In B2B marketing, when you have many potential buyers who are involved in the buying process, how do you connect with these people in a memorable way?
If you look at most lead generation messages, they often contain industry jargon and abstract ideas. Interestingly, that's part of the reason many of them don't work.
Our future customers are weary of messages, pitches, hype, buzzwords, and corporate speak, that they quickly forget them. So how do you create marketing and lead generation messages worth remembering?
According to this ITSMA interview with Chip Heath author of What Makes Things Stick, we need to overcome the curse of knowledge.
Heath say's, "B2B marketers have a very high standard of communication that they have to impart. A group of psychologists and behavioral economists has called this 'the Curse of Knowledge.' As we become experts, it becomes harder to imagine not knowing what we know."
In other words, as we develop our individual areas of expertise and live it out in our companies, it actually makes it harder to communicate with those outside out company. This could be part of the reason some might struggle explaining their job (i.e. what you do) to family and friends.
Heath's focus is on this idea of "stickiness" he found that for our ideas to stick in people's minds, they must be concrete. But the reality is that most of our business language is far from concrete.
According to the interview, Heath found the following 6 themes are consistent with sticky ideas:
- Simple
- Unexpected
- Concrete
- Credible
- Emotional
- Stories
Link: Making B2B Marketing Messages More Memorable: An Interview with Chip Heath
I found this related article in MarketingProfs by professor Debbie MacInnis interesting because she describes new research about combining concrete words with imagery to make more memorable branding messages and "the power of the internal movies that consumers generate themselves." Please note this article was written from a B2C perspective but I see B2B applications too.
Link: How to Use Imagery to Create Memorable Messages
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