THE CHALLENGE

Be the Business was established to dig deeper into Britain’s productivity problem and aims to make the UK home to the most ambitious firms in the world.

It combines expert business advice and peer stories to demonstrate how SME leaders across the UK can improve productivity and grow their businesses.

The main challenges for Be the Business are:

1. Attracting time-poor CEOs, managing directors and business owners 

2. Being able to deliver accurate, helpful and relevant content to SME leaders

3. Motivating readers to take action in their own business 

Be the Business’s audience is business leaders with 10-500 employees. Since this audience doesn’t necessarily have the time to sit down and read long articles, it was important to consider different content formats.

​THE PROCESS

Step 1: Identifying potential case studies

We chose five target companies for intensive deep dive profiles. Each business covered an important audience group for Be the Business: manufacturing, retail, restaurants, exporting and office-based.  

The companies varied in size and location, from a small Bristol-based cafe to a management consultancy with offices in London, Switzerland and Singapore. This diversity meant the content would appeal to Be the Business’s audience and we could include a range of experiences.

Step 2: Building a suite of content formats

Each suite of content needed to be presented in a way that created a “blueprint” for other business leaders to follow. That way, the audience could learn from the case study and convert advice into action.

We created a structure that allowed us to showcase visual aspects and build an immersive experience for readers:

• Overview feature. Chart the company’s history and highlight key inflection points in their growth (eg. opening a second premises)

• Three snapshot articles. Cover the technical aspects of how they solved specific challenges (eg. creating a marketing strategy for a new product)

• Three videos. Each video would include interview answers from the founder and footage of their office or premises to give a visual demonstration (eg. establishing company culture)

• Photo gallery. The photo gallery would focus on a specific topic and include text explaining how changes were made (eg. a move into sustainable manufacturing)

Step 3: Conducting interviews

Each initial interview was structured to explore the company’s history and touch on key content themes for Be the Business:

• Leadership & Strategy

• People & Team

• Planning

• Sales & Growth

• Digital Readiness

From there, we identified topics that would lend themselves to the video interviews and photo series. 

The photo series and video interviews were conducted on-site to better capture the company’s environment and demonstrate workplace systems or technology. This made the content more engaging and strengthened trust in the quality of the advice.

In addition to the founder or CEO, we encouraged employees to take part in the interviews to provide valuable perspectives on subjects like company culture.

​THE RESULTS

The deep-dive profiles featured successful business leaders and highlighted key areas where a change had resulted in greater productivity, innovation or growth. Each profile provided context and step-by-step information to help other leaders make a similar change.

Showing tangible examples from established peers was crucial in building the authority of Be the Business and making sure the content connected with its target audience. The variety of content formats also meant business leaders would learn something from each profile, whether they had two minutes or 20.

The videos in particular helped Be the Business increase brand awareness, since they were adopted into each profiled company’s PR materials and featured on blogs or circulated via social media.