How To Find Your Story Part 3: Using Formats To Turn Prospects Into Loyal Audiences

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 third 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 (that’s this post!)

• 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

As we’re discussing formats today, I’ll just mention that one of our most ambitious B2B content formats - Phoenixed, commissioned by the Global Payroll Association - has just been shortlisted for a 2025 BrandStorytelling award, and has won two Platinum MARCOM awards, including Outstanding Production. If you’d like us to help you make award winning story formats, a great place to start is our 15 day story finding sprint - details below!

We’re absolutely giant nerds about story formats at Storythings. We even have another newsletter dedicated to exploring formats and how they work - if you’re reading this and you don’t already subscribe to Formats Unpacked, I think you’ll find it really valuable.

But format is a word that is deeply misunderstood. In the world of digital marketing, it is often used as short-hand for a specific platform or channel. We often hear clients talk about podcasts, TikTok or Youtube as examples of a format. Formats are really deeper than that - they are a narrative structure that works across different platforms or channels.

This is the secret power at the heart of all formats - formats are a form of storytelling that you do more than once.

That might not sound like a secret power, but it is, and there are two reasons why.

First of all, they help audiences make the decision to give you their attention. As we’ve said lots of times in this newsletter, we’re all schedulers now, making hundreds of decisions a day about how we focus our attention. Think about the things you regularly choose to give your attention to - the podcasts you listen to on your way to work, the shows you binge watch in the evening, the newsletters you read every morning, or the video games you love playing with friends. They will all be based on a core format that is developed and explored with each new episode.

Formats are familiar, yet different, and it is this combination of familiarity and novelty that makes us want to give our attention to them. Most traditional ad campaigns don’t do this - they interrupt our attention with something new and unasked for, and this forces us to make a decision about whether to spend our attention on the new thing. An interruptive ad campaign that we didn’t ask for is an attention problem, and is likely to get swiped or skipped. A returning format is an attention choice - something we’ve decided to commit to, by subscribing or following. This is the power of a good format - you are no longer a problem for your target audience, but a choice.

Secondly, formats help your production workflow. Doing something new with every single campaign is exhausting for everyone - strategists looking for new insights, creatives pitching new ideas, planners trying to get it in front of audiences, and analysts looking to measure impact. And then with the next campaign, you start from scratch and do it all over again.

Wouldn’t it be better to spend that time trying to do the same thing again, but make it better? Why start from a blank page, when you’ve already written your first chapter?

When we build creative teams around formats for our clients, the kinds of conversations we have completely change. Instead of racing to the finishing line, then crossing our fingers that the results show it was worth it, we have an ongoing discussion based around one question - “how can we make this better next time?”

The whole relationship with our clients and creative teams change - it feels like we’re all committed to a creative journey together, and it won’t depend on one thing working. We can experiment with each new episode, try different ideas out, and double down on what’s working for the audience. It feels like we listen a lot more - to each other, but especially the audience. With repeatable formats, you develop a deeper relationship with your audience, and this is essential to make the format better.

This can be, at first, a difficult transition for a marketing team that might be more used to the annual rhythm of setting a budget for a number of campaigns, and then ticking them off through the year. With formats, success comes through commitment, and using fast feedback loops to make adjustments as you go along. It means getting closer to your audience, and really having a conversation with them.

We know that clients sometimes find this level of commitment hard. But there’s another secret power behind great formats that makes them much more effective, and incredible value for money compared to traditional marketing campaigns. It’s something we rarely see happening in B2B marketing departments, but we used to see all the time when we worked in TV and Radio.

It’s the power of development - the process of building truly great ideas by quickly trying lots of ideas. And that’s what we’re going to be discussing in next week’s newsletter.

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