The B2B attention challenge: Why your B2B content strategy needs to go beyond the funnel

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

First of all, thank you to everyone who got in touch after the last newsletter. We heard lots of people feeling similar frustrations about boring B2B content, and some great suggestions for content that does the extra work to stand out. Our friend Jez Paxman at the brilliant Live Union got in touch to talk about how they create epic, immersive live experiences for their clients, so definitely check out their work. We’ll be running some interviews in future newsletters with Jez and other people creating great B2B content, so if you are a CMO or working in brand content and want to feature in a future newsletter, drop me a line.

Secondly, we’d love to know what you think about the Attention Matters newsletter. We’re always looking to make it more valuable and help you feel smarter and get more attention for your work, so to help us, could we borrow 5 mins of your attention to fill in our reader survey? There’s only a few questions, so it won’t take long, and it’ll really help us develop and grow the newsletter. Thanks!

And a quick plug for Storythings - 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:

Your B2B content strategy needs to do more than just drive people down a funnel

If you work in marketing, you’ve probably seen this viral LinkedIn post from Massimo Giunco, taking down Nike for shifting their marketing strategy from brand building to direct to consumer, data driven performance marketing. Giuncco spent 21 years at Nike working as senior brand and marketing director roles, so he clearly understands the company inside and out.

His argument is that in Jan 2020, just before the pandemic, Nike’s leadership pivoted their brand and marketing teams from a category-led, wholesale brand positioning focus, to a new membership based, data-driven D2C strategy. In the next year, as the pandemic closed high streets all over the world, it looked like a smart strategy, but since then, Nike has seen increased competition in some of their traditional sports categories, and reduced sales. Their earnings report for Q2 2024 led to a 32% drop in their share price compared to the beginning of the year.

It’s worth reading the whole article, as Giunco clearly has a huge amount of inside knowledge, but the main accusation is that the pivot to becoming a generic D2C fashion brand created two major risks for Nike. Firstly, performance marketing is purely a money game, and the only winners are really the platforms taking your ad dollars. The conversion from digital campaigns to membership and product sales was nowhere near enough to justify the billions of dollars Nike spent on D2C marketing. This sales funnel based strategy probably looked good on the deck McKinsey gave to senior management, but it placed a huge amount of power for Nike’s audience reach into the hands of a few digital platforms.

Secondly, Giunco unpacks how the pivot from wholesale burnt many long-standing relationships with high street stores and other resellers, just as a new generation of more agile sportswear start-ups were looking for shelf space. And the pivot from strong sports-led categories to more generic fashion categories watered down the incredibly powerful brand building work Nike has done with star athletes over the last 50 years. Although Nike are now re-inroducing sports categories to it’s marketing strategy, Giunco argues that a lot of really important brand-building knowledge and relationships has moved out of the company, and wholesaler and other retail relationships will take years to rebuild.

The Quotes:

As you probably know if you’ve been an Attention Matters subscriber for a while, we’re huge fans of Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow, and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s work on B2B marketing. So it was heartening to see Giunco directly reference Sharp in his post. His point about loyalty is a strong one, and something we say all the time to our B2B clients - you cannot really build a strong brand with one-off paid campaigns. You have to consistently offer valuable content over time, so that when new potential clients are in a position to buy, your brand is well known and understood. The fact a company like Nike, considered one of the best known and most loved brands in the world, could forget this is truly shocking.

The Insight

The lesson here is that performance driven campaigns have their place, but your B2B content strategy needs to do more than just drive people down a funnel. It needs to position your brand in your market effectively, regardless of where buyers might be in the sales process. This means looking hard at what you are trying to achieve with your B2B strategy, and recognising that long-term positioning and brand building goals are just as important, if not more so, than direct sales.

The Action

So what makes a good long term brand building B2B content strategy? Even if you are not working on a sales-funnel driven strategy, you should still have clear goals for your B2B content strategies, and ways to measure them effectively.

At Storythings, we’ve been looking back over the work we’ve done for our clients in the last decade, and we think there are five common challenges that you can address with your B2B content strategies:

1: We work in a sector that is incredibly important, but overlooked
We see this a lot with clients working in areas like Payroll, HR, finance and training. Their work is critical to the business, but as ‘back office’ teams, they are often invisible outside of their peers. But underneath that seemingly dull surface, we know there are thousands of fascinating, compelling stories waiting to be told

2: We work in a sector that is complex and misunderstood
We do a lot of work with the non-profit and foundation sector, where people are working on really complex change projects that are simultaneously global in impact, but highly technical and often misunderstood outside of the sector. Telling great stories about change means getting beyond the jargon, and finding the moments of human connection.

3: We are well established in our sector, but need to shift attitudes to our brand/positioning
This is something we’ve seen with brands who are dominant in their sector, but as a result, can often seem like the obvious, unexciting choice. This can lead to potential customers looking to smaller, more agile competitors (as was the case with Nike in Giunco’s analysis).

4: We work in a sector that is diffuse and unconnected
Some of our clients work in areas that cut across many different audiences, and there isn’t anything that holds them together. This is a huge opportunity - a good B2B content strategy can make you a really important hub and connection point for your audiences.

5: We work in an emerging sector that hasn’t developed its own languages or rhythms yet
One of the reasons a lot of B2B content is boring is that a sector has been running on the same jargon and routines for decades - the same events, the same metaphors, the same aesthetics, until it all becomes just grey goo. But some of our clients have the opposite problem - they’re working in new sectors that haven’t yet defined a set of common languages, metaphors and rhythms yet. Everyone is out there doing their own thing, and it’s hard to stand out. This is a really exciting and lovely problem to have, and gives your brand the opportunity to define how the whole sector sees itself.

What Do You Think?

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to go deep into each of these five B2B content challenges, and show examples of great content that has gone beyond the funnel to really change a company’s positioning in the market.

We’d love to hear from you too - if you have a content project that you think has been really effective, or if you’ve got a strategy problem you’d like to share, please let us know by hitting reply and we’ll feature you in the next newsletter.

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!