The B2B attention challenge : How going niche will help you bring focus to a diffuse sector

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools to grow your audiences’ attention.

This is the fourth in our five part series looking at common business problems that you can solve with your B2B content strategy - you can read the first three by clicking on the links below:

1: We work in a sector that is incredibly important, but overlooked
2: We work in a sector that is complex and often misunderstood
3: We are well established in our sector, but need to shift attitudes to our brand/positioning
4: We work in a sector that is diffuse and unconnected
5: We work in an emerging sector that hasn’t developed its own languages or rhythms yet

We’ve had some great conversations recently about B2B content challenges, like content strategies for ABM, for example. What kind of issues you would like us to explore? Send me an email if you have any suggestions - and we’ll get our teams’ brains on the problems asap!

The Message:

If your sector is diffuse and unconnected, the trick is not to go broad, but to go niche.

In an earlier part of this series, we covered something we hear a lot from our clients - they work in a complex sector that is hard to explain to their target audiences.

But sometimes, the problem is closer to home - you work in a sector that is so complex and diffuse, even people working in the sector struggle to navigate it. This is often the case with sectors like global development, where the sheer scale of the challenges, participants and timescales involved makes it hard to create unifying stories. We also see it a lot in big multinationals, where comms teams are trying to unite internal and external audiences across the globe around a single strategy or goal.

So how can you connect people when the field they are working in is so huge and diffuse? The temptation is to zoom out and use generic campaigns that end up not really meaning anything to anyone, as design agency RGA recently pointed out:

Counter-intuitively, we’ve found that the opposite strategy works better. If you want to bring order to a diffuse sector, don’t go broad, go niche.

The Quote:

Jim VandeHei is a serial media entrepreneur, scaling two digital publications - Axios and Politico - in an era when a lot of other digital publications (Buzzfeed and Vice, for example) were struggling. As he says in this quote, the key is to find a simple value proposition that meets a very clear audience need. To build on his formula - if you can’t say “we are the xxx for xxx” then you are probably too broad.

The Insight

For me, the core insight from VandeHei’s quote is the last line - “It is hard to be broad or many things to many people”. This is the most common mistake people make when they are trying to bring focus to a diffuse and unconnected sector. But the reality is, the more niche your value proposition, the more likely it is that people will not only engage with your content, they’ll actually share it with their peers. This is because you are trying to focus on creating value for a specific context in your sector, not trying to cover it all.

But what does focusing on a niche actually look like? Well, it might mean using a shared emotional hook to unite communities across your sector. The UNHCR do this brilliantly with their podcast interviewing people working in the refugee sector based around one simple, but powerful question - What Keeps You Awake At Night? Another Storythings favourite is Usesthis, a blog format that connects a wildly diverse groups of creatives through a short questionnaire about the tools that they use in their day job. Or it might mean providing a valuable short recap of what happened at a huge industry event, as we did with our Caught Up On Cannes daily podcast series earlier this year.

In fact, the very beginnings of Storythings came from an idea to connect a diffuse and unconnected community. Back in 2010, I was working as a commissioning editor for the UK public broadcaster Channel 4, and my job involved going to lots of different media events to meet production companies and digital indies. Every sector had their own events - TV, documentary film, web 2.0, games, children’s media, etc - and they all tended to have a couple of creative keynotes, and then panel sessions looking at current issues in their industry.

I loved the keynotes, but was often bored and frustrated by the panel sessions. I wasn’t interested in sectoral squabbles, I wanted to hear how people told world class stories in different contexts, and what made them so effective. I suggested to a colleague that someone needed to bring together all the creative keynotes from the different events, so that we could learn lessons about great storytelling from lots of surprising and diverse sectors. They turned to me and said “Well, why don’t you do it?”

So I booked a venue, started inviting speakers, and created an event called The Story that we ended up running for the next decade. Over those ten events, we had journalists, playwrights, scientists, economists, animators, zine creators, magicians, foley artists, politicians, gamers, comedians, and just about every other form of storytelling you could imagine, coming along to share how they told stories.

My hunch was that storytelling was the hook that would connect lots of diverse and diffuse communities across creative sectors, and it seemed to work - we were sold out pretty much every year. And after two years of running the event, I left Channel 4 to start my own company - Storythings - that would specialise in exploring the craft of great storytelling.

The Action

At Storythings, when we’re helping a client find a value proposition that will connect a diffuse audience, we start from thinking about three things - Create, Curate, or Convene. Can you use your unique position in the sector to create stories that conncet diverse communities? Can you curate resources across different parts of the sector to save people time and effort? Or can you, as I did with The Story conference, convene people around an idea that connects people in a surprising way?

If you’re struggling to think about how to connect your sector, start with these three Cs - Create, Curate and Convene - and they will help you dive down to find niches that will be genuinely valuable for your audiences. I did it, and ended up not just with an even, but a whole new company.

What Do You Think?

Have you ever created something that really connects and unifies a diverse or diffuse sector? We’d love to hear your stories, so please let us know about your own favourite examples of formats that connect and bring value across sectors.

If you’ve got a great case study, please share it with us by hitting reply and we’ll feature you in the next newsletter.

If you found this valuable, we’d love to hear from you! Please reply to this email to get in touch, or share the article on Linkedin tagging Storythings.

See you next time!