We confess, after a day of meetings, marketingmoves only made the last few hours of the B2B Marketing Expo.

Was it even worth us turning up?

Thankfully, yes, the hall was still buzzing, though there was creeping sense of a coming-to-an-end in the air.  After whizzing round the stands, we did manage to catch the final useful talks of the day.

We joined the standing-room-only talk by Simon Baker on B2B Video strategy. Here being topical and relevant topped the list. A quick turnaround in reaction to news events was the name of the game.  Simon explained how piggybacking major news stories could massively increase a brand’s organic reach. Who knew? Well, everyone, but Simon’s strength here came in his detailed video examples – clearly he’s had a lot of success with this strategy himself.  The focus though centred on the B2C market, such as Barclays’ use of the getting children to code initiative in an advert where children staffed a branch, and live military footage. The audience would have to work out for themselves how it could work in a B2B context…

We then heard from Tim Tucker on another important aspect of any good content strategy – effective copywriting. This time, we were early enough to get a seat and even to engage in an impromptu brainstorm on creative stand design with fellow attendees. We’ll leave you to imagine what brilliant, albeit unfeasible, ideas we came up with there.

Clearly, an experienced educator, IDM’s Tim Tucker outlined his 7 key principals of B2B copywriting. These did not, as you would expect, take the form of new ideas but were solid fundamentals for good practice and useful warnings about easy writing traps. It would be nice to say we haven’t fallen into any here, but this would be wishful thinking…

For the curious, here they are:

  1. Know your audience.
  2. Solve your reader’s problems.
  3. Give proper attention to headlines. (Yes ‘Top X’ lists are still doing well!)
  4. Address core objections.
  5. Follow good style principals (use logical chronology, avoid the passive voice, try the inverted pyramid approach and write for each channel).
  6. Top down thinking: be concise and group ideas (or our goldfish brains won’t handle it!)
  7. Don’t annoy or frustrate your readers (in particular avoid marketese!).

 

Revision done, we’ll leave you with our favourite quotes of the day…

‘Don’t use social as a broadcast medium, it’s a conversational medium’

‘Never kill a customer’ (Monty Python)

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