NEW SERIES: How Prototyping Makes Your B2B Marketing Better

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.

At the end of our last series on how to STAY HUMAN in your B2B marketing, I asked for some feedback on ideas for our next series. It was a close-run thing, but the winner was how to easily prototype or pilot B2B content ideas. This wasn’t a surprise, as its something we hear a lot from clients. They’d love to try new ideas, but no-one has the time or money to do it. Or someone comes up with a great idea in a workshop, but once you’re back at your desk the momentum seems to flag and it never happens.

Don’t worry - you’re not alone! I used to run the BBC New Media Innovation dept back in the 2000s, and I tried lots of different ways to generate and test new ideas, and saw lots of these ideas struggle to grow beyond the workshop. But I’ve also see the huge value you get from prototyping ideas, and some tried and tested ways to carve out space for prototyping, and then scale the successful ideas through your organisation.

So over the next few weeks, I’m going to share my hard-won practical insights on how to:

- Create space in busy schedules to build and test prototypes
- Collaborate with internal and external partners on prototypes
- Test these ideas with your internal and external audiences
- Create metrics to measure attention and engagement
- Scale ideas from prototypes into full projects
- Know when to stop or kill and idea, even if you love it
- Demonstrate how prototyping saves your company money and time
- Build a sustainable workflow and culture for prototyping in your team

Before we start, I want to know what experience you all have with prototyping, so here’s a few questions I’d love you to answer - I’ll share the results at the beginning of the series so we have a good picture of how you all do (or don’t) use prototyping in your content ideas:

Thanks for answering these questions, and if you can, please share this post on LinkedIn so we can get even more responses. And in the meantime, here’s some examples of how we prototype at Storythings - four ideas for new podcasts made by our in-house audio expert (or as he describes himself, “the WAV file whisperer’) Chris Mitchell:

See you back here in a few weeks for the start of the series!

Matt