STAY HUMAN - Breaking out of Risk Aversion Paralysis

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 post in our campaign exploring the seven signs you might be about to become a B2B Zombie. We’ll cover the symptoms, the cure, and simple steps to success. And read to the end for a useful reading list (we know from our stats you all love a reading list).

1 - How to avoid Generic Thought Leadership Disease
2 - Escaping from Buzzword Dependency Syndrome 
3 - Overcoming Algorithmic Addiction 
4 - Curing your Corporate Voice Affliction
5 - Moving away from Template Dependence Disorder
6 - Breaking out of Risk Aversion Paralysis (that’s this post!)
7 - How to cure Engagement Entropy Rot

Thanks again for all your comments and feedback on the series so far. We’re nearly at the end, and we’re developing a workshop to help your teams make more effective B2B comms. If you’d like us to run a workshop for your team, get in touch - we’d love to help!

And we’d love to help you de-zombify your thought leadership content - whether that’s podcasts, video, editorial, or reports - so hit reply and tell me why you’re worried you’re becoming a B2B zombie.

Right then - on to this week’s sign of zombification - Risk Aversion Paralysis.

1 - What are the symptoms?

At the top of last week’s post about Template Dependence Disorder, I said that the dominant symptom of Zombie B2B marketing is playing it safe. We hear this a lot from clients - they often come to us because they start each year with a B2B comms plan that looks remarkably similar to the last year. The same reports, the same events, the same requests from the c-suite to get their opinions published in the FT. Do these symptoms sound familiar?

• Content that's been edited until it's meaningless

• No real fresh insights on industry issues

• Same safe topics covered by every competitor

• Case studies that hide all the interesting details

These symptoms are usually a sign that content and storytelling in your organisation has been reduced to a paint-by-numbers job. Rather than being led by new, exciting, stories that only you can tell, you have the same boxes to fill every year, and no opportunity to break out and try something new. You’re on a train, and it’s a one way express to Dullsville. But there is a way to jump the tracks!

2 - Take The Test

There’s a simple way to find out how risk averse your B2B comms have got in your organisation. Ask yourself one simple question - how often does a discussion about a new content idea end with “Let’s try it!” and how often does it end with “We don’t have the time/budget’?

3 - Here’s the cure

The thing about Risk Aversion Paralysis is that there is a similar form of zombiefication on the other side of the B2B equation - the buyers. We’ve mentioned before the excellent research from Jann Schwarz at the LinkedIn B2B Institute, which introduces a really important concept - Target Buyers vs Hidden Buyers. When we’re building personas for our ideal customers, we often focus on the Target Buyers, and imagine them as people who are actively looking for new products, features and services. But the reality of B2B buying groups is that they’re made up of Hidden Buyers as well - people often working in finance or legal who are not as close to the product, and are more risk averse. Schwarz’s research shows that Hidden Buyers are a lot more driven by avoiding risk than Target Buyers:

Your job as a marketer is to get noticed by both the Target and Hidden Buyers, and this means building trust and relationships with them way before they get together as a buying group to select a vendor. You might think that risk averse marketing will appeal to risk averse buyers, but the opposite is true. If your marketing looks the same as everyone else, and doesn’t change year to year, you won’t stand out, and the chances of you being known and trusted by both Target and Hidden Buyers is vanishingly small. You need to stand out before you can become a safe choice - it’s counter intuitive, but it’s true - Schwarz’s research shows that building brand with Hidden Buyers is even more important than Target Buyers:

So if you need to persuade risk averse Hidden Buyers, you need to get their attention first, which means you need to do something new to stand out. But when your B2B marketing plan for the year is already set out on rails, how can you do this?

4 - Our simple steps to success

Before starting Storythings, I spent over a decade working in media orgs like the BBC and Channel 4, commissioning new and innovative projects. There is one simple thing that every media company does that we very rarely see in B2B comms - THEY MAKE PILOTS!

