How To Find Your Story Part 6: How to Grow Audiences and Impact

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 sixth 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

• How to use stories to create conversations and turn audiences into customers (that’s this post!)

Last week we looked at probably the most important part of building really effective story formats - workflow. We ended up talking about the value of the archive - the collection of stories that you build when you get the workflow of a story format just right, something you can sustain over a long period of time.

This leads to a bigger question about value - how do you measure the impact of a great story over time? To answer that question, we’re doing something we love doing for our clients at Storythings - taking concepts from other parts of the media world, and translating them into the world of B2B marketing. It’s this ability to translate ideas and cut through the jargon of different sectors that our clients tell us they love about working with Storythings. If you’d like to work with us, our new story-finding sprint is a great place to start:

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a B2B conference in London and saw a fascinating presentation about brand vs demand marketing from WARC, Stein IAS and Linkedin. As someone who is still getting my head around the jargon and acronyms of the B2B marketing stack, it was a hugely valuable session, but my one big takeaway was summed up in the intro to the report:

As someone who comes from a media background rather than a marketing background, this quote addresses a question I have whenever we’re talking to our B2B clients - why do B2B marketers love building barriers between the different stages of their work?

Breaking up the complex process of building awareness, trust and ultimately conversion might help you build a model of customer journeys, but in reality, nobody ever follows a linear path on the way to becoming your customer. Instead, it means your marketing and sales teams end up siloed, exchanging small parcels of customer data between each other as they try to attribute the impact of their work on any results or sales.

This ends up creating passionate, but pointless, debates about attribution and therefore investment. The silo who can best argue that their data has the most impact on sales will end up with the lion’s share of the budget. Bottom of the funnel performance marketing is currently winning this argument, even though we all know that buying decisions are made much earlier on in the customer journey. But performance attribution data is easier to capture, so they end up convincing finance teams to give them more money.

To break out of these silos, you need a way of thinking about user journeys that is holistic and contextual. Holistic, so that you combine data points to build a richer, more nuanced model of user behaviour; and contextual, so you can see that users are not isolated data points on a single journey, but living within complex social and cultural networks, all of which influence their decision making.

There is a really good model for doing this, and surprisingly, it comes from the world of documentary film. As digital and social media introduced new ways of connecting with audiences in the 2000s, documentary filmmakers who were using storytelling to drive social change started building digital campaigns around their films. As these campaigns got more and more sophisticated, it led to a new role - the Impact Producer. An Impact Producer is a member of the project team who is focused on how the story can connect with communities, drive conversation, and empower these communities to create change.

There are lots of similarities between the work of a sales and marketing team and the work of an Impact Producer. Both are focused on creating real impact and results from great storytelling, and both use data to inform strategy and measure results. But instead of being a siloed department, Impact Producers are holistic roles that work across the creative team from the beginning of the project. They help you understand the goals of your project, identify target communities, create baseline data for measuring impact, and then design programmes and activities that take the stories in the film into these communities to help them drive change.

The documentary community have produced great shared resources about how they do this, including this excellent, and very comprehensive, impact producing field guide and toolkit. Their examples show how impact producers combine diverse sources of data and conversations to measure the impact of their campaigns. Impact reports - like this one from the 2012 film A Place At The Table, about food poverty in the US - will show initial audience feedback after viewing the documentary, but will also track communities over time to see how they discussed the film together, and how this in turn led to communities taking action.

Impact Producers start from the insight that great stories influence culture, and culture drives change. This context of ‘culture’ is really important - your audience does not consume your stories in isolation. We discuss and share them with our communities, and this cultural context is ultimately the biggest factor in decision making.

This is as true for B2B campaigns as it is for social action documentaries. So why are we still attributing impact to isolated data points, rather than connecting them into a bigger picture? It’s probably, as Paul Stringer said in the quote at the start of this post, because marketing loves binaries, even though they can ultimately be unhelpful and even disruptive.

At Storythings, we’re looking at how we can build roles like Impact Producer into our work with our B2B clients. We’re lucky in that we work across sectors - B2B, non-profit social change, culture and media. This means we understand ways of working in one sector, and can translate and apply them to another sector, giving our clients a unique advantage over their competitors.

As we’ve explored in this series, borrowing ideas from across sectors is key to telling really impactful stories, whether this is about story finding, development, workflow or impact measurement. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series, and that it’s inspired you to think about changing the way you tell stories in your B2B marketing. If you’d like to have a chat about how we could help you, we’d love to talk!

How are you measuring the impact of your B2B stories? Do you have any roles like Impact Producer already in your marketing teams? 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