If properly executed, content marketing is a powerful way to build a B2B tech brand story. Here are some guidelines to bring your brand story to life.
The range of communication channels for companies have become increasingly diverse. It now includes social media, corporate blogs, web texts, newsletters, customer mailings, sales leaflets, brochures, advertisements/advertorials, and more, as well as reaching out to online and print media through press releases and media pitching.
To give direction thus speed to a tech content marketing strategy covering all of these channels, it is best to choose one or two or maximum three core themes that are in line with your company identity and tech brand value(s).
Choosing Your Core Theme(s)
One of your core themes will act as a primary story telling guide, while the other one(s) will guide secondary storylines. It’s more or less the same as how great fiction/novel writers as well as movie plot writers develop story premises and build up their storylines.
Your core theme(s) has/have to be abstract and objective enough to be effective and to have a good match with all your company stories. ‘Innovative’ and ‘security-driven’ might be good examples for tech companies to use, as well as ‘SMB-focused’, ‘channel-oriented,’ ‘personal’, ‘developer-oriented’ or ‘enterprise-ready.’ GoDaddy might be a good example of a (cloud) hosting company breathing the ‘SMB-focused’ theme, while cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean has embraced the ‘developer-orientation’.
Receiver Orientation
The translation of your B2B brand value into a messaging core theme (and after that the specific company stories) is actually a journalistic method, which naturally bridges the gap between sender-focused content and a recipient-focused information need. Receiver orientation is important for developing a powerful content marketing strategy.
Sometimes the core theme is already present in the story topic. For example, when a tech company has chosen ‘innovative’ for its core theme while creating messaging headlines such as: Company X Expands its R&D department; or: Company X Launches an Inhouse Developed Tooling Solution. At times however it can also be in the execution of the story itself.
Connect with Core Theme: Association
The content can have a fairly direct relationship with the tech content marketing core theme. At other times, a relationship can also be established between the specific topic and the core theme by means of association. When ‘enterprise-ready’ would be your core theme, mentioning ISO27001 compliance and 2N data center redundancy might imply indirectly that your company is enterprise-ready. Association can provide for quite a strong tool as it stimulates receivers of a message to interpret things themselves. In the end this will add to the impact and durability of a company’s brand story.
For example, within the ‘innovative’ theme, you can endlessly elaborate on your ‘innovative’ solutions and capabilities. When starting associating, it might be more effective for your core theme execution to talk about ‘R&D’, ‘engineering’, and ‘inhouse-developed’; or for example, to come up with a really unique HR model for your employees; or to sponsor a research institute.
Story Details
Show don’t tell is important for powerfully executing your tech content marketing stories. Tech story ingredients must be clear and honest, interspersed with good details supporting the argumentation within your core theme. Mentioning a customer base of more than 400,000 clients, or a 130,000-mile proprietary fiber network might be more convincing to show your company’s market leading position than just saying that you’re ‘a leading company’. And, a claim must always be supported by proper arguments.
In any case, the information must not be woolly or vague, thus creating the impression that information is being withheld or certain facts are being distorted. A reader should be able to forge together the various messages, stories and details in his or her own head into an unambiguous brand story.
If properly executed, the actual brand experience will be congruent with the intended brand story while resulting in an identifiable and powerful tech brand.
News Value or Narrative Value?
The production of professional content can be quite expensive. For an efficient and cost-effective execution of your content marketing strategy, the trick is to make certain texts - with some modifications - suitable for different communication channels. For example, a press release can form the basis for an article in a newsletter, a corporate magazine, a corporate blog, a LinkedIn message, a sales leaflet, Twitter messages, or an advertorial. A web text can serve as the basis for a company profile on Linkedin, while a customer reference story can form the basis for some sales supporting resources.
However, it is important to keep news value and storytelling value apart. If a certain topic has any news value, then it’s 'content hierarchically' of a higher value. In that case it is advisable to first of all use this formation in a press release and/or for a targeted pitching of a topic to a journalist. After that you can use this information for other channels. If a topic only has narrative value, it can be communicated directly through other channels including social media.
Press Releases to Guide Your Tech Brand Story
Within your B2B content marketing strategy, the use of press releases is the way to give direction to a brand story. Through press releases you can tell the story at large behind your brand values. The press releases will in the course of time form a chain of main arguments that constructively support the chosen theme and thus the brand value(s).
Press releases are eminently suitable for constructing an argumentation structure at large, because it concerns information with news value (provided that a good news selection has been made). This information has more value hierarchically than other business content; topics with narrative value only. Therefore, information with news value should initially be published through external media via press releases before it is communicated via other communication channels.
Color Your Brand with Sub-Arguments
Within a chosen core theme, between the distribution of press releases, you can further color a brand story through topics that have narrative value. These are the sub-arguments of the argumentation structure that additionally give a face to a chosen core theme and thus your brand value.
For this content you use the other communication channels, such as a corporate blog, LinkedIn, the company website, Twitter, Facebook, customer mailings and, for example, a company magazine. At best, the use of text is supported by photo and video material that also illustrates the chosen core theme. Where possible, you can lard the core theme-related material with content that reflects the humanity/personality of the company, something that will enhance the credibility of the brand story.
A properly executed content marketing strategy will result in the creation of an ecosystem of business content in online media, print media, social media, website(s), et cetera. Together it may form a structured storyline with main and sub-arguments for your targeted brand story.
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