How To Find Your Story Part 4: How prototyping stories can save you money and reduce risk

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 fourth part in our 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

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

• How to save money and reduce risks by quickly prototyping and testing stories (that’s this post!)

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

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

Today we’re going to share the secret of how great stories are developed in the media industry, and the big difference between that and the B2B marketing industry. In essence, there’s one thing the media sector does better than B2B content marketing - they develop lots of story ideas, quickly and cheaply, before commissioning the best one. It sounds simple, but it’s very different from the way most B2B marketing is developed, so we’re going to go into the processes and show you how you can do it yourself.

But if you want to start doing it right now, we can help! Here’s details of our 15 day storytelling sprint, which if you reply now will give you lots of great stories in less than a month:

Last week we talked about the power of formats to help create loyal audiences for your content marketing. Creating great content formats is about commitment, and working together as a team to ask one simple question - How can we make the next episode better than the last episode?

In most campaign based marketing, the focus is on production and distribution - how can we produce this campaign on time and budget, and what channels will we use for distribution? The content itself will be one of maybe a couple of options that agency presented, in response to a tightly focused message and brief. Once the campaign is commissioned, there’s little room for further development of the creative idea - it’s all about production and distribution.

But if you want to make great content formats that people love and want to subscribe to, you have to prioritise development. People who excel at making great content formats - like TV and podcast production companies - put a lot more time and effort in development and prototyping than most B2B marketing campaigns. In these stages you’re doing two things that make your stories more engaging and effective - story finding, and audience testing.

As we said earlier in this series, there are two secrets to finding great stories - start with a question you don’t know the answer to, and find the unusual experts. But finding great stories is hard, and you’ll sometimes hit dead ends. In developing media formats, this is not just expected, but encouraged. TV production companies invest heavily in their development teams, who are constantly looking at cultural trends and audience insight to find the next great story or format idea. When they pitch their ideas to a commissioner, the first step is to develop a cheap pilot or prototype that can be tested with the target audience. If it looks good, it’ll then be developed into a full series. If not, you’ve not wasted a lot of time or money finding out.

This ability to quickly and cheaply find, develop and test stories is critical to creating a hit format that people come back to time and time again. Ira Glass, the founder and host of the hit podcast This American Life says that having the capacity to develop stories that might not work is critical to their success:

As Ira Glass says, producing a deeply researched and produced podcast weekly takes a big development team. But if you’re producing editorial content on a monthly or even quarterly basis, you can make it work with a much leaner and more efficient team. For our B2B clients, we often start with a Managing Editor, an Assistant Editor, a Designer, and then a global network of freelance journalists. Our editorial team works with the client to agree the core subjects we want to explore, and then they work with journalists to take pitches for story ideas, fund development, and commission stories.

This can feel very different from a traditional campaign production workflow, but we’ve found clients love the process of developing, pitching and testing ideas. This process means content development is a true collaboration between our client and our editorial team, as the feedback loop of pitching ideas, prototyping, developing and getting responses from the audience is a lot more iterative, engaging, and just plain fun than a traditional campaign. Once we’re up and running, at any one time we’ll have stories in development, pitching, production and distribution stages all at the same time. This makes the job of commissioning marketing content incredibly varied and exciting, compared to the one-and-done campaign model.

If you’re used to agreeing a campaign concept with an agency, then waiting for them to come back with the final result, this will feel like a very different workflow. But when you try it, it quickly becomes addictive. It’s a creative conversation between the client, our editorial team and the audience, and the ability to make changes and respond to audience feedback is very addictive. It feels like you’re managing a constant flow of interesting stories, surfing a growing wave of great content that you’re excited to share with your audience. That feeling of excitement and anticipation feeds into your audience as well, and this is how you build truly loyal audiences.

All you have to do to join this wave is to make a couple of tweaks to the workflows you set up to commission content. Which is exactly what we’re going to look at next week.

Are you building great formats with your B2B marketing? We’re looking for people to interview for future editions of the newsletter, so if you’d like to share your story, hit reply and I’ll be in touch asap!

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