How To Find Your Story Part 1: The Reasons Why B2B Marketing Has Become So Generic

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.

This is the first part in our new series on the difference between storytelling and story finding, and why this matters for your B2B marketing. Here’s what we’re going to cover over the next few weeks:

• The reasons why B2B marketing has become so generic (that’s this post!)

• 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

Before we get to that, a quick plug - if you want to get better at finding great stories for your B2B marketing, we’d love to help. Details of our new story finding sprint are below - we’re kicking off the first one of these for a new client in the next few weeks, so if you’d like us to run one for you, here’s the details:

If there’s one book we’ve recommended more than any other at Storythings this year, it’s probably Filterworld by Kyle Chayka. We even gave hardback copies away to attendees at our London client dinner back in spring. Chayka’s thesis is that the pervasiveness of algorithmic feeds are flattening culture around the world, both online and offline. His most relatable example is the homogeneity of independent coffee shops around the world. From Tokyo to Brooklyn to my home town Brighton, you can find a coffee shop near you that will probably have subway tiles on the wall, Edison filament LED bulbs in their downlighters, copper or reclaimed wood table tops, and chalkboard menus. Sitting in them will be groups of people working on Macbooks, sipping flat whites, dressed in similar combinations of faux sportswear and faux workwear.

The reasons why this has happened is down to the influence of global platform algorithms on culture and society. As platforms have shifted from being based on social graphs to discovery engines - from showing us our friends’ content to showing us the content an algorithm thinks we like - more of the culture we see is copying other things that seem to work well for the platform algorithms. So the same aesthetics and formats get replicated - like endless photocopies of the same document - until everything ends up looking the same. Chayka describers this as a flattening of culture:

In B2B marketing, this flattening has been accelerated by two other factors - the shift towards data-driven performance marketing, and pressures on marketing teams to continue the same content strategies from year to year. The shift to performance based marketing has moved B2B marketing content further down the funnel, with the promise of real time attribution and conversion data. And we know from talking to our clients that when they pitch for their annual budget, there are expectations from stakeholders to run the same cycle of reports/press releases/events that they did last year, with little room to experiment with something new.

If you are a CMO working in B2B, does this sound familiar? If so, you might recognise the flattening that Chayka describes above, as your marketing content is squeezed to the bottom of the funnel and spread out across dozens of channels. This turns the surface of your company - as experienced by potential customers - into something flat and lifeless, full of language about products and solutions that is undifferentiated and instantly forgettable.

So why have we let our stories get so flat and lifeless? Why have we squeezed our marketing down the end of the funnel, when research shows that most buyers start the buying process with vendors already in mind, and 73% of vendors rely on word of mouth to choose suppliers?

Meanwhile, underneath the surface of these flat and forgettable campaigns, your company is bursting with rich, human, memorable stories, about the people who are the engine of your work, and the impact you have on the communities you serve. This is what your potential customers remember and pass on in word of mouth conversations, not the over-workshopped taglines from your performance campaigns. People share stories, and you have thousands of them.

The challenge is, how do you find them? Well, sorry to leave you on a cliff-hanger, this is what we’re going to talk about next week.

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!