With the website finally in beta, I’ve found time to reflect on the past twelve months or so leading up to this point. This is the story of the inspiration behind researchHQ, the challenges we’ve set out to tackle and how it has started to come to life.
I’ve been involved in content marketing for more years than I care to remember. I can’t say it’s been all plain sailing. Far from it. But that story is perhaps for another day.
This is my attempt to put pen to paper to provide some context behind our ‘lockdown baby’ out of which a new side to our business is emerging.
It all started around May 2019. A beautiful sunny day, I was on my daily cycle commute into a co-working space in central London. I was taking in the sights – yes, even though I passed by every day, I never tired of them – Kensington Gardens, the Royal Albert Hall, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, The Mall & Trafalgar Square. Some of London’s best.
In all weathers, my trusty Brompton was a far better option than being packed cheek to jowl in a London Underground tube train.
Anyway, I digress. Let’s get back on (the cycle) track.
Whispering into my ear connected via Bluetooth to my Audible app whilst pedalling at full pelt through London was the voice of Randy Frisch, author of the Gordon Ramsey-esqe titled book, F#ck Content Marketing.
Don’t let that put you off. I rate it highly, especially as it’s made clear the book is not the preserve of content marketers.
The book provides a framework on how to centralise, organise, personalise and distribute content for maximum results while illustrating how everyone from the CEO to the sales team is involved and has a role to play.
Content Experiences
Frisch was talking about creating ‘content experiences’, drawing the customer into an immersive infinite scroll that mirrors the consumer experience of Netflix, Spotify, and other billion-dollar brands.
It got me thinking about the approach to content for complex B2B buyer journeys.
The current mindset is all about volume – the more content created, the better. But the reality is that almost 70 per cent of content created within an organisation is never used.
Think about that for a second. Never used. Not even ‘poorly used’. It simply never sees the light of day.
What a waste of time, effort and money.
My discussions with clients over the last five years have centred around leveraging existing content assets. I’m a big advocate of repurposing content for different personas as well as slicing and dicing into different formats.
‘Sweating the assets’ is something I’m regularly heard evangelising. You do it with the Christmas/Thanksgiving turkey, right? Why wouldn’t you do it with your white paper or eBook?
A Bigger Picture
Frisch’s message really resonated with me. I had started my current business, InsightBrief, for a similar reason. Too much quality information is buried deep in white papers, webinars or reports, often hidden behind long forms or onerous registrations – effectively depriving key swaths of intended audiences ever gleaning key insights.
Our approach at InsightBrief is to distil multiple sources relating to a specific business tech/challenge into short, concise nuggets. These ‘insights’ are brought together in a format that enables time-poor business people to easily read, digest and share.
In short, through relevancy, brevity, clarity and design, InsightBrief seeks to improve the ‘experience’ of consuming content.
But what I was listening to got me thinking about a bigger picture.
What if we could build a platform where content from all sources and various formats could come together and provide B2B tech buyers with a Netflix like experience? One where the right content at the right time is presented, easy to access and consume on any device, anywhere.
It got me thinking. A seed had been planted.
But let’s backtrack a little.
The Why not the How
Let’s look at the ‘why’ this made sense to me, not the ‘how’ do we do it.
According to Gartner, 90% of B2B decision-makers agree that the information available today is of high quality. Yet, 50% found the sheer volume of trustworthy information to be overwhelming.
I concur.
There is simply too much content. The daily tsunami of content does as much to hinder the B2B buyer as it does to help them.
Not only is there too much quality content (yes, I admit, tonnes of crap too), the process of finding trustworthy content relevant to the task you’re undertaking at any moment in time is, well, shall we say, lacking.
Put simply, if you’re trying to identify a specific problem or challenge – let’s say, ‘ensuring data security with remote workers’, then you’ll have different information needs from someone who has a good understanding of the problem and has moved on to explore possible solutions.
Got the picture? (if not, learn more about buying tasks).
Okay. So stay with me here.
You won’t be surprised that most B2B buying journeys start on Google. You’re familiar with what happens next. Multiple tabs to a smorgasbord of websites that takes time and effort to sift through.
There’s no shortage of places to look. But there is a shortage of time; your time.
It’s not pretty. The experience quickly becomes frustrating, made worse by obstacles to access ‘premium content’ hidden behind Fort Knox.
Even once you get access to the ubiquitous PDF, in all likelihood, it will be attached to an email, perhaps stuck in Spamland, missing that moment you wanted to check it out.
The content you’re interested in quickly becomes buried in your inbox and, unless you’re super organised, it’s likely to stay there, unopened.
If opened, will the PDF get saved to your desktop, or some other dark recess of your folder ecosystem, full of good intentions to check it out later?
I’m not saying the above scenario is a cookie-cut template for all – but I’m pretty confident that for most people, parts of this will resonate like a bad migraine.
As well as setting out to improve the content experience, I wanted, in parallel, to improve the research experience.
It was this dream combo that lit a fire within me.
A lofty goal I know. And maybe if life continued as normal this dream would have died on the vine.
But, of course, 2020 proved to be a shakeup.
Lockdown Passion
The drastic changes to everyday life, driven by the pandemic provided just the motivation I needed to get to work on seeing whether my dream could be turned into something tangible.
By mid-2020, after the first lockdown in the UK was easing, I had assembled a skilled team and started on v1.0 of the project.
Once we had the basic development in place, the task of content discovery and quality assessment across a number of factors began in earnest.
Using a mix of machine learning and a team of human curators with a keen eye and infectious passion for the project, we started to see it take shape.
Our small, lean, fully remote team came together and worked wonders. Thank you to each and every one of them.
Deep and Challenging
We’re going deep into each category – starting with just two primary categories – cybersecurity and cloud and related subcategories. More will follow during 2021.
Every piece of content is carefully organised by category/subcategory, buying task and content format. In addition, you can search by vendor or publisher. (industry sector, job role and analyst firm are in the pipeline)
For each category, we’ve identified related business challenges that are common pain points within organisations. So if you want to start your research using pre-suggested challenges rather than selecting a category or subcategory, you can.
Remember your last visit to a doctor? I suspect you didn’t walk in and request a red pill. You probably described your symptoms first and left the doctor to come up with a diagnosis and if appropriate, a prescription.
In this analogy, the business challenge is the symptom – and the content delivered contains relevant task-appropriate information. Quality information you and your buying team can get working on without wasting time.
Interactive Beats Static
At the heart of creating a better content experience is providing a more interactive experience – so rather than static PDF’s – the online reading experience is transformed by turning PDFs into interactive digital assets that open instantly on any device.
Need to download the PDF version? – no problem, go right ahead.
You can even make notes on the digital asset itself – for future use when you return, or highlight snippets and share the URL directly with colleagues.
We’re doing the same with video, podcasts and audio.
One (Baby) Step at a Time
After about 9 months in development, March 2021 will see the birth of our lockdown baby! Her name is researchHQ (aka rHQ-v1.0 – no relation to X Æ A-12).
Go take a peep, but be gentle on her as it’s early days and she’s still processing her new surroundings.
Where next?
I must confess, lockdown for me has had some upsides. Although I miss the cycle commute through London, working from home has forced me to rethink working practices, reevaluate priorities and realign my focus.
We’re just starting out on this journey. Our vision of a Netflix/Spotify/Audible–like platform transforming the content experience for B2B buyers is nascent but most definitely on its way.
Looking forward to an exciting journey that will transform the B2B buying experience with an alluring mix of innovation, creativity and tech. Hope you will join us.
Paul Denham is the Founder & CEO of Research HQ and InsightBrief. You can reach Paul on Linkedin or Twitter
