Escape the B2B Content Desert: Creating Social Media That Resonates

Written by Mike Allton

Last modified Apr. 24 2025

How do you transform technical information into content that resonates with your audience while still maintaining professional credibility? Social Pulse: B2B Edition guest Marie Skachko, founder of Growth Moves and host of the Growth Moves podcast, specializes in helping B2B companies develop social media content that drives thought leadership and creates meaningful connections with prospects through her work. In this podcast recap, Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller, Mike Allton, talks with Marie about building proven systems for creating content that sales teams can actually use and that target audiences want to share.

[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.]

Marie Skachko: I think it all starts with operating without a strategy or having a strategy in place and simply not using it. And it’s like a domino effect if you don’t have a strategy in place where you’re not using it.

All other efforts from there just fall short. So, that helped me to build a strategy for them, for social media, and it’s their previous efforts. So what worked for them, what didn’t work, and I also checked if they bought any followers because with some clients on Instagram, even if they’re B2B brands, and they’re in this space, they still bought a few fake followers, and that does affect the overall performance of the channel.

And sometimes it can take months to bring it back, or even we had some cases where we had to restart an account, and fake followers make the feedback loops irrelevant. So you cannot look at the performance of all the previous posts they did. And then we also look at the competitors’ bio group, their goals.

And here is also one of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is not connecting their social media to their top business goals. So, social media is operating in a completely different direction from their business, where social media actually can help your business reach your top strategic goal way faster, and some businesses just simply fail to connect those two things.

Marie Skachko: I think engaging always starts with the audience, so it should be audience-centric.

One thing that I also notice in this space is when certain social media pages are overly focused, so the company just talks too much about themselves, their features, and doesn’t include their audience at all. Here, it’s also a little bit sad because there have been statistics that around 65% of marketers rarely or never do audience research.

So they operate on assumptions, and it’s just a place where you can create a lot of content, which just doesn’t resonate with the audience. So it’s not engaging for them.

One creator, I love Marc Thomas. He works in growth at Podia. He created a product that helps to collect those insights from different departments in the company because usually they are throughout the whole company, so they’re in the sales department, they’re in the product department, and then just because there is a slight misalignment between the teams, those insights never are collected in one place. So, first would be making sure you collect customer insights and making sure that you do audience research. As I mentioned in the last question, audience research is part of the strategy, and I even try when I already work with clients, making sure we’re doing it regularly, ideally, audience research is ongoing.

It never stops, so we develop certain content series. For instance, I have a client in Circularity. We developed a weekly series, People In Circularity, where we ask their ideal client, basically managers or commerce managers, certain questions that also help us make sure we are on the same page with our ideal client.

It can also be a podcast. So there are so many ways to keep up with your audience. It’s just making sure that you are creating audience-centric content and then also engaging with me. We try to include some storytelling because, even when I scroll through social media, when the company provides your only facts, it’s hard to engage with that piece of content. So you can reply something like, oh, okay. Or you can have a question in your mind, but it doesn’t drive you to comment, to share your side of the story. Whereas when you create a storytelling format here, it’s important also to make sure that it’s relevant to your audience.

It’s not just storytelling for the sake of storytelling. Where I can see some, like the CEO talking about a certain saying, and the audience cannot relate to that at all. Here, storytelling just opens up people to relate to that. It’s if you’re sharing a story that’s in there, they can relate to, and then share their side of the story and their opinion. So storytelling is a great way to engage the audience more.

Are there any tools or tactics you’ve used?

Marie Skachko: I think if you are doing complete audience research for the first time, we found that landing five to seven calls with your ideal client, for around 30 minutes, 20, 30 minute calls where you have one clear goal.

So, one mistake I see my clients make is that they have five goals for one call, and then they’re lost and they’re not sure what to focus on. So, having one clear goal for the call with the client and then making sure that you are trying to understand their day-to-day as much.

As you can, you’ll craft the questions in advance, and then we pool so much insight from those five to seven calls that it’s enough for a few quarters of the content, and why five to seven? We found that it is just a happy medium where answers start to get repetitive there. We also know that it’s then that we are basically discovering the commonalities in our ICP.

