How To Start B2B Storytelling

Posted by David Terry on February 15, 2020

 

Storytelling should be the beating heart of inbound Marketing. As humans we are drawn to connect with and remember good stories. We find dry facts and lots of data hard to remember, but we can feel a connection and bond with well told stories.

In fact, storytelling in marketing is really nothing new. Telling stories in advertising  goes back to the best TV ads of the golden TV era which had traditionally used storytelling to great effect using humour and emotional ties, with the home consumer audience. TV ads became a classic example of how a conditional stimulus can get an emotional response, to great effect long before the digital and social era.

Creating good stories are timeless, they can surprise us, they entertain, and they can make us think and feel positively towards a brand. What we feel is the connection that can make your brand more memorable with the key messages staying with us long after the story ends.

Storytelling is now all the rage among business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers and now it's time to make it part of business-to-business (B2B) marketing. Telling well crafted stories can make our communications easier and they can connect us more closely to our customers.

If we use storytelling as part of our B2B Inbound Marketing we can build and maintain emotional connections to our brand, products and company in a way that facts, specs and logic could not.

Yet we don't hear much about storytelling in B2B marketing, that’s because many organizations struggle to articulate any story beyond what we sell.

So, has B2B storytelling has become too difficult for many of us?

Inbound marketers have become complacent and too consumed with doing multiple functional tasks, so we have lost our ability to be creative resulting in the writing of bland and stale words, product descriptions, about-us phrases and industry acronyms that may be meaningful to us marketers, but completely lack a narrative to stimulate the mind and the emotions of our customers.

Everything we do as B2B Inbound Marketers should be about telling a story; therefore, we need to start thinking differently about these narratives and work much harder at developing ongoing interlinking stories that align with customer needs.

Start By Stop Talking About Ourselves

The first step toward B2B storytelling is we must stop talking about ourselves and stop using stale brochure and sales copy to promote our business. To really get storytelling started in your Inbound Marketing programming we need to start thinking like our customers and focus on building strong connections with them.

To successfully connect with our customers, our stories have to be meaningful and compelling so they can connect with the buyer emotionally. Only then can stories have the power to deliver brand impact and differentiation in the hearts and minds of our customers, and by doing so make B2B branding truly memorable.

 

If you have any further questions about storytelling in your B2B Inbound Marketing programs - please contact - The Brit Agency today - we would be happy to help. Our team of HubSpot and Inbound certified experts will be more than happy to answer any questions you have.

Topics: B2B Inbound Marketing