What if you could turn your “boring” industry into a source of compelling stories that resonate with your target audience?
In this episode of Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition, powered by Agorapulse, our Chief Storyteller Mike Allton talks with Robert Carnes, marketing manager at GreenMellen Digital Agency and author of three books about storytelling, to answer that question.
[Listen to the full episode below, or get the highlights of the Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]
What is the biggest misconception people have about creating content for “boring” industries?
Robert Carnes: I’m glad you put air quotes around that because they can … Oftentimes, a lot of the clients and the industries that we work with can feel boring or they can feel complicated or they have real limitations with the type of content that they can share.
But I think maybe the misconception is that they have to be boring or that they’re boring by default. The phrase that keeps bouncing around in my mind when I think about something like this is:
“There are no real boring businesses, there are only boring marketers.”
I’ll say that again. There are no boring businesses, there are only boring marketers. If you just do the default, if you snooze on the social media content, yeah, it’s going to be boring. But I think that these industries just have extra challenges. They’re sometimes legal or compliance challenges that you have to do or sometimes it’s just harder to think of good creative content to share. But ultimately, you can still create content and share things online. Those are compelling and that is interesting for a lot of reasons that we’re going to unpack later in this conversation. You just have to be a little bit more creative in order to engage people on social media.
The one other challenge that I think a lot of these industries have—or these companies that work in these industries—is it’s harder to sometimes visualize and create visual content, whether that’s images, video, whatever. It’s harder to create visual, compelling graphics around those types of services.
Some of the bigger consumer retail brands out there have the flashy, easier job of sharing things on social media, which is great and fine. And we can look to them for inspiration. It’s just a little bit harder that we have to work a little bit. We have to dig a little bit deeper in order to truly engage people, whether it’s visually or textually or with a story. Ultimately, you don’t have to be boring. And we will unpack what it takes to get beyond that and break through the noise and the grind or challenges of your industry.
Walk us through your process for finding interesting stories
Robert Carnes: I think what it ultimately boils down to is curiosity. Like, I think we just have to be curious about how we approach our marketing in general, and that certainly trickles down to the stuff that we’re sharing and talking about on social media.
The big thing that I talk about with storytelling is listening for stories. We focus so much on storytelling, and we glaze over the fact that we have to listen first, especially in B2B, and be able to collect stories.
We have to be able to hear from our audience, hear from our community members, all of those things in order to then share the stories on social media or on your website or email anywhere else—any platform that you’re marketing.
So, it takes having a journalistic mindset. I studied journalism in college. That’s my background before I became a marketer. We were just trained to ask questions. We were asked to dig deeper to do our research and to be open-minded and genuinely interested in the stories that were around us. And so like you have to do that. You have to be a student of your industry, be a student of your own brand and business.
Be a student of your audience, ask them questions.
We have taken the time, and we’ve worked with some of our clients to interview their clients and ask them questions about their day-to-day life, what are their responsibilities in their job, and what they wish other people knew about the work that they do. Figure out what motivates and interests them, and what social media accounts they follow. Take some time to get face time with your best clients and just have an open conversation. It can yield such interesting insights and give you new opportunities and ideas for what to share ’cause these are the people you’re trying to reach on social media. If you’re talking to your best customer, you want more people like that person. I’m sure everybody listening to this has that person in mind that they’re like, “If only I could get more people like company X or like point of contact Y.”
So, just try to visualize them in your mind as you’re asking these questions or as you’re creating social media content, and just constantly be curious about what they’re interested in and what you can post that’s going to grab their attention and hold their attention.
Share an example of how one business took a “boring” topic and turned that into something engaging on social media
Robert Carnes: Sure. One of the best examples that I can think of is a client right now that we’re managing social media for that. Again, I don’t think anybody would truly admit that. Yeah, we’re a boring industry. That’s just the way it is. But we’re working with a wealth management company locally here in Atlanta. And we’re trying to work with them to revamp and rethink some of the things that they’re doing, that we’re working with them on social media. I think they’re a really good example of a challenging industry because they are highly regulated. There’s a lot of compliance around what they are allowed to say on their website, on social, through email, all those kinds of things because they have to be fiduciary.