There are always survey approaches, but for content specifically, it helps me to have those insights. I remember we had a client—it was before I was working in B2B, we were working with a chocolate brand—but I’m just going to make an example here. And a lot of the content is about [people who love chocolate], which is a very common knowledge. I was doing research and an audience call, and one woman told me that she was hiding in the bathroom to eat chocolate away from her kids. And that is an insight that’s inside I’m talking about. It’s something not pretty, something you cannot pull out of a person for the first five to ten minutes, you need to warm them up, and that’s what I find also happens with surveys.

It’s great quantitative data, but you simply will not get those golden insights you can have while having a call with a person.

Marie Skachko: There are certain bigger places where you can use storytelling.

For instance, there is a strategic narrative. Strategic narrative is like a story about who you are as a company rather than what you do. It is very specific because it cannot be created by any agency. It should be created by founders, founding team investors. So, basically everyone who is very much intertwined in the values and the creation story, and it communicates your opinion on the market, how your product helps people. So, it’s usually one sentence, but it’s formed by the founding team.

For instance, there is a company Cognism, and their strategic narrative is that the marketing process is broken right now, or something along the lines of. So you are creating a narrative statement about the niche, about your product, and then you are explaining it further through different POVs or content topics. That’s one thing that comes to mind because it’s just a great way to humanize your brands a little bit. Some companies tend to focus on features, which a lot of the audience cannot relate to, so strategic narrative is just a way to add more human part to it.

Another thing is the founder’s story. So it’s basically the story of a founder, why he created the product, why, and what is problem the product is solving. It’s very similar to strategic narrative, but there the focus is on the founding person or leader, and my favorite one is case studies, so viewing case studies also through the prism of storytelling.

I follow the framework. Usually it depends also case by case, but the problem, so:

What was the problem your customer was facing then?
What was their biggest goal they wanted to achieve with your product, or just generally frustrations along the way? Because day-to-day, there are problems that appear. So what was the frustration along the way, and then how did you solve that? And the end is the outcome.
So, how do you help them to achieve the goal they wanted to achieve?

And that also shifts the focus from your company to your customer and being problem-centric, not problem-centric, but still focusing more on the golden problem helps other companies in this similar niche relate more to that rather than starting with this feature and this thing.

So, storytelling along the lines of the B2B world: I think it’s strategic narrative, founder story, and case studies.

Marie Skachko: I think that it’s very much company-specific, so one person cannot answer that because it will look different for different audiences.

One thing I would say is not doing it from your own perspective. So, you are not your audience, and you simply cannot understand what would be too much for them and what-not unless you test it. I always advise you to just test certain things in your audience and see how it performs. And I also funnily enough see a trend now that overly polished content, so very much video edited, is not performing so much better now than simply videos filmed on the phone or talking about employee generating content for instance, an employee can film a video in the company on not sometimes even super high quality phone camera, and it still would perform because it resonates with the audience or it is just adds this human element to it.

So I always recommend testing everything on your audience. Make sure your research is first, and then test it on your audience. Make sure you are not adding your own perception to it too much because it can be very misleading and then] test a lot of ideas without overly polishing them. And then if it is accepted by the audience.

So it’s, they interact, they comment, they like, then you can invest more into that idea and see how you can create more high quality content from it. So I think now we live in the era that if it resonates with the audience, it doesn’t need to be overly polished. And again, talking, it’s casual, very subjective and you need to check everything with your audience.

Marie Skachko: Yeah. One company I’m loving right now is TL;DV. So they’re in the B2B SaaS space, which is super crowded right now. So their competition is super high and they are basically an AI meeting recording tool. So again, AI. Now there are lots of platforms with AI. But how they do storytelling, which is also very interesting, they do it through humor sketches.

So they take certain pains of their ideal clients and their ideal clients are in sales, marketing, and product teams mainly. And then they would create a short sketch under one minute with dialogues, there are always two same people in video content, so it also works great for brand recognition.

But because it’s a short video, just the content format performs well across all social media platforms. So they put it on LinkedIn, on X, on YouTube shorts, on Instagram and TikTok, so they can distribute this same short piece of content. So short, funny videos across all social media, and that worked amazing for them.

So they grew a following pretty quickly. Across all social media platforms. Overall, I think they have around 300,000 followers. They got an award from LinkedIn recently, so I think they nailed it with format and also view in storytelling, not only through text form or video format, you just sit in front of the camera or do voiceover, but through the shorter humor sketches and because the audience is under a lot of stress usually, so sales teams with high targets, marketing teams.

Now the budgets are getting cut. If a person operates in a stress environment, humor usually performs well for them. Because there is already so much informative content in the B2B space and in B2B sauce especially. So I love how they approach storytelling not through a familiar format, but more through the humor format.

What role should bosses, the company executives, or maybe just other employees in the companyplay in this whole content creation process?

Marie Skachko: I think it depends very much on the growth stage, depending on the growth stage involving certain people who can just create trust and humanize their brand. Again, I mentioned humanizing the brand a lot, but what we see right now is that people tend to trust other people more than they do brands. I think coming from the past where brands just overly complimented themselves being the best innovative solution.

So statistics has that people trust people more so including a founder story, including your subject matter experts, so people with expertise on specific topics. Sometimes you even have people who meet your ideal client inside of your company, so it’s a great way to include them in this space where an ideal client hangs out where they can share the story mentioning how you solve certain challenges.

Again, storytelling in your own company, and it would be sharing your narrative without overly advertising your company again. And then there is also employee generated content where it doesn’t even need to be around your company or around your zone of expertise. Just people sharing their day-to-day behind the scenes just exposes more people to your brand. So again, it helps you to stay top of mind.

One of my favorite stories is Dave Gerhardt, ex-CMO of Drift. He wrote a book Founder Brand, and basically he shared how his CEO David Cancel, created demand for the product yet to be created. So they had a year where he guest hosted it actively on podcasts and conferences. He was great in content on back then Twitter, they started their own podcast as well, and in around one year they created 3000 pre subscriptions for Drift. So your brand and your experience as a founder, including other people can just drive. More awareness of the product and help you stay top of mind, basically drive more visibility for your brand.

How do you maintain consistency in regard to voice and quality when you’re creating content across all these different channels?

Marie Skachko: I mentioned strategic narrative and when I start with a client. I always make sure that they have a strategic narrative in place because what happens with content now, we have social media, we have VR department, we have sometimes personal brands of CEOs or leaders managed by completely different people.

So, strategic narrative helps to create one direction and helps to make sure that we are not creating content that just doesn’t align with the product and builds the right association for people. So there is an easy framework developed by Re Dopkin and Todd Clouser’s which starts with a strategic narrative and then grows into different POVs and subtopics.

There’s also the CEO, Chris Walker of Refine labs. He also talks about strategic narrative. So I think just having this sentence, some companies even just do one word where you understand the direction of the topic, the direction which you want to go with the content. And we usually then also break them into POVs, like three or four POVs, which we then when we create content, we can see which piece. Which content matches which POV. So here, I think it’s just important to have a strategic narrative and also make sure that you create around three to four POVs around what, why your audience would care for your product, what problem you’re solving and which association you want to build with that.

Marie Skachko: I’m going to circle back to the first question: making sure that you’re actually connecting social media to top strategic goals, business and marketing.

So, taking three to six months goals and then breaking it into smaller and bigger content goals—and then also checking the tactical action you need to take for each call individually for each channel.

And also shout out to Mina Mesbahi because while interviewing her, we also were talking about how important this is then to set up tactical action, which you choose not to take next three to six months.

So, it’s checking the top strategic goals, connecting the social media goals to those goals, which you can track each month, and then choosing tactical action, which you’re going to do to reach those and the things which you’re not going to do.

Laser-focus so that social media actually drives business goals and not operates as a separate. It’s a separate function of the company because then you sometimes can have a confused leadership around what is it the social media actually doing, which is a very dangerous spot to be because a confused CEO is just like then an angry CEO.

Basically, you need to connect social media to the overall business growth.

What should companies not do?

Marie Skachko: So, depends so much on the goals, but usually what happens is that you need to do millions of tasks all yesterday, today. And it’s just discussing why you are not doing specific things. It’s not because you simply don’t have the time or effort. It’s just certain things. They require laser focus and not all things that require certain laser focus. So, here it’s just important to identify what action is going to be taken to achieve certain goals and because, again, it’s better to over-communicate than under-communicate. It just creates a space where the leadership and the social communication team are on the same page, and it’s all pre-discussed, and then we just pull all the resources to reach the goals.

