During one of my team’s monthly ‘Inspiration Sessions’ – where we each bring a cool example of some marketing magic we’ve discovered in the wild – one of my colleagues shared this.
It’s 160+ slides from the Mine Safety Disclosures blog on how The New York Times turned around its fortunes and saved itself in the face of a digital ad onslaught from the likes of Google and Facebook.
I highly recommend you carve out some time during a coffee break and read through the whole thing.
Here’s why I love it.
- Red hot storytelling. This isn’t a light subject and it’d be easy to drown in the details. The author breaks down their findings into digestible chunks, mixing the right amount of data, quotes and visuals to drive their point home.
- Killer format. While the deck can be viewed as a regular SlideShare, upon first opening the page you see the document in its full glory. A quick scan down the page to see a banquet of colourful diagrams helps to whet the appetite of the eye.
If you ever needed proof that a triple-digit deck can be interesting, then this is it.
Takeaway
B2B organisations have a penchant for being a little bit… complicated. It’s not like buying a sweater, where you just need to whether you walk charcoal black or onyx midnight. Often, solutions have dozens of unique benefits to communicate with multiple different personas.
And that’s why I love this piece of content. It shows that it’s possible to present a complex story in a way a layperson could understand. It doesn’t take more than 15 minutes to read through and leaves the reader with enough, clear-cut info to impress at a (virtual) cocktail party.
So what’s the takeaway? Simplifying your story and presenting it in a digestible format is paramount when trying to speak to a customer for the first time. Ask yourself the following question before sitting down to create something:
