The Internet is inundated with content. For every piece you publish, you’re competing not only with a slew of videos, articles, and blogs but also for a limited attention span and time that your audience can dispense with. This is truer for the B2B customers, where the audience’s attention is invariably tied to other more pressing demands.
This was, and still is, the challenge that stares at Giulia Mendoliera, Head of Digital and Content at corporate language provider Speexx. The pandemic suddenly changed the language habits of her whole audience, requiring her to look for more novel and innovative ways to connect. She shares her top tips on creating content that engages and resonates well with the audience.
What’s Inside?
- Giulia Mendoliera’s Career Journey
- Seizing the Marketing Moment
- Four Ways to Create Engaging Content
- Lesson Learned
- Who is Giulia Mendoliera?
Giulia Mendoliera’s Career Journey
I started working in marketing agencies in 2010 in Milan. I’ve always been interested in web design, UX, user behaviour and content management working in larger companies in Fashion.
The most important role in my career was when I became Marketing Director at Speexx. I feel like my role during the pandemic became really crucial. Promoting things in different countries, contexts, and cultures required a different approach and use of time.
Today, when we talk about personalisation, we don’t just allude to content tailored to the user’s interests, that would be reductive. Each company has its own culture, the industry in which the company operates has its own technical vocabulary. The winning strategy that wins is identification, stepping into the shoes of the user who works in that company that operates in that sector and that has those dimensions.
Linguistic training affects the cultural approach and this is the ingredient that makes us different from other providers, besides cultural sensitivity, empathy, sector expertise gained over the years. We have embarked on Artificial intelligence and human intelligence.
Today, I’ve been at Speexx for 6 years as Head of Digital and Content. My team and I take care of Digital and Content activities – lead generation for customers in European markets. Editorial plan, newsletter campaigns, blog section, interviews, events.
Seizing the Marketing Moment
Speexx is a corporate language learning provider for businesses. Like for the majority of people, everything changed for me and my team during the pandemic, with the need to promote things in different countries, contexts and cultures requiring a different approach and use of time.
The companies that ask for our services need language training for various different reasons – improving communications across borders, colleagues, customers, partners in crime – we try to improve their fluency and fluidify the intercultural communication. A huge part of that is creating the right learning environment.
As human beings, we need an immersive environment in which to simulate, try, share, since evolution is the result of mistakes. Training and learning isn’t just about filling gaps. Learnings should connect people’s paths on a human level.
In 2020, we planned as a team to deliver content that could solve problems because it’s something that is really human and practical. Some of our most popular content last year included:
● How do you learn English from TV series?
● Most common English mistakes that French, Spanish, Italian speakers make
● Remote leadership – how to be the perfect leader online
● How to engage your remote teams?
● How to answer hard questions during meetings?
● How to become a perfect public speaker online
Four Ways to Create Engaging Content:
We noticed that the companies with higher levels of engagement were the ones we provided with content that supported their team with real problems that they were experiencing in their day-to-day lives.
Of course, we sell language courses and our product is nothing without communication, but we realised we needed to go further. The element that brings everything together is storytelling, so we made sure we made it a key part of our offering. We looked at the following methods to do this:
1. Build Trust
Our first step was to create trust with the audience. Learning is a social activity – human beings never learn alone. Whatever we learn, we learn from something or someone else. But you need to be able to trust the source of that information.
We need to be trustworthy whenever we’re presenting information, especially when we’re dealing with area specialists. Our content creators go deep into best practices for the industries that we operate in to ensure we’ve optimised every element of the course for the real world our customers are working in.
2. Identify Your Audience Pain Points
It’s important to treat your audience as human beings and take a broader look at their needs. Your content isn’t just about ticking a box, it needs to connect. Think to yourself:
● Which emotions can I use as leverage to involve my audience?
● Are we useful in the ways that matter most?
● How can I align with their goals?
This may include problems they don’t even know they have.
I use the example of an art exhibition – it’s not always clear what the goal or meaning of a piece of work is. Sometimes the audience may not even understand. But then the guide arrives and explains the story behind the work and the meaning and everything falls into place.
3. Offer Valuable Solutions
This is where you get the value. Every B2B company needs to ask themselves, “How can they develop effective content that truly solves your audience’s problem?”. You want to become the place where people come for answers.
4. Provide Solutions in a Convenient Format to your Audience
The digital world has witnessed a dramatic paradigm shift. People are deciding how much they want to expose themselves or not online. If you think about something as simple as turning on your webcam – it could be getting you out of your comfort zone. In 2020 we have interacted more, we have learned more, because interaction and communication generate learning.
Experiment with different formats and presentation methods to suit your audience and get feedback on what they like and what you can improve.
Lessons Learned
- Be a proactive problem solver for your audience – show them issues they didn’t even know they had.
- Think not just about what your content is going to teach them, but what that content will enable them to do, and create broader messages.
- Digital offers a huge range of format possibilities, not just video and text – experiment with different mediums to engage your customers.
- Live the diversity as a training source, be open and always try to put yourself in the interlocutor shoes.
Who is Giulia Mendoliera?
Next Steps
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