Let’s go back to that test earlier in this post - how many times do you say “Let’s try it!’ versus "We don’t have the time/budget”? The way to break out of Risk Aversion Paralysis is to lower the risk levels, and that means making quick and cheap pilots of ideas before you commit larger budget and resources. Here’s a couple of ways to do it:

• Don’t publish everything - The weird thing about B2B marketing is that everything gets published. You issue a brief, commission an agency or internal team, they produce the content, and it goes out into the world. This is why B2B comms is more risk averse - there’s that feeling that everything you make has to be published, so it gets dulled down through layers and layers of sign-offs. Stop doing that! Test new ideas with pilots that you only share with a few people internally. You’ll then have the evidence you need to stop new ideas getting dulled down as they go through the sign-offs needed for publication.

• Make pilots as quickly and cheaply as possible - When you have a workshop for new ideas, how often do they get put on the back burner after the workshop because people think it’s too expensive to start making? The thing is, these days you can make pilots for a lot of formats just using your laptop or phone. At the end of our format workshops with our clients, we give them a challenge - how could you make a pilot in a day, or for less than $100? We’ve yet to see an idea that couldn’t be prototyped with those restrictions. And once you’ve realised it’s that easy, it’s almost embarrassing not to do it.

• Create a safe space to test pilots - The other fantastic thing about pilots is that you can put them in front of real humans, and get a reaction really quickly. But most companies don’t have a way of doing this - instead, we present new content ideas in the same way we’d present a major new change programme or IT investment - by making a powerpoint and showing it to a group of people in a room. This makes the decision to do something that could be fun, cheap and effective feel as heavy as a major investment. So break out of that room! Create a virtual pilot space in Slack or Teams where people can quickly share new ideas and prototypes, or have a regular event where you can test pilots in a very different environment. We do this at Storythings - we have a team prototype awayday, where we all have to make a new content format in one day. It’s a hell of a lot of fun!

• Make feedback fun - When I was at Channel 4 commissioning weird digital projects for teenagers, we’d always test new ideas with our target audiences. Pizza was nearly always involved, and no-one ever had to fill in a form or give us a Net Promoter Score. When you’re testing pilots, qualitative feedback is more useful than quantitative, so ask people what they liked about the format, what was memorable, and what they found most valuable. And definitely buy them pizza if you can.

4 - Go Deeper

GOV.UK - Making Prototypes - You know who’s REALLY good at prototyping? The Government Digital Service. Yes - the people who build essential services that help people with matters of life and death are much, much better at prototyping new ideas than your B2B comms department. The first line of this page explains their ethos: “You must make prototypes”. This is a really great intro into why they prototype, and some of the simple ways they do it, from paper sketches to mocking up working code.

5 Tips for Running a Successful Design Sprint - When I was at BBC, I used to run an annual prototyping project called Innovation Labs, where we would invite production companies to come away for 5 days to make and test new prototypes. I was heavily influenced by the design agency IDEO, who had been using 5 day design sprints for years as a way to quickly build and test new ideas. This simple set of tips from IDEO will give you inspiration to start your own prototyping session, whether you’re doing it in one hour over a lunch break, or (if you’re lucky enough) a 5 day offsite.

Just Enough Research by Erika Hall - I’ve probably recommended this book more than any other over the last decade. Erika Hall is one of the founders of digital agency Mule, and this book is a brilliantly practical guide to effective research and evaluation. In an age when its all too easy to fall back on endless surveys and quant research, Hall reminds us that actually to real people is always the best way to get feedback on a new idea. And the best form of research is not spending thousands on huge user surveys - it’s Just Enough Research to make the next decision.

That’s six out of the seven episodes in this series completed! I’ve loved getting feedback from you all, and seeing you sharing them on Linkedin. So if you’re finding the series useful, or would like to have a chat, please reply to this email to get in touch, or share the article on Linkedin tagging Storythings.

Matt