Remarkable Content with Ian Faison Who Gives a Crap Toilet Paper: B2B Marketing Lessons from the Eco-Friendly Brand with Director of Customer & Content Marketing at Intellum, Shannon Howard
B2B marketers take themselves so seriously. A little more humor wouldn’t hurt.
Even if you’re thinking, “I already use humor in my content,” we’re going to convince you to ramp it up. Because today, we’re looking to a company that spends about a third of its content just on humor. And despite having "wasted" content on humor, it's thanks to their booming sales that they’ve raised over $8.6 million to fund sanitation projects around the world.
In this episode, we’re talking about the eco-friendly toilet paper brand, Who Gives a Crap, with the help of special guest, Shannon Howard. Shannon is Director of Customer & Content Marketing at Intellum. Together, we talk about dedicating a third of your content to making your audience laugh, edutainment, paying attention to the details, and much more. So take a bathroom break then tune into this episode of Remarkable.
About our guest, Shannon Howard
Shannon Howard is Director of Customer & Content Marketing at Intellum. She joined the company in March of 2023. Shannon is an experienced Customer Marketer who’s had the unique experience of building an LMS, implementing and managing learning management platforms, creating curriculum and education strategy, and marketing customer education. She loves to share Customer Education best practices from this blended perspective. Prior to Intellum, she served as Customer Marketing Manager at PeopleGrove. She has also held marketing roles at companies like Crowdvocate, Litmus, and The Predictive Index.
About Intellum
Intellum is the learning management system powering the world's leading education programs. Intellum's scientific, data-driven approach is based on 20 years of industry experience, and the Intellum Platform includes all of the tools an organization needs to create, deploy, manage, track, and continuously improve highly personalized, engaging educational experiences. Large brands and fast-moving companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Twitter, BeyondTrust, Randstad, AT&T, Verizon, Mailchimp, and many others rely on Intellum to improve product utilization, customer retention, and revenue.
About Who Gives a Crap Toilet Paper
Who Gives a Crap Toilet Paper is a recycled toilet paper brand. They pride themselves on creating a product that’s better for the environment, as it has no inks, dyes, glues, chlorine or artificial scents. Their products can be delivered or picked up in store. And most orders ship free (over $25). But most importantly, they come with a mission to spread toilet humor and make the world a better place. They use 50% of their profits to build toilets and fund sanitation projects in developing countries.
That money goes to a non-profit called WaterAid, which helps people in those countries access clean water, sanitation and hygiene education.
The company was started by Simon Griffiths, Danny Alexander, and Jehan Ratnatunga, who are engineers and product designers, in July 2012 after they found out that 2.4 billion people, or 40% of the global population, don’t have access to a toilet. Now, according to their website, that number is down to 2 billion.
So they started a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGogo and it took about 50 hours to meet their goal, and they raised over $50,000. They launched their first product in March 2013. Now they also offer paper towels and tissues. Each roll is also wrapped in recycled paper in color and playful prints for sanitation purposes.
They’ve now raised over $13.3 million dollars (that’s Australian dollars) or $8.6 million US dollars.
What B2B Companies Can Learn From Who Gives a Crap Toilet Paper:
- Spend your time equally on creating content around product, impact, and humor. A third of the Who Gives a Crap blog is dedicated to bathroom humor. While that might seem like a lot of content that’s not dedicated to marketing or making a sale, Shannon says, “In B2B, we forget that there's not a company on the other side of our marketing. There's a person and they have dreams and aspirations and they have things that they struggle with and they have a sense of humor. Everybody's been asked to do more with less. We just need something to break through the noise and give us a little reprieve. And I think humor does that.”
- Edutain your audience on your mission. Who Gives a Crap educates their audience on their mission to provide access to clean water and sanitation around the world, but they make it fun. Shannon says, “They're talking about deforestation. They’re bringing things in that can be really heavy topics, but making them lighter. They do it in a way that's really organic and natural and funny.” Educate your audience on why what you do matters, and make it light, funny, natural and organic.
- Write like you talk. You’ve probably gone to a site where you have no idea what the business does, because the content is so dry and buzzword-heavy. Don’t write like that. Act like you’re explaining to a friend what you do and write it out. Shannon says, “This is something I try to think about for content when I'm writing for SEO. Okay, I'm writing for a search engine. But I'm also writing for humans. I can't write for search only, right? You need to write for real people who are going to read your content and give them a reason to want to read your content. If you can make it entertaining and maybe you're putting gifs in there or emojis, or you're breaking up the text, or you're giving some real life examples. Those are ways you don't maybe necessarily have to use humor. That's not part of your brand, but you can lighten it up a little bit.”
- Fit creative moments into the details. Every bit of real estate matters, whether it’s on your blog, in an email, or on a piece of packaging. Shannon says, “If you have an autoresponder, an email signature, real estate on your website, on your social media, are you paying attention to those details? Are you personalizing them? Are you speaking to your customers there?” The details and the little bits of space are opportunities to personalize, to be creative, and to speak to your customers.
Quotes
*”Surprise and delight is a big part of B2C companies. But it's not something we always think about in B2B. We think about, like, what is the thing that is going to provide the most value? But then you think about something like loading screens. Or in Asana, when you check off a task that needs to be done, you get a little unicorn, yeti or otter that flies across the screen. So just things like that, where it's small, it doesn't add value. No one's buying it for the unicorn, but it's a way to surprise and delight your customers. And that does make a difference. I think we forget those little things can mean a lot more to people. They can be really impactful moments.” - Shannon Howard
*”When it comes to brand voice, think about if you were to walk up to our brand at a party. What would they be like? Think about your brand and what would that brand look like personified in the real world.” - Shannon Howard
Time Stamps
[0:55] Meet Shannon Howard, Director of Customer & Content Marketing at Intellum
[2:03] Why are we talking about Who Gives a Crap toilet paper?
[3:57] What does Shannon’s work at Intellum entail?
[5:24] What is Who Gives a Crap toilet paper?
[10:22] What makes Who Gives a Crap remarkable?
[13:15] What are marketing lessons we can take away from Who Gives a Crap?
[26:51] What is Shannon’s content strategy at Intellum?
[35:14] How does Shannon think about proving the ROI of content?
Links
Check out Who Gives a Crap Toilet Paper
Connect with Shannon on LinkedIn
About Remarkable!
Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both non-fiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com.
In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Meredith Gooderham, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK.
Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise.