How To Find Your Story Part 2: Finding Unique Stories That Bring Your Brand To Life

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 second 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 covering in this series:

• The reasons why B2B marketing has become so generic

• How to find unique stories that will bring your brand to life (that’s this post!)

• 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:

Thank you so much for everyone who shared or responded to part one of this series, especially Ben Dietz for featuring us in his fantastic [SIC] newsletter, and Glyn Britton for making a Notebook LLM podcast version of our last series! It’s great to hear from you all, and I’m glad the idea of Story Finding is resonating with so many of you.

Today I’m going to share two really useful tips to help you find great stories. As I was developing this article, I had earlier drafts that had 5-6 tips, but they felt a bit more generic - the kind of thing that you could find in lots of articles and books about storytelling. They didn’t really feel like something that would change the way you think about stories - they didn’t focus on story finding enough. So I went back to the drawing board, and thought - what are the things that really great story finders do that most other people don’t?

The two things that I came up with sound deceptively simple. They look easy, but they start you on a journey into the craft of story finding. If you can get good at doing these two things, you’ll find plenty of stories that genuinely stand out from the crowd. And you’ll have a lot more fun doing it.

1 - Start with a question you don’t know the answer to

This sounds really obvious, but think about it - how many times have you started developing a B2B story where you already know the answer? A lot of B2B thought-leadership storytelling starts with the destination - “make us look like we’re smart about xxx” - but this means that you’re not learning anything as you develop the story, and so the result feels flat and lifeless.

If you start from a question, and go on a journey to discover something you don’t know, you’ll end up with a way more exciting and engaging story, and you’ll take your audience on that journey with you. This is how great journalists and documentary makers work - they start with a question, and fall down rabbit holes untill they find the answer. Talk to novelists, and they will often say they don’t always know what their characters will do in a situation until they write it out - the process of telling the story is finding out something that you didn’t know when you started.

This might feel harder to do in a B2B setting, but there are always ways of turning what might seem a very strict brief into an open question. When we work with our clients, we start by asking what might seem like really dumb questions, but they always open up rabbit holes that lead to incredible stories.

For example - I was talking to an old client last week who is now working for a charity that helps communities restore orchards. As we were talking, I asked her a question that had been bugging me: ‘So, how many trees make an orchard?’ It turns out the answer is five, but in answering it, our conversation went down many fascinating avenues, including their work building orchards in prisons, and restoring lost hidden orchards in central London.

We spoke in last week’s newsletter about how writing for algorithms, and the focus on performance marketing, has squeezed B2B content in the bottom of the funnel, turning the surface of your company into something flat, generic and lifeless. If you want to reach below that surface to discover more interesting stories, turn every B2B content brief into a question, and then see what you uncover as you try to find the answer.

2 - Find the unusual experts

When you start with a question you don’t know, you have to seek out people who can help you find it. Sometimes, this will be experts - people at the top of their fields who spend their days being ‘thought leaders’ on their subject. But the really interesting stories come from people who are experts in ways that even they might not realise.

Many years ago, I saw Ira Glass talk about the story finding process they use to make the radio and podcast series This American Life. He spoke about an episode from 2002, when he and two colleagues were embedded on a US warship during the post-911 conflicts in Afghanistan. They were tightly controlled by their US Navy hosts, and were struggling to find a story. Then they noticed a 20 year old sailor, Crevon Scott, restocking a vending machine on the warship, so they started asking her about her work:

This started a journey that revealed the stories of the 5,000 workers it takes to support the 50-60 pilots on board the ship. They might not fit the Top Gun stereotypes we’re used to seeing in the news, but they are a vital part of the machine, and experts in their own little bit of it. Once you realise that everyone is an unusual expert in something, you can unlock their stories with simple questions like ‘What are the big sellers?’

Your organisation is full of unusual experts. They exist at every level, from the senior leadership to most recent joiners. Your job as a story finder is to ask the questions that unlock their unusual expertise. For example - in our work with ADP, we work with some of their biggest clients to tell the stories of their payroll transformation projects. There are a couple of questions we use at the beginning of our interviews with them that always unlock fascinating stories.

One of them is ‘Do you remember your first paycheck?‘ Payroll is a vital part of every company, in many ways the most important contact point between the company and it’s employees. By asking payroll leaders about the first time they got paid, we unlock stories about what pay means to people, and what it helps you do in your life. We can then start to craft a story about their expertise, not just as people that develop and run hugely complex digital payroll platforms, but as people that understand what pay means, and how it is inextricably woven into all of our lives.

This is their unusual expertise, and we discovered it by taking them back to a moment when payroll wasn’t their job title or a complex procurement process, but something tangible and memorable. That simple question repositions their payroll expertise, away from the jargon and buzzwords, into something human, personal, and relatable.

I hope these two tips are useful. I’ll be honest with you - as I was developing them, I realised that I use exactly this process to write the Attention Matters newsletter. I’ve been working in media and researching audience attention and storytelling for over two decades, but when I write these series, I start with a list of questions I don’t know the answers to. I then have to go and find new answers, and then share them with you all in the newsletter. That makes it a hell of a lot more fun for me, and hopefully you too!

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!

Matt