Craft Beer, Consistency and B2B Content Marketing
As a home brewer (to be honest, it IS brewed in my home, but I am mainly the cheerleader) and a craft beer connoisseur, I have noticed it is difficult for the beer from batch to batch to remain consistent, be it home brew or micro-brew. I observed this recently when I indulged in a craft beer that I had really enjoyed a few months ago, but this time I tried it and didn’t like it as much. I got to thinking about this again last night as I was reading a blog post from Glenn Taylor where he recommends utilizing your whole team to create a collective and consistent voice for your company’s B2B content marketing strategies.
So let’s look at the idea of consistency and quality as it relates to beer. Do you prefer A) your beer to taste exactly the same every time that you drink it? or B) Would you rather have a higher quality beer along with some flavor variation? A national brand beer will be consistent but at the same time be less interesting. With craft beers, the variation is part of the style. You may not like every batch the same, but you can count on a deeper quality of contents and flavor. It’s the variety that’s part of the experience and more interesting than a repetitive, mass produced “big beer.” Which beer would you rather drink?
So now think of your B2B content marketing voice as a craft beer. If across your social media marketing efforts, you remain true to a higher level of quality, you can create brand loyalty. You increase the repeat visitors to your blog, increase your brand promoters, hopefully increase conversions and increase your authority all because your customers will know what to expect and that they like it. The like factor is the result of your business personality, and your business should have one. Just like a micro brew as long as there is quality to your content, there is still room for variables.
When using your whole staff to create a social marketing team, their collective voice will become your quality, while their individual voices will create those taste variables that will not just meet your customer’s expectations but surprise and delight them. Which blog would you rather read, better yet subscribe to? A repetitive, bland, mass produced, “quantity over quality” blog, or a consistently good, original in thought, innovative in industry blog?
