3 ways to tell better stories in B2B marketing
Experts say B2B brands should tell more stories, but how do you know what’s worth telling? We have three suggestions.
Your product might be the most mind-bendingly innovative, useful, and just plain awesome thing the B2B world has ever seen, but it is not a story.
The product specifications, the features of your services, and all the most carefully chosen adjectives used to describe them…those are not stories.
Does that mean your product is boring? Not at all — we’ve seen B2B solutions that help build homes and businesses, repair roads and bridges, restore the natural environment, and even save lives in an emergency.
Each product has a journey, from its initial conception to the end user and beyond, and each step in that journey has storytelling potential. It’s all about framing your message in a way that creates emotional resonance, captures attention, and ultimately drives more engagement.
Here are three ways to do that.
1. Make it human
Humans relate to other humans. That’s a fact. Whether your product is a big piece of metal equipment or software powered by thousands of lines of code, it’s made possible by the work of humans, and its starting point was likely founded in solving a human problem. Effective B2B stories get to the heart of that quickly and authentically.
Let’s start with your internal team. Your products and services are made by smart people, and smart people are interesting. They can talk through your product’s development process, explain the science or engineering behind it, wax poetic about the unique ingredients or materials that compose it, and speak to the pain points that led to its development. All of this can be helpful in engaging with technical-minded buyers and building trust.
There’s also value in looking externally and speaking with people who benefited from your product or service. What challenges were they facing before, how did the solution transform their work, and how did it ultimately make their life easier? There are stories to be found in all these questions.
Try this: If your technical teammates are on the shy side, highlight their expertise through written Q&As or blogs that quote them directly, whereas more outgoing personalities can be showcased in video format for extra engagement. Attributed quotes can be repurposed in social media for quick bites of shareable intel. If you’re focusing on external customers, case studies with a storytelling angle are an impactful way to demonstrate the real-life outcomes of using your B2B solution.
2. Make it data-driven
Numbers and facts can also tell a compelling story about your product or service. A lone piece of data might not have the emotional impact of a human talking about their field, but when you use a storytelling approach, you can reach the reader’s heart and mind in one go.
Try this: Research statistics that frame a common pain point in your industry, then turn it into an infographic that both educates your audience and demonstrates your deep understanding of the problem. If you have data points that speak to the performance or success of your product, weave it into a blog or case study.
You can also use data to engage online users and help them visualize something complicated — for example, an interactive calculator tool that lets them determine potential cost savings or emission reductions derived from your product.
Even if you only have a single piece of data, graph, or chart, you can amp up the impact by turning it into a clever visualization.
3. Make it funny
Storytime! One of our clients had an issue with customers trying to “fix” their product by hitting it with a hammer. We turned this into a lighthearted blog about all the things you shouldn’t do with said product. The result educated readers about proper maintenance and safety in a fun, engaging way.
Humour can be a bit trickier to pull off, and you need to strike an appropriate tone for the topic at hand. The key is to balance funny stories with useful information and avoid making fun of anyone.
Try this: Reach out to your teams — you never know what fun or interesting stories people in sales, tech support, manufacturing, or development have to share. A funny story can sometimes reveal a hidden pain point for customers, which is something you can dig into further to create a blog, email, video, or social post that makes them laugh while helping them overcome a problem.