They have to be responsible and can’t give advice on investing in those kinds of things. And we have to be very conscientious of that, and we have to lean on them as the experts for what we’re allowed to say to keep them from getting in trouble on social media.
But ultimately we’re trying to still be engaging, to still be interesting, and to still connect with potential clients of theirs to help grow their business. And one of the things that we’ve started doing for them, like the ground level work from a strategy standpoint, was just figuring out what the purpose of each of the social channels that we’re on. “Why are we using Facebook? What are we using LinkedIn for? Why are they different? What about Instagram? What are we trying to do there?”
LinkedIn is about building credibility for them as wealth managers. Facebook is about creating educational content and sharing new things that you need to know about the industry. And Instagram is trying to give them a little bit of personality and a little bit of behind-the-scenes stuff with their team. They’re very highly involved in the community. They’re very hyper-local and they love doing things and sponsoring local events and all that stuff. So we’re trying to capture more of that. It’s a little bit outside of what they do as an actual business, but still again it shows their personality. It gives them a unique perspective. And ’cause you don’t have to be a local person to be a client of theirs, I think it’s still helpful for people to see, again, this is what they care about. This is their values reflected in what they’re doing. And I think the educational piece is another big thing that we’re starting to really lean on beyond just the investment portfolio and beyond just retirement planning ’cause those are the easy and obvious things and the things where they’re limited the most and what they can share.
And so we’re trying to think we created audience profiles of the different types of people that we want to reach on each of those different social channels. And saying, “What are the things that they’re interested in? What do they care about that’s related to finances, but might be a little bit different?” Things like travel, things like helping prepare their children for going off to college. College savings is a big piece of that equation. Preparing for retirement through Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, filing their taxes on time as we close to April 15th. Like all of those kinds of things. We’re trying to be aware of the whole picture of an actual person’s financial life so that this client can speak to them well, empathize with them, and create more of a personality and more of a connection there so it doesn’t feel so dry, like “Here’s just what the market and the economy is doing.
It’s a much broader picture than that, and it’s approaching it with that personality [and] with an educational bent to it as well. So that’s something we’re working on rolling out right now for this client. We don’t have any of the numbers or statistics for how that’s going to go, but we’ve worked with them for several years and know a lot of the things that don’t work.
And we’re trying to allow a lot more flexibility and adaptability as we learn what things do work in the future.
How do you balance maintaining professional credibility while creating engaging content
Robert Carnes: Absolutely. I think that’s a tough balance to strike.
Many more people are probably on the one side of the pendulum where they’re never getting anywhere close to the memes, which is fair. But, yeah, you can swing too far in the other direction if you’re not careful and I think the important key here is finding your brand’s personality.
Understanding not only what the message is, but what is the tone of voice that you’re trying to share on social media. How are you trying to give yourself across? And it goes very closely in hand with your individual credibility. When I’m posting on my individual social media accounts I know what my tone of voice is intuitively, but I also don’t want to compromise that by sharing things that are outside of that. I don’t want to share something that feels awkward, [or] that would compromise my professional integrity or something. And that feels a little extreme, but if you’re not being consistent with the things that you’re sharing, it can confuse people.
And they don’t know what to expect, and that’s again identifying your personality as a brand first, I think is really crucially important.
Write down the list of things that your business is and is not.
Write down some adjectives that describe your tone of voice. “We say these kinds of things, and we wouldn’t say these kinds of things.” Even getting as specific as “We would share these kinds of memes,” or “No, that’s not in our wheelhouse at all. Should we share gifs or no gifs? How much of a sense of humor do we have or not have?”
And then I think the other half of this as well is also relying on or encouraging posting an activity from your employees because that’s something we do including for the wealth management client that I mentioned before in the previous example. We not only manage their LinkedIn, their company’s corporate LinkedIn page. We also manage several and help manage the content for several of their employees, their top-level employees’ LinkedIn profiles, and oftentimes, on all social channels including LinkedIn.
People trust faces a lot more than they trust logos.
So we see a lot better engagement when the CEO of the company or the marketing manager of the company shares a post compared to the brand itself. The brand might actually be bigger, but they’re oftentimes going to get a lot more engagement from an individual post than they do from the company page. And so using your employees to amplify your brand and to give their own personal spin and touch on it. I think it also makes another really big difference. They should have their own unique voice, and hopefully, it’s in line with your company’s voice. Hopefully, it jives in the same direction.
Hopefully, they work at your company. They’ve got similar core values and you can maybe train ’em up and help them know what kind of things to post and not get anybody in trouble. But allowing them to lend you their personal credibility and professional credibility is, I think, huge. And this is a tricky balance as well because you can’t force employees to be active on LinkedIn. You can’t coerce them to be more active. I think it’s something you should encourage and find positive ways to reinforce that.
One of the things that we do internally for our team and our agency ’cause we’ve got a staff of employees who are invested in digital marketing and so they’re active on their own different channels is on our Slack group we will post things that came from our, company GreenMellen accounts and say, “Hey, we would really love for you guys to reshare it or comment on this,” or “Share this in your own way,” like just giving people subtle nudges, and usually, the team is willing to do that. They’re bought in and they understand why that’s beneficial to us as a company.
But don’t assume that they’re going to do that. Don’t assume that they’re going to see what you posted. Don’t assume that they’re naturally going to want to. Do some education internally first so that’s then they’re more likely to engage, and you’re more likely to have a team of cheerleaders ’cause your internal staff is your biggest group of cheerleaders, hopefully.
Again, that’s not something you can manufacture. It’s something you have to grow through your culture over time. But if you’re able to do that, it gives your brand a much wider and more trustworthy personality that’s going to make that pendulum swing a little bit less drastic. And you’ll be able to find that nice middle ground hopefully for your brand.
Mike Allton: I love that advice. In fact, we actually built a feature right into Agorapulse to help facilitate that: an advocacy feature where you can schedule a post to a company LinkedIn page, and as soon as that post goes out—which might be today, it might be three weeks in the future—it’ll automatically send an email to however employees you selected, maybe even external advocates, like influencers. If you want to include them, you can, and that email will ask them if they want to engage with that company post. And then you’ll be able to track who opened it, who clicked, who liked to share, who commented on that LinkedIn post, and we’re just seeing that our clients are seeing tremendous success with that. Because, to your point, it’s just so much more valuable when you get a lot of people who are vested in the content or the initiative engaging with that.
One of the coolest use cases I’ve seen is when companies will share a job opening. And they’ll ask the employees from that department to comment, engage, and share that job opening through the company page ’cause when we’ve got a role for a product engineer opening at Agorapulse—me sharing that with my marketing crowd, that’s not going to go anywhere. But when you get the other 60 engineers to share that, there’s a job opening here, that’s whom they’re connected with.
Do you have strategies for working with regulated industries?
Robert Carnes: Yeah. So to give you two other similar examples to clients that we’ve worked with that also have some similar constraints.
- First, we worked with a commercial construction company that did retail renovations and they worked with some of the biggest retail brands across the country, but they signed NDAs with almost all of them. Big, huge clients that they were happy to work with on big deals. It would’ve been a huge feather in their cap if they had been able to promote that. And they just simply weren’t because of the contract negotiations. And that’s an understandable part of it.
- Another client that we worked with was a white-label agency and they did a lot of development with other marketing agencies to build web applications and tools and integrations with other systems in the background. And it wasn’t ever their client. They were working on a lot of big projects, but they were working through other agencies. And so they wanted to be able to promote that as well, promote those partnerships, but they weren’t able to claim those clients as part of the deal that they had worked out. So they have their hands tied a little bit in how to promote this and talk about it.
So the two different approaches that we took to help out these two clients in these, more complex examples, were to do customer stories that were either anonymoused. Being able to tell the story of those client examples because they had lots of they knew the whole journey from beginning to end. They could talk about the customers that they were helping and the industry and all those kinds of things. But we would simply gloss over or sensor out the name or any identifying details about who that company explicitly was.
This is also really important, I think, to make sure to get permission before you do that. That was something we made sure to do. Again, “Hey, customer X, we’re going to talk about you, we are not going to mention your name as part of our deal. We are not going to disclose any information. We’re going to make sure to share this with you before we publish it anywhere on social media, or on our website. We want to make sure this is okay with you.” And in most cases they were fine. As long as you don’t bring up our name or slap our logo on this, that’s permissible.
To further if you do have a little problem with that or need to fudge the details a little bit more, you can also take a couple of different similar clients in an industry and almost make a hypothetical case study—and these essentially are case studies. I like calling ’em “customer stories” a little bit more ’cause that is frankly a less boring title. So sometimes it’s just, again, your mindset shift of thinking about it as a story instead of just a case study. Give a hypothetical example of “We’ve worked with clients in X industry and we’ve helped them in these ways,” and you can make up almost an audience persona using real-life examples from your experience and the things that work, but you’re simply taking out any identifying details of those specific clients for those legal reasons.
I think you can also be transparent with the audience you’re sharing with on social media. I just have a small note on there that says, “Hey, this is not a real client,” or “The client’s name has been changed for legal reasons.” You hear that in Journalism quite often, and I don’t think we have a problem with that. We’re hearing a similar story. This is based on a real client story. We have simply changed some of the details at their request. I think as long as you are transparent with your clients that you’re working with and transparent with your audience and you’re still getting across, the main details that we care about are: “What is their problem? How did you help them and what were the results like? That’s what a case study really is.”
As long as you can highlight those things without having to get caught up in some of the loopholes of your industry, I think you can still connect with people and tell really great stories.
Again, that takes a little bit more work, it takes a little bit of extra effort to make sure to know what details you can and cannot share. But once you’ve done that really well, that gives you some powerful stories that you can tell on your social channels.
What should we be focusing on in a B2B industry [that is] somewhat complex, potentially even boring?
Robert Carnes: The one-word answer that I can give to that quite simply based on my experience is “people.” Like you said, there’s a lot of different ways you can package that. You can do those videos, you can do those pictures, you can do it as Reels, whatever the case.
But the content that we see for our clients that always performs the best is when it is pictures of people. That thankfully comes in a lot of different packages that could be photos of your team, that can be pictures of your clients, or testimonial videos. You could do holiday parties, behind-the-scenes stuff, birthdays, or workplace anniversaries. You can do pictures of new hires that you want to welcome to the team. You can show pictures or videos of the community service that you’re doing. There are a lot of different ways to show your personality as a brand!
You can show how you’re interacting with customers because this is all about a relationship.
I mentioned before in this conversation that—unlike a lot of B2C and product-based companies—it’s a little bit harder to visualize the service that we’re offering to people. And so the people part of that is also key. I’ve also alluded to the educational piece, and the ways you can overlap behind-the-scenes, personality-based brand content with educational pieces. Oftentimes, if you’re doing talking head videos where you’re talking about the things you’re relying on your internal subject matter experts to be able to record a short-form video for basically any network.
Now that’s talking about “Hey, we wish that our customers knew more about this,” or “This is some of the misconceptions in our industry, and we’re going to talk to you about it in this, 60-second video.” Educating and providing value through some of those short-form videos—that’s something we’re getting into more now. We’ve experimented with it a little bit and that has been for a little while one of the big trends.
Ultimately, it’s about people. And when you can put a person’s face even to an industry, something like logistics, like we have several logistics clients and they have lots of pictures of their trucks and their warehouses, which is awesome, but we are trying to push them as much as we can. Like, “Let’s show the drivers of those trucks and let’s show the people working in those warehouses who are shipping things.” And every single time, we have always seen those types of social posts perform far better than everything else.
How do we know how those are impacting the actual business results?
Robert Carnes: Sure, I’m sure I’m not the first person to say this and hopefully will not be the last one but [we’re] trying as best we can to steer away from vanity metrics. Things just look at our reach or look at the number of likes we got. Oftentimes, our clients want to see those numbers because that’s what they’re familiar with, and those are the things that they can track most easily. So we oftentimes will report them, but we try to report them in the larger context of, “But here’s what that means. Here’s the larger engagement piece.” Not all engagements on social media are created equal. I would much rather have a comment than a like because it took somebody a little bit more time to pause and engage with the content. And that’s a much bigger indicator of whether or not they were curious and whether or not they actually grabbed their interest rather than just their passing attention.
And so placing an emphasis on that engagement and then conversions as well. Website traffic is fine, but did that actually lead to something on your website? Did that lead to them filling out a contact form or actually picking up the phone and calling you or something like that?
I will say that even these metrics are becoming harder to measure sometimes. Engagement, based on your industry, it’s hard to tell if you’re even getting any comments or shares and if you’re getting the right ones or not. How much of it is spam or not based on the platform, like all this crazy stuff. And then even something like website traffic is dark social, that traffic that does not get tagged as social media in an analytics tool like Google Analytics, it makes it a little bit harder to actually measure the whole funnel and see where people are coming from.
But that’s still just because it’s a little bit more challenging to track and takes a little bit more effort ’cause it’s super easy to just track reach and likes. It takes a little bit more to go further down the funnel and be able to see what value your social media content is providing. But again, the thing that I say is the better and more valuable the metrics. Oftentimes the more difficult it is to track.
And there’s a new metric that I did not come up with. This is from a guy named Jay Acunzo who I like and appreciate and would encourage you guys to check out and follow. He came up with a new metric since they’re all just invented by somebody at some point. URR: Unsolicited Response Rate. This is on social media. This is across all other marketing channels. But basically how many people reach out to you in a different way without you having to ask for it, You’re sharing consistently on social media. You’re talking and engaging with people on LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever it is, and somebody sends you an email and says, “Hey, I watched that video you did recently and I was interested in this. Can you answer these questions that I’ve got for you?” That doesn’t happen all that often. We don’t see that a ton. When you can get something like that, when you can get someone who actually, again, unsolicitedly reaches out to you and makes the extra effort to show their interest and curiosity in something you’re creating—that’s a huge green flag that you’re doing something right.
Just like we’ve talked about so many things, that’s a mindset shift. That’s a much more challenging thing to do. That’s a much more manual and difficult thing to be able to actually track. But if you can start hitting that. And getting people to respond to you in those ways, even just directly messaging you on one of these social channels and saying, “Hey, I like the stuff you’re sharing. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you guys offer?” Again, that is a huge win. Way beyond just “we got another a hundred subscribers on our YouTube channel” or something like that.
Those things are fine, but they are mostly just drivers of these other end results, and it’s much better to look at the target rather than just some of the steps along the way.
Mike Allton: That makes so much sense. I love that. You reminded me of a similar metric that Ann Handley put out, and I don’t remember exactly what she called it, but it was essentially how many people replied to her newsletter directly to her with a question, or an ask for help or something along those lines. And the key, I think, between both of those is you’re now measuring something of real business import, that now you’re creating a relationship with an individual that may lead to actual business results, a sale or a speaker, or whatever it is that you’re looking for with your business. It’d be like me tracking demo requests from this podcast. Sure. That’s not a normal thing that someone would track. Sure from a podcast, because you don’t normally have that one-to-one driving activity from this medium. But if you do once in a while, that’s powerful. And it’s important that you’re tracking that.
Learn from leading B2B experts in every highlight of Social Pulse: B2B Edition.
What other tools or other resources are most helpful in creating, truly engaging B2B content?
Robert Carnes: Yeah. So I think using a tool like Agorapulse is an easy one.
Having a social management platform that aggregates a lot of that stuff for you and automates some of it.
I’m sure a lot of people will talk about generative AI and some of the LLMs out there. Those are easy wins to at least iterate and brainstorm a lot of social content. So those are fairly easy layups that I’m sure a lot of people will talk about and are already on people’s minds. So I’m going to bring up two others that you may not know about and frankly are secret weapons of mine that I really appreciate.
- One of them is called GigaBrain. It’s another AI tool, but it aggregates a lot of data from Reddit and pulls together like you can ask it a question, and it will search Reddit and community answers. Obviously anybody can post stuff to Reddit, so you have to take that with a grain of salt, but it’s just really interesting. It’s an interesting source of data to pull from and it’s pretty powerful—it’s got a free version of the tool—but you can also pay a little bit more for more searches, that kind of thing. That’s a tool that I use periodically when I’m doing some research.
- The other tool, though, that I use far more and would highly encourage anybody to check out is called SparkToro. It is a really powerful and useful audience research software that you can search based on a website, your own website, or a competitor’s website. You can search for your industry. You can search on a multitude of key keywords and it will give you basically an audience profile and say, “Hey, of the people who typically visit your website, here are the other search terms that they’re looking at. Here are the audience or the social media platforms that they’re most following. Here are the podcasts that they like to listen to the subreddits that they most subscribe to and the YouTube channels that they visit most often.”
- It’s amazing how many data points and how much you can dive into this based on a simple keyword search. And again it takes a little bit of extra time to look through those, but it is a gold mine if you use it well for content ideas for other places to go for inspiration and research. It is something I use multiple times a week and highly encourage people to check out SparkToro if you want to. Just, again, it’s about the mindset of knowing your audience, knowing your brand, and then providing value between the two of those things. And that is a tool that I use massively in that endeavor.
What final advice would you give to marketers who are still struggling with making their content more engaging, particularly on social?
Robert Carnes: Sure. So we’ve talked about being curious, being students of your audience and your brand, asking those questions.
Coming back to that is a really important piece. I think there are two interesting ways to approach that as well as sometimes start with bad ideas.
I attended a conference a while back where there was a whole talk about how to use bad ideas, sometimes just by eliminating them or sparking better ideas from them. Sometimes just write down the list of all the social posts that you know you can’t do. What is the thing that your company definitely should not post on LinkedIn?
And that might give you maybe think about the opposite and you might want to post that. We actually tried something recently, we talked about case studies and customer success examples. We at GreenMellen actually last year posted an anti-case study with this person’s permission. They were a person who did not choose us to build their website or do marketing. And they came back to us about six months later and we said, “We really wish we had picked you. We are really regretting our decision to not go with you. Can we tell this story?”
We worked on it and worked with them to get their approval and everything. But that was just an interesting way to look at the inverse ’cause so often we’re looking at customer success stories, but what about those stories of people who weren’t successful because they didn’t work with you? It builds the stakes of why this is really important or why it’s worthwhile to work with our company. Because we will treat you in X, Y, and Z ways. And you can expect this and not this.
It’s not about badmouthing your competitors. It’s about just showing why. You have the core values you do.
And then the final thing that I’ll say about this ’cause again, it very much goes against the idea of boring brands and boring industries is having a sense of humor. I know we talked about “Does the pendulum swing too far if we share memes and gifs and all that kind of stuff?”
I desperately want more B2B brands to actually have a sense of humor. There are not many who do. And you really can stand out in your industry if you are bold enough to take some of those risks and try to be funny. Again, it takes extra work. It requires more creativity. In order to do that and I don’t just mean telling crass jokes or that kind of thing, it requires you to find the balance and find the line between what you’re appropriately allowed to do and what you feel comfortable doing that’s still authentic to your brand. And it’s not going to work for every brand or every industry. Some audiences might be very turned off by that, but I wish that more B2B companies would try that partially just because it livens things up, and it definitely sparks curiosity and interest. When a brand, B2B, B2C, anything is willing to try that. So don’t be afraid to put in the extra work.
Don’t be afraid to overcome some of your hurdles with a little bit of creativity and curiosity and maybe humor as well.
Mike Allton: I did have one, quick follow-up question. That anti-case study loves the idea now, was that simply somebody who’d chosen somebody else and they weren’t happy? Or did they actually come back to GreenMellen after a certain amount of time?
Robert Carnes: I don’t believe they are a current customer. I think we had to clean up a few things that they did not like about the other agency that they decided to go with. But it was interesting because again, they initially liked us and just had a couple like, “Hey we need to do it a little bit cheaper. We need to do it a little bit faster.” There are always the same similar excuses that we get. And it’s so funny that oftentimes they’ll come back and go, “Hey, actually the website ended up costing more with this other agency” or “Oh, hey, it actually took a little bit longer with the other agency than we were expecting.”
We try to explain that to people often. If we hear that same pattern being repeated in other potential customers and leads, and so we’re like, “It’d be great if we had an example of that, of somebody, not us, because they’re going to trust another third party a lot more than they will our brand. Can we tell that and discuss some of those pain points?”
It’s a very delicate balance that you have to land there when done right. And there are not many examples I can give of that because the person actually has to come back to you and maybe admit that they were wrong or something or just made a different decision than what they might have.
So it’s a very unique opportunity that not everybody’s going to get—but find those opportunities when you can and capitalize on them in the right way.
Don’t forget to find Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition on Apple and drop us a review. And check out other editions of the Social Pulse Podcast like the Hospitality Edition, Agency Edition, and Retail Edition.
