- Attention Matters
- Posts
- Follow us as we make a new B2B format: Getting the first insight
Follow us as we make a new B2B format: Getting the first insight
In our new series we're sharing all the background details of how we make a new B2B format.
Matt Locke
November 19, 2025
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.
Hello!
We’ve talked a lot about importance of value propositions for B2B formats in previous series, and that is really because for us, content is not just marketing, it’s a content or service. If you’re serious about getting really good at making content formats, you should treat it like that. There’s no better example of this than System One’s The Uncensored CMO podcast. According to Marketing Week, the podcast has had over 2m downloads and generated 28.5k new contacts for zero media investment. That is not a campaign, that’s a product!
So when we started thinking about making a new format, we spoke to existing clients and friendly CMOs in our network to find out some needs/pains/gains we could use to build a value proposition. A couple of ideas from our value proposition workshop stood out, and they were both about creativity:
“I feel very unmotivated creatively and want to do something I'm proud of”
“I'm lacking in creative ideas and don't know how to get my spark back”
Here’s Anjali from Storythings on how we came up with this insight:
“We know that C-suite executives have a lot on their plate. But at the end of the day they are also creative individuals - it's how they got where they are. We knew we wanted to speak to them, but we didn't want to be yet another item on their to-meet or to-do list. The format we're thinking of is more a chance to have a conversation with them that positions them front and centre as creative people. For some, it might be several months, or even years, since that was the focus of a conversation. We want to get to know about some of the inspirations and models for their thinking and personalities - and get to know them better in the process.”
So we started collecting examples of formats that give people a chance to share their creative inspiration. We very deliberately didn’t focus on B2B formats, as we wanted to do something that felt very different from existing B2B content. Here’s a screengrab of part of our Miro board:
You might know some of those formats, from big media brands like Architectural Digest, Letterboxed, Criterion and the awesome Why Is This Interesting? newsletter. We wanted to take inspiration from formats that were aspirational, intimate, fun and maybe even a bit glamorous, qualities you don’t normally see in B2B content.
For each format, we looked at how the structure of questions or asks in the format gave the interviewee a chance to show a side of themselves they don’t normally see. This felt like the key to a really strong value proposition for our target audience of B2B CMOs - to unlock their creativity and give them a chance to talk about the things that inspire them. As Hugh put it on our Storythings Slack:
“The goal for the new format is to get more B2B CMOs familiar with who we are and what we offer. We do B2B Content Marketing and we want to show potential clients that we can make high quality content that is entertaining. But we have two problems. The first is that there is a LOT of B2B content out there so it needs to be different enough to stand out as well as being valuable. The second problem is that if we are hoping to get senior leaders involved they don’t have a lot of time. The ask is going to have to be really appealing. It’s a new format so we don’t have data to get their attention. I think the format itself has to be so appealing it feels like something they will WANT to do rather than something they SHOULD do.”
So that was the first thing we needed to test - would CMOs be interested in being part of a new podcast format with no track record? We wrote a short one page summary and sent it to a previous client to see if he’d be willing to record a pilot with us. The response was immediate, and followed up with a couple of further emails sharing the thing he REALLY wanted to talk about.
Bingo. This was the response we were hoping for. Now we had the opportunity to test the format and see if it was as inspiring for the contributors as we hoped it would be. Next week I’ll dive a bit more into how we developed the format structure, and what we wanted to test in the pilot.
Matt