Content has never been more important than right now. This has brought attention to the fact that great content can be difficult to do well, which has been amplified by many companies requiring quality content at scale. This is why businesses require modifications to their existing content marketing methods.

As a result, marketers today are increasingly shifting budgets towards content focused programs. According to DGR’s 2021 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey Report, these areas include ABM, content marketing, sales enablement and personalization.

With new opportunities come new challenges. The most dominant of these challenges are time and attention. In a recent content marketing survey, half of participants felt like there was so much to do, in so little time. Over one third of respondents believed that their primary challenge was standing out in an overly saturated digital environment.

Let’s take a look at four trends centered around these challenges and how these issues can be improved upon. If you would rather watch than read, scroll down or click here.

1. Lo-Fi content storytelling

Essentially, lo-fi content is exactly what you’d think – the antithesis of hi-fi content. Embracing the coolness of being under designed and under styled, it consciously rejects the high specification elements associated with big budget, hi-fi content. A great way to minimize the effort involved in creating new content, lo-fi content is an effortless way to add an extra level of authenticity to your story.

Authenticity and storytelling are at the core of great content that buyers like to see. Lo-fi content saves your time on the production side. In addition, it adds an authentic flare, resulting in increased engagement. When used correctly, you can construct your content narrative which is essential, from a psychological perspective, in triggering the human urge to listen.

If we can learn anything from 2020 – lo-fi content is a growing trend. A more informal approach to meetings; zooming from the kitchen table in one glance and home schooling your five year old in the next glance – while the cat parades over your laptop, making itself at home atop of the warmth that radiates from your keyboard. Fantastic.

Lo-fi in B2B content

B2B can often struggle with the storytelling element of content creation. Afraid of lo-fi content making them look unprofessional or cheap, businesses need to get ready to embrace the lo-fi marketing trend of the future.

People know the difference between a perfectly polished studio produced video with actors and directors, versus a real customer/employee production. Involve people with experience of your product or people that work in your company. Give them the opportunity to be involved. As a result, this can help to humanize your brand. Putting the power of content creation into the hands of more people at the heart of your organization will make the content more personalized.

Set up your content in a way that allows for personalization and authenticity. This gives more power to the people distributing it. Involving more people in the creative parts, encourages more people to share and promote it.

2. Interactive content

Marketers in the B2B space often fear interactivity for being simplistic. However, it just needs to be something that puts the readers in a position where they are not being dictated to. Instead, they have some involvement, control and participation in the content they consume. As a result, when people feel more involved, they are more likely to engage.

Turtl leverages the Principles of Psychology to bring interactive elements into content creation. People engage 73% longer and are later better at recalling information when consuming content through an interactive platform such as Turtl. Cisco saw 7 times more engagement with Turtl vs PDF.

Interactivity in B2B content

Seeing interactivity in motion, a headline analyzer tool can help assess headlines before publishing. HubSpot does the same for websites. These are successful because they are giving audiences something to engage with, rather than just saying ‘we understand your problem’.

Functions where users have to input an element to get something in return are always great for nailing that interaction. At Turtl, the personality quiz presents users with questions in an interactive format, delivering customized content to them based on the responses provided.

Businesses need to show their audiences how they understand. In addition to this, suggesting actions helps users understand and resolve their problems.

3. Personalization

Personalization should be at the heart of content initiatives. Common in B2C, it is trickling into B2B, gaining the most traction where personalization results in increased engagement. It gives people control over their experience and uses their names to stand out. As a result, personalization cuts through the noise and targets the right people with the right information.

“You can achieve some impressive results with increasing engagement and accessibility of putting that content into the hands of your content distributing teams, like SDRs.”

– Kate Terry

Automated personalization can help B2B teams ensure their comms are to the point and well structured. It’s a great idea because nobody wants to be sitting down manually editing 1000s of documents. With automated personalization you achieve a granular level of personalization.

Personalization in B2B content

Including a video for that personalized experience adds a human element to content. Consequently, this establishes a connection between the person or team recording the video and the person at the end of the email or presentation. Keeping the video simple (think lo-fi content) makes it easy to create simple edits.

Punch, the ABM agency, for example, wanted to create a personalized fairy tale with Turtl. To engage users, they adopted a modular, templated approach to content creation. Every possible scenario is created by the marketing team. Then, the technology pulls relevant sections of information forward for the reader depending on their answers / data they submitted.

Another channel of automated personalization, available directly on the Turtl website, is the Turtl chatbot ‘Finn’. He will ask you questions and, based on the answers you give, provide you with a piece of personalized, on demand content.

4. Content repurposing

Buyers are increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of content available. The question is, how do you stop people from being overwhelmed by all of the content? The answer; make it as relevant as possible to the people reading it. Repurposing content can save time in your quest for ‘new’ content to promote. As a result, neither the team producing the content or the consumer are overwhelmed.

Repurposing content is often shied away from, similar to lo-fi idea. This is because many marketers think that repurposing content is a lazy option. But that’s because they have been doing it wrong. Moving away from the ideology that repurposing content is lazy, marketers must start seeing it as a helpful tool in their content operations.

Format, format, format

Say you create a piece of content in one format. The only people that will engage with it are people who enjoy consuming content in that type of format. However, it goes further than format preference. Think about the environment of the consumer.

Someone that is on the move, may not be able to dedicate seven and a half minutes to read an article. On the other hand, if there is an option for them to listen to the article, they may do so while on their daily commute.

Alternatively, creating a video summary of your content can increase not only accessibility but interactivity too. Many businesses worry that creating a video is a complicated, drawn out process, but, remember what we said about low-fi content.

Furthermore, there are a range of tools available to easily edit your videos. For example, VEED.IO can help you create videos in a single click and add subtitles and audio transcriptions with ease. VEED.IO’s accurate auto-captioning makes simple clips or webinar highlight reels look professional and shareable.

People are more likely to engage with the content because it is convenient for them to consume it. The more formats available, the more the repackaged content is likely to capture a broader audience, increasing the scope of the content.

Repurposing in B2B Content

Convince + Convert: They create 3 minute videos on a range of different topics. These videos are then passed to different teams who repurpose the videos into various formats, creating content to be published on the website. Content can include LinkedIn articles, Medium posts, podcasts, blog posts and much more.

Copyblogger: They took one of their blog posts and created a slideshow. As of September 2021, the presentation had gained almost 40,000 views. Untold opportunities such as this cannot be accessed unless you are repurposing your content into different formats.

Buffer: The software company ran an experiment in 2012 to see what would happen if they stopped creating new content. Instead, they refreshed existing content and repurposed everything, sharing 2-3 pieces of content every week for one month. By the end of their experiment, their organic traffic had grown by over 4%.

Getting results

Not every content marketing strategy will suit every business. Testing different content marketing methods will help you to find the most effective strategies for your business. Focus on creating the best content possible. Implement these marketing methods to level up your content, increase your engagement and start smashing your marketing goals. Why not start by taking a blog post and repurposing it into a lo-fi, personalized video that is utterly compelling and interactive?

For a more in depth look at content marketing methods watch Kit and Kate’s full webinar here: