The B2B attention challenge: why 78% of your audience is bored by your content

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools to grow your audiences’ attention.

Over the last few newsletters we’ve looked at how digital distribution networks have changed our attention patterns, how to find your next audience, and how to create a value proposition.

At Storythings, we specialise in helping B2B companies with their content strategy and production, so over the next few weeks we’re going to focus specifically on the challenges of getting attention for B2B content. We’ve been doing this for years at Storythings, for clients including ADP, Experian, Lenovo and Pearson. We’ve seen how some of the traditional models for B2B content (hello gated PDF reports!) just aren’t working anymore, and what you can do to refresh and reposition your content strategy.

We’re working with a lot of great companies on repositioning their B2B content strategy right now, so if you want to work with us, we’d love to talk.

The Message:

There isn’t a special ‘work attention’ mode that we use for B2B content.

I remember working in my first job at a photography gallery in York in the mid 90s. This was just as computers, email and the internet were starting to enter the workplace, so it was really fascinating to see how people used to work before always-on digital networks demanded our attention. The office ran on paper, lots of it, spewing out of printers, fax machines, files and drawers. Most of the tasks of the day involved printing, reading, marking, signing and filing paper documents.

But in reality, this probably only took up less than 50% of our attention in the average work day. The rest of it was making coffee, reading newspapers or magazines, chatting to work colleagues, having lunch or staring out the window. So the available attention for the work documents we really should have been reading was already less than half of our total attention.

As computers started to replace paper over the next decade, our attention shifted to email, websites and digital documents. But the ratio of attention on work/non work content stayed pretty much the same. I definitely spent work time chatting to friends on mailing lists and forums, then looking for rare records on ebay, playing Flash games and buying books from Amazon, when I should have been finishing that Word document.

Now many of us work in hybrid or remote workplaces, the boundaries between work and non-work attention are even more blurred. Slack is the new office watercooler, but also the place where we discuss work progress with clients. We use our mobiles to share a picture of our dog on instagram one minute, then the next minute we’re using it to read a new brief from a client.

This means we’ve got an even harder challenge to get attention for our B2B content. There really isn’t a lower bar for attention because something is ‘work’ - you can’t afford to make something dull and un-engaging. Back in the 90s, the things that distracted my attention from work were physical and limited - newspapers, magazines, the coffee machine, the window. Now, there’s the entire world in my pocket.

The Quotes:

Back in 2022, when it became clear that the hybrid work experiments of the pandemic were here to stay, we produced Scroll Stoppers, a new research report to understand how hybrid work was changing our attention. Our research showed that as the structures and behaviours in the office that focused our attention went away, we were having to build new habits and behaviours to manage our attention. We’ve said in previous Attention Matters posts that we’re all schedulers now, making hundreds of decisions a day about what to give our attention to, and this is true whether we’re having to focus on a work document, or committing to a binge-worthy TV series.

The Insight

The challenge for B2B content in this hybrid world is clear - the bar has been raised for getting attention. Marketing Effectiveness expert Peter Field’s recent research found that 48% of audience responses to B2C advertising was neutral, but for B2B, that rises to an astonishing 78% - over three quarters of B2B content is boring the audience. One of the reasons for that, in Field’s analysis, is the rise of performance marketing - highly targeted campaigns that are optimised for clicks and algorithms, rather than emotion and memory.

For B2B marketers, this is a huge risk. As we’ll cover in the next part of this series, at any one time only 5% of your target buyers are likely to be in market. If you’re not building compelling, memorable content that audiences actively choose to give their attention to, the chances of you being front of mind when they are in the market to buy is vanishingly small.

The Action

So how do you make more memorable content? This is what we’re going to cover in depth over this series. But the first task is to get really curious about what makes good content so compelling. This is what we do in our Formats Unpacked newsletter, and in format development workshops for our clients.

A good way to start is by looking at your own behaviour - what have you found really compelling lately? What are the things you’ve really enjoyed giving your attention to? What was it about them that made them so compelling?

And then start to analyse your competitors’ content. What formats are the ‘stars’ in your sector? What are you really jealous of? What do you find really boring?

Making memorable B2B content is really hard, but the first step is simple - start becoming more aware of your own attention decisions, and the factors that guide your attention. Your potential audiences are making the same decisions, based on similar factors, every single day.

What Do You Think?

A lot of new clients come to us because they feel their existing content is too dull or isn’t cutting through. So we’d love to know - what B2B content have you seen recently that is really compelling?

We’d also love to hear how you’re doing this with your own B2B content - if you’re proud of a project that you’d like to share with your thousands of fellow readers, please let us know by hitting reply and we’ll feature you in the next newsletter.

Reading list

The full conversation between Adam Morgan and Peter Field on the cost of being dull is anything but dull, and well worth a listen.

In fact, the whole series by Adam Morgan - Let’s Make This More Interesting - is fantastic.

We’re big fans of Russell Davies at Storythings. His book for the Do series on How To Be Interesting is great, practical advice you can use every day.

If we can blow our own trumpet for a second, we recently made Phoenixed - a podcast for the Global Payroll Association about Phoenix, the botched payroll transformation that affected thousands of Canadian government employees. Our goal was to make a compelling, narrative podcast for a sector that often thinks it is overlooked. We’d love your thoughts on whether we succeeded!

If you found this valuable, we’d love to hear from you! Please reply to this email to get in touch, or share the article on Linkedin tagging Storythings.

See you next time!