Striving for better B2B storytelling

One of the best pieces of advice I received from a Director when I started my career was to always push for more creative storytelling – tying your clients into your own interests, digging into the persona and knowledge of your spokespeople, and always being on top of the news agenda.

So when I crossed paths with a spokesperson who was a subject matter expert on VR, I naturally made it my mission to land something around ABBAtars – the precursor to ABBA Voyage being officially launched. A spokesperson download call, pitch and byline draft later – and cue an op-ed in Huff Post (yes – this does show my age).

Since then, the media landscape has continued to shrink. This makes securing stories harder, but it also challenges us to raise the bar for storytelling even higher. Push for more creativity. For punchier opinions. And for more strategic narratives.

But what exactly does that mean? Here are some of the ways that we’re striving for better storytelling for our clients at The Flywheelers:

• Educating on the value of storytelling: Not all spokespeople will naturally offer their opinions or see the value in doing so. Our job as comms people is to help our clients establish their opinions. To offer views that aren’t tired or full of cliches and product messaging, and that provide timely, relevant and authentic insights. We have done this by hosting workshops to educate on the media landscape and what makes a good story.

• Thoughtful storytelling, not jumping on the bandwagon: We of course keep a pulse on the news agenda to creatively and authentically fit our clients into the narrative, such as commenting on The Carer’s Leave Act for Curam, and issuing a comment on the BBC data breach for Trend Micro. But we also need to know when it is and when it isn’t appropriate to do so, ensuring we’re not ambulance chasing or just shoehorning our clients into a fad. Note, Simon English’s mailer “We need to talk about Taylor Swift”.

• Making storytelling work not just for PR but sales and marketing: Though we sit at the top of the funnel, storytelling doesn’t just start and stop with awareness. Stories that speak to customer pain points and strategically align to the product offering are as valuable for sales and marketing as for PR. This was our approach for the AeroCloud: Getting on the Runway to Growth integrated campaign. We developed a narrative showed the direct impact of legacy technology and processes on airports’ growth potential, highlighting how the capabilities of AeroCloud’s product suite could help them overcome operational hurdles can act as barriers to revenue growth. Combining third-party data and customer stories, the campaign not only boosted brand awareness for AeroCloud, but generated leads AeroCloud’s sales team with North American and European airports.

• Holding regular PoVs: Every quarter or six months, we host Point of View sessions to pick the brains of our spokespeople – asking questions about their area of expertise, what interests them about it and throwing in ‘spicy’ questions that challenge them to think ‘outside of the box’. This keeps our storytelling fresh and ensures that we’re not relying too much on ‘evergreen content’ that is often overlooked by journalists because they don’t offer anything ‘new’ or ‘topical’ for their readers.

• Offering unique insights that no other brand can: With a smaller media pool and brands battling for air time, the success rate of storytelling can be elevated by unique insights. One way we do this is to work with our clients’ available data to create unique angles. For example, we used WeArisma’s platform data to land commentary on the ‘tennis core’ fashion trend in Vogue Business. Spotting the trend was gaining popularity around Wimbledon, we pulled and analysed the data on the WeArisma platform to show which brands were engaging with tennis core. (Find more details on data storytelling here).

 This is not an exhaustive list of how we are striving for better storytelling. But, it hopefully gives you a glimpse of how we pursue strategic and creative narratives.