B2B Prototyping part 1: How do you find the time?

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

It’s a bit ironic that I’m a few weeks late starting this series about prototyping, because we’ve been running workshops and talking to new clients about helping them with their prototyping, and also kicking off prototypes for a huge new content project. So I’ve been doing too much prototyping to write about prototyping!

Thanks to everyone who filled in the poll about your challenges with running prototypes for your B2B content. The overwhelming response was that people just don’t prototype their content formats, so over the next few weeks, I’m going to show you how to start doing that, and create much better B2B content as a result. Here’s what we’re going to cover:

- Create space in busy schedules to build and test prototypes (that’s this post!)
- Collaborate with internal and external partners on prototypes
- Test these ideas with your internal and external audiences
- Create metrics to measure attention and engagement
- Scale ideas from prototypes into full projects
- Know when to stop or kill and idea, even if you love it
- Demonstrate how prototyping saves your company money and time
- Build a sustainable workflow and culture for prototyping in your team

THE PROBLEM

One of the things I see a lot when we work with digital content teams is that they spend a huge amount of time responding to requests from the rest of the organisation to “get something up on the website/socials.” This could be a landing page for a campaign, an activation for a new project or partner, reports or social video. Content teams end up being service departments, on a treadmill of making stuff and churning out content, rather than being strategic and investing in valuable, long running formats.

So when I start talking about prototypes with clients, the immediate response is “we don’t have time!” This is totally understandable. But you’re not going to get off that treadmill unless you really transform your content strategy, and change the requests you get from “Can you get this on the website/socials?” to “Can we be part of your awesome podcast/video/editorial format?” To do that requires taking the time to step back and think about the formats that your target audiences will value, then make prototypes to test them out.

THE INSIGHT

Prototypes are valuable for a lot of reasons. They save you time and money, help you test ideas effectively with your target audience, and help you discover potential issues with your workflow.

But there is another reason that is more important than all of these. Prototypes are how you become a brilliant storyteller. I think prototyping is to storytelling like training is to sport - if you were a professional footballer, you wouldn’t just turn up to the game on Saturday, lace up your boots and start playing. You put in the hard work on the training ground first, practising that free kick time and time again, so that when you’re in game mode, you know what you’re doing.

This might be why your content teams feel so burnt out. If they are constantly producing and publishing everything they make, they’re not getting time to practice. Prototyping is that practice. If you can build a culture of prototyping in your teams, you will become better storytellers. That’s got to be worth spending time on, surely?

THE ACTION

I’ve worked over 25 years making digital content, and I’ve tried lots of ways to build prototyping into the way my teams make content. I’ve not always been successful, but here’s five things I’ve learned:

1 - Map your existing workflow
If you’re not prototyping your content ideas at the moment (and the poll from the last email suggests that most of you are not) you need to find out why. The best way to do this is to have a coffee with some of your team and draw a detailed timeline of the last content project. When were you doing creative work? When you were stalled or waiting for a response before moving on? When are the crunch periods? Without understanding your existing workflow in detail, it’ll be hard to work out where you team can find time to prototype.

2 - Start by copying something
The biggest enemy of creativity is the blank page, so if you’ve managed to set aside time for making a prototype, don’t start with nothing. Look around at what your peers or people outside your sector are doing, and start by making a copy of the format that most appeals to you, tweaking it to work for your brief. All great artists start by copying, so join them and copy something yourself (shout out to our friends Rosie and Faris, who call their whole consultancy GENIUS STEALS)

3 - Make it lo-fi
Prototypes should be fast, cheap and quick. When I’m running a format development workshop with clients, I always end by asking “How could you prototype this for less than £10, or in less than an hour?” I’ve yet to find an idea that couldn’t be prototyped under those constraints. We have paper, phones with cameras and microphones, and now AI. Grab those tools and start making!

4 - Make it a habit
Once you start finding ways of making prototypes, think about how you can create a regular rhythm. It might be that you set aside a couple of hours the day after you get a new content request or brief. It might be something you save up and do for a morning or even a whole day once a month. Or it might be something you do last thing on Friday, so the prototype is ready to share Monday morning. The habit is what makes it practice. And as we all know, practice makes perfect.

5 - Make it social
A couple of years back, we changed our regular Storythings awaydays from presentations to prototyping. We realised that we didn’t want to get everyone together in a room to look at keynote decks - we wanted to get together to make stuff! So we started with a ‘creative safari’ in London, where we gave the team a brief, a very small amount of money, and a couple of hours to find a story and make a prototype. I was amazed at what people made, including a physical zine, a very funny video, and even a whole website curating science podcasts. But best of all, the feedback from the awayday was the best we’ve ever had. Turns out, if you work for a company called Storythings, you really really enjoy making stories. I bet the same is true for your content team.

Oh, and one final tip. You don’t have to tell anyone you’re doing this. You don’t have to show anyone your prototypes if you don’t want to. I’ll talk about how to scale and test prototypes in a later part of this series, but if you’re on the very first stage of building a prototyping culture, don’t worry about that for now. Finding the time to do it is the first step.

If you’ve read this far, thanks! I hope I’ve given you some inspiration and practical advice to find time for prototyping. If you want some feedback on your prototypes, I’d love to see them! Hit reply on this email or hit the button below to get in touch if you’d like Storythings to help you build a prototyping culture in your team

Next episode, we’ll look at one of the superpowers of prototyping - collaboration.

See you next week,

Matt