What can the wildly successful craft beer industry teach B2B marketers?
From storytelling and keeping content fresh to making corporate campaigns delightfully crushable, there’s plenty the B2B marketing world can learn from taking a look at the craft beer industry and its emphasis on customer delight, engagement, and more.
While the pandemic has slowed the growth of the craft beer industry with the largest disruption to the industry since the days of Prohibition — leading to an 8 percent decline in sales among small and independent craft brewers — its trajectory over the past decade has been undeniably admirable.
The global health crisis has forced the craft beer industry to change, including an expansion of direct-to-consumer sales in the face of closed taprooms, yet there’s still much that B2B marketers can learn from the long-term ascendancy of the craft beer world.
Let’s hop right in and take a look at a selection of the top things B2B marketers can learn from the craft beer industry.
Find Your B2B Tech or Finance Freshies
Freshies Image
Among craft brewers, the fresh-hopped variety of seasonal beer features hops used as close to the time they’re harvested as possible, and the resulting India Pale Ave (IPA) freshies are highly desirable among hoppy beer fans, but they don’t retain their initial taste qualities long enough to be a year-round offering.
In B2B marketing, we can make the equivalent of content freshies by offering existing and prospective customers any type or format of digital assets that don’t fit into the unchanging evergreen content category. Timely content can come from many sources in the B2B marketing world, however some of the most successful features elements that often revolve around:
Virtual or real-world conferences
Twitter chats and Reddit Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions
Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces audio-based calls
Current events and so-called hashtag holidays
Timely social media polls
Live-stream events
Whether you’re in the B2B technology, finance, or another business industry, give your customers a generous pour of virtual freshies by including a fresh mix of seasonal and unique content in your marketing blend, to augment your evergreen information that doesn’t necessarily change throughout the year.
Make Your Corporate Channels Crushable
Crushable Image
Crushable beers are generally considered easygoing lower-alcohol beers that make customers want more, a phenomenon that is also quite well-suited to B2B marketing.
Crushable B2B marketing content isn’t bitter or hard to consume, instead focusing on providing customers an experience so smooth and pleasant that they’ll want to come back for more, whether it’s by subscribing to your brand’s newsletter, liking its LinkedIn company page, or becoming a regular listener to your firm’s podcast.
Here’s a list of just a few of the elements that help make your B2B Colombia Phone Numbers List marketing content crushable:
Easy-to-digest content that’s well-written and pleasantly positive
Contains enough helpful information to make it relevant
Makes it easy for customers to subscribe or otherwise get more of the content they find crushable
Sometimes the craft beer industry also considers crushable beer to have a session beer component — tying it in to a social occasion over a specific period of time, or session.
Session content, similarly, gives customers an easy flow from one piece of information to the next, such as in the popular social media stories format, where text, images, and video all play in sequence, with little effort required on the part of the customer.
Don’t be afraid to creatively use the stories format for B2B marketing content, and to serialize other forms of digital content — from B2B podcasts that customers can binge on while listening, or brand video playlists that can auto-play for binge watching.