Storytelling in B2B marketing
1 February 2023
Apparently, it is National Storytelling Week, and it inspired me to talk about using storytelling in B2B marketing. It’s used in B2C all the time but often overlooked by B2B marketers. Here I talk about why you should use storytelling and how to do it.
Find out more about The Society for Storytelling charity and National Storytelling Week events across the UK here.
Why storytelling?
There is a reason that so many B2C ads use some form of storytelling. The protagonist having an exciting car ride, personified villainous bacteria being destroyed by a victorious toilet cleaner – Tesco even uses the tagline “food love stories” in their ads.
They do this because humans find stories engaging and memorable. If you utilise stories in your marketing tactics, you will get better results, such as more engagement on your social media posts (and thus more visibility), more visits to your website, and more sales at the end of the day.
It could even save you money if you include storytelling in paid media. If your ads are more memorable, you don’t need your audience to see or hear them as often.
Case studies
Case studies are one of the best-performing types of content in B2B and one of the easiest types of stories to create. They have a natural narrative about what you have achieved for your customer, and they are also great for building your credibility as they are evidence that you can do what you say you can.
Case studies that include your customer’s name are more powerful as they are a type of social proof – even more powerful if the customer is similar to other target customers. It can be difficult to get approval to include a customer’s name. Sometimes this is because the customer doesn’t want the world to know about the problem you solved for them; more often, though, it is because your contact at the company is busy or doesn’t have the authority to allow it.
A great tip for getting your case studies approved is to write it in such a way that it makes the client look good, then copy in their marketing or PR department. Marketers love easy PR, and you’ve basically just written a press release for them.
This brings me to another point. Journalists, editors and conference organisers also love stories because their readers and attendees pay more attention to them. So, turn your case studies into press releases and use them to get those speaker spots!
Testimonials
Testimonials are like mini case studies but written by your customers. Again, this provides social proof and credibility. Make sure that you ask happy customers for reviews and testimonials – making it part of your process. For example, if you conduct customer surveys, always ask if you can publish their comments, and add asking for a review on sites such as Google or Capterra into your sales or contract review process.
Whenever you get good testimonials, make use of them – post them on social media, publish them on your website and include them in your presentations.
Team stories
This one is often underutilised. In B2B, people tend to buy from people as well as brands. Also, your potential customers are not your only target audience: potential employees are too.
Most companies have charity days and other events, but they don’t always promote that outside the organisation. Both customers and potential employees love to hear about it.
You also probably have great employees doing interesting jobs that people would like to hear about. “Meet the team” blogs, videos, and social media posts perform really well in my experience – because, again – people buy from people. It also gives some personality to your brand.
Anniversaries & special dates
Your business already has a story, a story that includes its launch and other milestones along the way. For example, I founded Labrakita Marketing as a sole trader in July 2019; in July 2021, I registered Labrakita Marketing as a limited company, and in July 2022, I took on my first employee – there you go – a mini story for you (with a lot of Julys for some reason).
You probably have a longer story with more milestones than I do, so an “our story” blog post and graphical timeline in your “about us” section might make great (and easy) storytelling content to put together. Each milestone also tells its own story, so don’t forget to include them on your content calendar for social media etc.
Social media posts
Obviously, you can use all of the above in your social media, but there are ways you can make some of your other social media posts a mini-story rather than just stale and factual. This works particularly well with your team’s posts (especially your senior team’s). For example, I talk about marketing objectives and their importance quite a lot, and today (1st Feb 2023), I started a LinkedIn post talking about how I was checking if I had hit my January 2023 objectives. Using your own experience and stories to illustrate a point works well on social media.
Video
Video is a format for storytelling which is often dismissed as being too complicated or expensive, but the very nature of video often leads to a narrative and is, therefore, great for storytelling. They don’t necessarily have to be very long or complex and are often simply video versions of your other story content. It can be a video version of your case study, a video at one of your events, a short clip of you blowing out the candles on your business’s birthday cake – almost anything.
Whilst it is worth getting a video production team in for some video content, such as video case studies (which can be a lot less costly than many imagine), “homemade” video is perfectly acceptable for a lot of content. Post-lockdown, the world has changed, and people don’t expect everyone to always be in the same room, so interviews with your team via Zoom and recordings of your webinars make good story content. Short clips of events can be taken with a mobile phone.
Blogs
I’ve already mentioned blogs a few times here, but other storytelling blogs can be very powerful. For example, if you know your customers are firefighting under time pressures, tell the story of how x industry or x job roles are under time pressure. Offer a solution at the end of the blog, but don’t be afraid to have blogs that tell customers about the problems they know they face; not only are you telling a story - it shows that you empathise. To improve clicks (and open rates if you send emails on the subject), ask a question that you know the answer is “yes” for your target audience – so in this example “, Are you firefighting because of time pressures in “x industry”). All of this is also relevant for press releases,
If you want to talk about integrating storytelling into your B2B marketing communications, call us on +44 (0) 131 516 7295 or email us at marketing@labrakita.co.uk.