Mike Allton: So, an example might be saying: We are not going to invest time into launching a Bluesky profile at this time because of XYZ. It doesn’t fit our target demographic. Is it an emerging platform? We don’t have bandwidth, we have all these other priorities, something like that. But that is an example.

Marie Skachko: Yeah. It’s very much business-specific. So, we want to launch a podcast, we want to start collaborating. It’s making sure you are not spreading yourself too thin and having laser focus on two to three goals. Because then it’s better to reach those and then maybe shift the targets a little bit, rather than have six goals that you are not able to achieve at the end of three months.

Mike Allton: Yeah, I love that ’cause to your point, it’s over-communication.

So, if somebody else in the organization—whether they’re your direct boss or not—wants to know my example, why aren’t we on Bluesky? You demonstrate that you’ve already thought about it. And you determine strategically that [it] is not a good fit right now.

And you have specific examples why. And then it also helps you as the marketer push back on yourself because in a few weeks you might be personally on Blue Sky or whatever and feeling, oh man, we should rethink this. But no, we already decided this quarter. We’re not doing that. If you folks listening are familiar with the EOS system, it’s this combination of visionary and integrator that you’re instilling in yourself, at least in your department, right? And in your strategic plan, that immediate challenge to ideas that to your point, Marie can derail us. If we already have our priorities and we decide to add three more goals or priorities in the middle of the quarter, that’s not going to be very successful.

Marie Skachko: Yeah, and I think part of being a social media marketer is communicating certain things to leadership because it’s also sometimes you can be pushed as a marketer to reach certain things faster or to show the ROI of certain things way faster that it comes.

And here it’s also, we are sometimes leaning on qualitative feedback rather than quantitative feedback. Again, because. Yeah, I think my point here is over communicated at the very beginning. The things we are doing just help you to focus on the process and not communicate it again to the leadership that we need to stay on the track in order to see results for a few months.

Marie Skachko: Yeah, so for ideating content, I am now. I’m not going to say the tools, which a lot of people, yeah it’s a subjective design tool.

I’m using Photoshop, Canva currently.
I play a lot with ChatGPT. And I think it’s, again, like if you are not working with AI, there’s going to be someone who will outperform you, works with AI and understands it, how to use that. So I play a lot with ChatGPT again, like scraping different social media packages and just seeing. How they, how it performs, the tone of voice, the pieces of content that perform well and not, it helps with the competitor search with company research as well, like scraping social media posts of one platform. For instance, scraping LinkedIn. And then comparing the tone of voice brand guidelines throughout different social media. Sometimes you can find that on one platform your brand of voice is different.

Marie Skachko: Yeah. There are two groups which I love. It’s Exit Five. They are around B2B marketing and have a bigger focus on the American market. So the founder is Dave Gerhardt, the one I mentioned who wrote Founder Brand. It’s a community, so it’s a great place to ask questions and get your feedback on certain things. And also, I’m loving the marketing meetup. It’s a marketing community. Also is focused on B2B, talking thought leaders.

I love Travis Tyler. He is a senior social media manager at Motion, and he’s a perfect person to mix in education and entertainment. He used to work in Pandadoc and he drew crazy growth for them. I don’t remember numbers, but I think it was over thousand percent of organic growth or something like this. So, he’s an amazing person to see the insights on connecting education and entertainment.

And I would also say people I mentioned, so it’s Marc Thomas. He is working in growth at Podia. He also has his own brand, Positive Human. He has interesting products or just likes to check, as I mentioned the customer research tool for the companies. And then also he has one Ideation card deck, which helps you to come up with ideas and it works on the limitations. So it basically helps you to come up with the ideas, content ideas, but just in general some creative ideas.

And then the last person would be Mina Mesbahi. She’s a great person to talk about content repetition. She is a content consultant for startups and for leaders, and she has an engineering background, so she’s a great resource to learn how to repeat messaging because you don’t need to overwhelm your audience with multiple messagings taken to three to four core messages is enough, and she just does amazing visualizations of her messages as well.

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.

Escape the B2B Content Desert: Creating Social Media That Resonates