The B2B attention challenge : How to stand out when you work in a sector that is important, but overlooked

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

In our last newsletter we identified 5 common problems for B2B marketers that aren’t just about filling the sales funnel:

1: We work in a sector that is incredibly important, but overlooked
2: We work in a sector that is complex and often misunderstood
3: We are well established in our sector, but need to shift attitudes to our brand/positioning
4: We work in a sector that is diffuse and unconnected
5: We work in an emerging sector that hasn’t developed its own languages or rhythms yet

Over the next 5 newsletters we’re going to go into each of these in detail, with examples of how you can solve those problems with great content formats. We’ll also share some interviews with people who are solving these problems for their own organisations or clients, so if you want us to feature you and your content formats, I’d love to hear from you!

Thank you to the many of you that have filled in our newsletter survey. It really helps us understand what you want from the newsletter, so if you’ve haven’t already filled it in, could we borrow 5 mins of your attention get your feedback? There’s only a few questions, so it won’t take long, and it’ll really help us develop and grow the newsletter. Thanks!

The Message:

If you work in a sector that is vital, but overlooked, you have to work harder to stand out and get your audiences’ attention

One of our favourite Storythings clients over the last few years is ADP, the global payroll experts who have some of the world’s biggest brands as clients. If you work in the US, there’s a 1 in 6 chance your payslip is produced by ADP.

But the problem they had was that their whole sector was under-appreciated. As they said in their first email to us “How you pay people really matters, but to most businesses it’s a blindspot.” As we started working with them and understanding the payroll sector, it was something we heard a lot. In fact, the sector almost prided themselves on their obscurity - we heard payroll professionals say that people only noticed them when payroll went wrong, and their aim was to be quietly efficient, not getting any attention.

This was a fascinating challenge, as the more we looked into the world of payroll, the more we realised that it was the most vital point of connection between companies and employees. If payroll goes wrong, people’s lives at are stake - making mortgage payments, paying taxes, feeding their families, or saving for holidays. Payroll really, really matters, but even for people working in the sector, the stories of why it matters were not being told.

We’ve since found out there are many business sectors where the B2B challenge is similar - HR, Training, Internal Communications, Finance - parts of every business that are extremely important, but are often overlooked. If you are work in these sectors, getting attention is hard, but being talked about is even harder. And being talked about is one of the most important factors when it comes to B2B marketing.

The Quotes:

Wynter’s B2B Buyer Journey Research shows how important it is to stand out and create compelling stories about your company and sector. Even for big SAAS procurement, most buyers start with a list of vendors in mind, or go to friends and networks for recommendations, before they start looking at detailed product specifications and demos on your website.

This makes sense - we’re all facing the same attention challenges, whether we are researching a new vendor for our company, or deciding what to watch on Netflix - we look for help to reduce our options before we start getting in to details. This means we need stories that are memorable and shareable, that help people understand the value and impact of their work and their sector, and create strong brand associations.

The Insight

The Wynter research shows how potential buyers use multiple channels to create a more limited set of considerations before they even start looking at product specifications and demos. And the most valued sources are personal social networks of peers and colleagues, not search and product rating sites. Only after this stage will they start looking at vendor sites for more information about features and pricing.

So if you want to be part of those personal conversations and recommendations, you need to stand out. That means telling memorable stories that go beyond features and pricing. You need to help people working in these sectors feel like you see and understand their work, and the impact that they have. You need to make them feel like heroes. If you can do that, your brand and product will be associated with them feeling recognised and valued, and that will in turn increase their positive feelings of trust and value with your brand.

The Action

Telling memorable stories means approaching your sector like a journalist or documentary maker, not a marketer. What are the stories that are hidden in your sector? What is obvious to everyone working in the sector, but surprising to people outside? What motivates people working in your sector, and what makes them feel proud? What is the impact their work has on other people, and what are their opinions? What are the stories that make people go ‘wow’ and want to share with others?

Here’s an example - for the first edition of ReThink Quarterly, the editorial publication we produced for ADP, we discovered that migrant workers sending money back home (remittances) totalled $695bn in 2018, whereas total net aid and development investments globally was only $166bn. So workers sending their wages home were responsible for 4 times as much money entering emerging economies as all global aid. If you work in payroll, you can do something to help with that, especially as workers sending money back to Africa were often charged 9% fees, way more than banks in developed economies. So we focused the first issue of ReThink Quarterly on this subject, diving deep into data journalism and human stories to reveal the hidden world of remittances.

We also developed a format - Real People Talk Pay - involving journalists in cities around the world talking to everyday workers about what pay means to them. Global payroll transformation is a hugely complicated process, with thousands of complex requirements and connections with data flows around the rest of the company. So it’s easy to forget that ultimately it’s all about one thing - helping people get the pay they have earned, so they can use it to make their lives better.

Bringing the human stories of pay to the surface helped payroll teams share the impact of their work with their colleagues, and in doing so, make their work less of a blindspot. If your sector is invisible to a lot of people in your business, you might think, as a lot of people working in payroll do, that being invisible is a good thing. After all, up until now people only thought about payroll - or HR, or finance - when something went wrong.

What if you could flip that around? What if you could be the brand that tells the hero stories for your sector? What if you could make workers in your sector feel valued, respected and vital? After all, if you make them feel like heroes, you’re way more likely to be part of those conversations and recommendations when they are looking for a new vendor.

What Do You Think?

Huge thanks to those of you have been in contact saying you’re enjoying this series about B2B attention problems. We’re going to interview a few of you to get your stories about your own stories and formats, and will be posting these soon, starting with a fantastic interview with Adam Sanders, the Director of PR at Canada’s National Payroll Institute (as you can tell, we’ve gone DEEP into the world of payroll!)

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!