A story of context

Your B2B content could be written by Shakespeare and designed by Picasso but without the right context it will be as ignorable as last Tuesday’s Daily Express (or any edition of the Daily Express for that matter).

Harsh? Perhaps, but I want to put it out there that context is everything. To be effective, your content must be aligned to the user’s own situation. We are all exposed to so much stuff each day that our finely-honed natural filters will ignore anything that doesn’t speak directly to the opportunities and challenges of our working lives.

But how contextual do we need to get? After all, most organisations are trying to target multiple verticals. Does this mean we have to create multiple variations of our content that directly reference the target sector or industry?

Don’t panic, the answer is no. Phew.

The trick is to present your solutions in such a way that they makes sense, and are relevant to your audience. Just because you’re in the Pilchard Canning business doesn’t mean that you will only look at content that directly mentions Pilchards or Canning. But you will insist that it frames its message in a context that is familiar to you.

For example…with apologies to those who have heard me tell this before:

Some time ago I was invited to a customer’s showcase site, where they had physically built a healthcare scenario to demonstrate their RFID technology solutions (yes, that long ago).

First you walked into a GP’s waiting room, then into the consulting room, then to a one bed ward in a hospital, and finally to a medicine storage room. You could see how RFID could work; by being embedded in Doctor’s notes that then brought up the correct patient records; how healthcare professionals could safeguard the delivery of the correct medicine to patients; and how stock control could be improved.

I was impressed but a bit surprised by its extravagance. “Isn’t this a very expensive way to sell one technology to one market?” I said to my customer.

His response was that he had never had anyone from the healthcare market. Most visitors were from completely different markets – but by putting it in a familiar scenario (everybody has been to the Doctors and at least visited a hospital) – people just ‘got it’.

All of which makes perfect sense. And while it’s not practical to physically build these scenarios every time we want to sell something (particularly in a world with social distancing and remote working), we can do the same thing digitally.

We often create digital scenes that are overlayed with points of technology and their benefits. They are specific business scenarios but are a generic enough journey to be recognised by many different sectors. The vertical may not be directly relevant but the context is.

At Differentiated, one of our missions is to explore the ability of digital media to bring content to life. Let’s not just talk about benefits, let’s demonstrate them too in a vibrant and relevant way.

Matt Neal,
Managing Director,
Differentiated