How To Find Your Story Part 5: How to build a sustainable workflow for story formats

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 fifth 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

• How to build a sustainable workflow for long-running story formats (that’s this post!)

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

Last week we looked at how building a culture of story development is critical to telling great stories, and how you can do this within your B2B marketing teams. The development teams that are common in TV, radio and podcast production have a very different workflow from traditional marketing/agency relationships, so today we’re going to dive into how they are different, and how you can develop a similar workflow in your B2B storytelling.

This is probably the most important post in this series, as workflow is critical to finding and telling consistently great stories. When we talk to clients who have tried and not succeeded with setting up their own podcast or editorial series, it’s never because they didn’t have great stories to tell - it’s because they didn’t develop and maintain a sustainable workflow. You might have experienced this yourself - have you ever set up a podcast, video series or newsletter for your organisation, then struggled after the first few months to keep it going? That’s not because you aren’t a great storyteller - it’s because you hadn’t developed a sustainable workflow.

This is why, when we work with our clients on developing story formats, we always deliver them a story format playbook, with detailed advice and insights not just on the format itself, but how to run it for the first season. We share what we’ve learned from decades of creating and growing story formats, and give practical advice about how to manage workflow issues in their own organisations. If you want us to help you develop a great story telling workflow, hit reply and we’ll get a chat in the calendar asap!

Last week we looked at how development works as part of a content format process - here’s the chart we created to illustrate it:

This week, I wanted to break that process down further to look at workflow, and add two important stages - audience engagement and archiving. Here’s what the workflow looks like for a typical long-running content format:

This five stage workflow model is based on our experience running everything from monthly and quarterly thought leadership publications, to narrative podcasts and weekly newsletters. We’ve included our estimate of how much effort you need to plan for at each stage, depending on whether you’re running your format as an in-house team, or whether you’re working with an external content agency like Storythings.

There are a couple of key things to note about this workflow model and how it differs from a traditional campaign based workflow.

Firstly, with an ongoing content format, you will have multiple story ideas in all stages of the workflow at the same time. This is a more agile process than the waterfall of a one-off campaign. If you are producing a regular format - like a weekly newsletter or monthly podcast - you need to have at least 2 or 3 story ideas in every stage of the workflow.

This is because there will inevitably be delays with some of the stories - you might struggle to identify or get engagement from a key contributor, or a story idea might be dependent on an event that won’t happen for a few months. If you only have one story idea at each stage, the whole process will ground to a halt and your format will fail. If you have multiple ideas in progress at the same time, you can quickly switch your team’s focus between stories to make sure you’ve got a consistent flow of stories for your format at all times. This might sound like a lot of work, but it’s easy to set up simple processes to manage stories as they flow through a pipeline like this, and make sure your team are focused on keeping momentum or routing around problems.

Secondly, there is a really simple hack to make this workflow easier - produce your content in seasons. A season is a group of episodes of a content format that then has a break before the format returns for another season. This is obviously how a lot of TV and podcast formats work, but is less common in newsletters and social video series. The advantage of a season is that you can develop and produce story ideas in parallel up to the point of delivery, then handle the delivery, engagement and archive stages after all production has finished - you’re effectively splitting the workflow into two halves, although in practise, you can start releasing some early episodes in a season whilst you’re still in production for later episodes.

Seasons are powerful because they give you time to reflect as a team on a run of episodes, listen to feedback from your audience, and then plan changes to the format for the next season. This is much easier to do in the gap between seasons than it is if you are continuing to run a format without a break.

Finally, I want to mention the ‘archive’ stage. This isn’t just about having a nice place to put all the episodes. The secret power of running great story formats over one-off campaigns is that you build more and more value over time. Unlike campaigns, your audiences don’t just find your stories at the moment you distribute them. They might find them after a couple of episodes, or even a couple of seasons, through search or word of mouth recommendations. A great archive of content is a hugely valuable resource, not just for making your audience stick around longer, but also to help out with story workflow - if you are absolutely stuck for your next episode, you can rerun or revisit an earlier episode to give yourself breathing space.

Building a strong story archive is one of the most valuable benefits of developing a story workflow like the one we’ve explore today. It makes putting in the work of building a new workflow not just worthwhile, but exponentially more valuable in terms of thought leadership, brand awareness, and audience engagement.

But it is hard, in a world where most B2B campaigns are measured on instant attribution metrics, to justify the time and commitment needed to build a strong story archive. So this is why next week’s edition is going to focus on how you can do exactly that.

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