to work for a company that provides a solution, but that's only a small detail. 3. Set the Stage, Then Dive Deep: Start with the "why you, why now" by highlighting the overarching trends that matter to B2B marketers. People need to know the stakes. What's going on in the market? Why does this matter now more than ever? How can you create urgency? How can you make this relevant today? 4. You Are Taking to Your Peers. Get in the weeds. Readers and listeners are your peers in marketing. Don't treat them like morons. They will sniff through your BS and they don't want to be sold to. They love specific examples, results, numbers. They want honesty - not "everything is awesome!" Be real. Talk about other companies in the space. Admit you have competitors. Talk to them like you're having lunch with a group of peers, not presenting to an anonymous crowd. 5. Value Will Lead to Engagement: If you deliver value, people will remember you, find you, and reach out to try your product. It always works this way. A great valuable talk with no CTA will outperform a shitty sales pitch with a strong CTA every time here. Do you have guardrails for your content? What do you think about these?

Takeaways from the event Chris Walker and I did last week on how to build a content engine for Dark Social in 2024: 𝟭) 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝗕𝟮𝗕 𝗯𝘂𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝗲𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗿 B2B buyers are now primarily getting information from their peers on social and content networks. Having your content shared by the buying group inside of their company (where you're not the one sharing it) is one of the best ways to facilitate how B2B companies buy today. 𝟮) 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 • The Thought Leader - The person with domain expertise and credibility in your industry. The face of your content brand. • The Content Architect - The person who operationalizes the content process in a way that allows the Thought Leader to simply show up, record their thoughts, and then wait for the assets that they can post. They interface between the Thought Leader and the Production Team. • The Production Team - The team / person to handle all of the post-production and editing of the content assets. It is not ideal to put this on the Content Architect's plate. 𝟯) 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 The number one thing to have is a flag in the ground of a recurring long-form video content pillar (i.e. live event, podcast, webinar, guest appearances, internal interviews, etc.). Once it is recorded, the Content Architect and Production Team can now produce all of the assets needed from it to power the Thought Leader’s and the company’s organic social accounts, newsletter, YouTube, podcast, etc. 𝟰) 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 No matter how good you are at the content process… You still need the #1 most important thing - saying something that your target customer values, that challenges them to think in a different way, gets them interested in sharing it with somebody else, and that drives them to think about making a change in their business. 𝟱) 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 • Step 1 - Understand if the timing is right to implement this strategy. • Step 2 - Do ICP feedback / surveys to get data that will support doing this strategy. • Step 3 - Be strategic about the pitch itself. • Step 4 - Identify the goal milestones that will show leadership it’s working. • Step 5 - Highlight the current marketing programs that are not working that you could replace with this strategy. —- This is the first episode of our new show, 95% Content. It is now live on YouTube, and all podcast apps (links in comments). My goal is to make this the most helpful show in the world for B2B content teams who want to build trust with the 95% of potential buyers who are not ready to buy yet (but will be in the future). So please let me know any feedback as we continue to build it.

You aren't a goldfish and Long-form content isn't dead The longest video I ever made was 45 minutes long It also has 1.8 million views on it In B2B we've been trained to think that short-form is for authenticity and long-form for stuffy webinars and podcasts. I was recently reminded that this is so far from the truth: "Our average watch time on Salesforce+ during Dreamforce was 154 minutes." - Colin Fleming That stat should serve as inspiration for every B2B marketer reading this. It's proof that when you have intentionality behind the content you're creating and execute well, people will stick around! The example cited is a 45 minute video on angle grinder safety. "People don't even take the time to look at the instructions that come in the box, they're certainly not going to watch a 45 minute video on safety best practices..." Well, it turns out when you create the content with intention, they do. We knew some things about a particular segment of our audience (welding instructors at trade schools): 1. There was a gap in content about this topic that they needed. 2. The content that was available didn't touch on everything that instructors needed to cover. 3. This is content that every instructor was required to teach 4. The only available content on that topic was stuffy and didn't resonate with students. So we created a video that accomplished those things. - It required everything that was required by instructors so they could hit play on a video during day 1 of class - We did demonstrations of the destruction that ensues with improper safety measures to keep students interested - We sourced real-world (graphic) images of grinder injuries from our audience that instructors could point to (SEE!) and that made students cringe. Be intentional about the content you create and long-form becomes an asset. --- The talk Colin did at Goldenhour brought up so many good ideas that I'm going to be implementing in our own content strategy at AudiencePlus. You can watch the full thing by clicking the link at the top of this post (by my profile pic)

In 2023, I spent $350,000 producing a reality TV show about building Retention.com. This year I plan to spend DOUBLE that on video. Here's why video is the biggest bet I'm making (and the 6 areas we're investing): BACKGROUND: Why is video the biggest bet I’m making this year? 1. None of us realize how powerful the unmeasurable combo of video/ story is 2. I realized making compelling video is a superpower we have as an org 3. The future of B2B marketing is content that competes w/ TikTok not ebooks 4. I believe making key team members influencers leads to really low CAC 5. We’re not in B2B sales, we’re in human-to-human (H2H) sales. And there’s only one way to scale H2H sales... Through really, really good video. Here are the 6 BIG (and not so big) bets I’m making with video: 1. “Events that Don’t Suck” Episodic Series (Ecomm) We spent stupid amounts of $$ on big trade shows last year, then realized that small-to-medium-sized events (where we control the list) were the only for-sure wins for us. We did a 100 person wellness-event in LA that had a 10X ROI. So we're doubling down and creating a media brand following Kyle Standaert as he builds out this motion. 2. “Art of Excellence” Episodic Series (Ecomm) We are creating a mini-series where we tell the incredible stories of our most successful customers. Nothing to do with our product whatsoever, just their stories, aligning their excellence with our brand. 3. B2B Work-In-Public (B2B) I’m recording and publicizing our weekly team meetings along with my meeting notes so that you can watch our company grow from $1.2k MRR (and 3 paying customers) to wherever we get by the end of the year. You will be able to look back on the entire year week by week to see where we were at, key metrics what we were trying, what worked, what didn’t. All hosted in our video-based B2B community. 4. Ask-Me-Anything with Adam and Santosh (B2B) This is another community feature. You get access to myself and Santosh to discuss why we’re doing what we’re doing, and how that applies to your startup, go-to-market, or product. 5. Monthly LinkedIn Teardowns (B2B) This is reserved for our Elite community members. We will let you in on our monthly LinkedIn strategy sessions, then you can submit posts for us to critique and we will show you how to master LinkedIn. 6. More talking head videos on LinkedIn (B2B) Interestingly, when I post an episode of our reality TV show, I’ll be lucky if it gets watched for 6k minutes, despite the huge effort and high production value. If I post a talking head of me riffing about VC vs. Bootstrap in my office, it gets watched for 40k min. TAKEAWAY:  I am investing what some consider to be WAY too much in video. There is no way we will be able to measure what came from it. Why is this my bet for 2024? Because I believe there are two moats left in SaaS: 1. Brand 2. Community Great video does both of these things. Better than *literally* anything else.