How To Find Your Story - new series starting next week!

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.

As we’re a company called Storythings, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear we’re all absolute geeks about the art and craft of telling stories. In fact, it’s that expertise, gathered from years working in the media sector, and with clients in B2B, non profit and the arts, that our clients really value.

But over the last few weeks we’ve been lucky enough to spend time talking with one of our favourite clients, who has years of experience in B2B marketing. He told us that what he was really looking for when he hired Storythings was not story telling, but story finding. This was a really interesting insight, and it made us realise that we don’t talk enough about our skills and experience in this area.

After all, there are lots of agencies out there who repackage Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey framework, and tell their clients it is the secret to great storytelling. The truth is, it’s a bit more complex (and a lot more fun) than that. After all, there are a lot of terrible books and movies that follow Campbell’s advice to the letter.

Over the last few series on Attention Matters, we’ve shared research about how B2B marketing has become more generic, as performance marketing campaigns have focused content on the surface of your business - product, price and performance. When your customers are in a position to buy, they need that information, but as we all know from Byron Sharp, only 5% of your customers are in market at any one time. For everyone else, this sales-led content is very easy to ignore.

For the other 95%, you need to find rich and engaging stories that bring your brand to life, and start building relationships with prospects that will make them think of you when they’re ready to buy. These stories lie underneath the shiny sales surface of your company. They are the stories about how you got here, the remarkable people that work for you, and the impact you have on your customers and communities.

This is what we love doing for our clients. For ADP, we developed a format called ‘Real People Talk Pay’, using our global network of journalists to tell stories about what pay means to people’s lives from Australia to Zimbabwe. For Pearson, we told stories of diverse women working in STEM education, from a Roman Catholic nun to the ‘Dirty Old Ladies Of Software’.

Telling these stories meant understanding how to create and use story structures in the way that Joseph Campbell and his many imitators suggest. But the really unique skill is in finding those stories in the first place. That takes a different set of experience and knowledge, something that is discussed a lot in the worlds of journalism and documentary film-making, but rarely in B2B content marketing.

So this is what we’re going to do. Over the next six weeks, our new series will cover:

• The reasons why B2B marketing has become so generic

• How to find unique stories that will bring your brand to life

• How to use formats to turn your prospects into loyal audiences

• How to save money and reduce risks by quickly prototyping and testing stories

• How to build a sustainable workflow for long-running story formats

• How to use stories to create conversations and turn audiences into customers

We’re really looking forward to diving into this area with you all. If you’ve got any suggestions for projects or issues you’d like us to cover, we’d love to hear from you - hit reply to this email and let us know.

In the meantime, if you want to hire us to help you find your stories, we’ve got a new product we’re launching alongside this series. Details in the box below:

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!