What Makes A Successful B2B Story?
Four guidelines for impactful editorial storytelling
Over 25 years, between ghostwriting articles for major business publications and creating content campaigns for global brands, I’ve learned a few things about storytelling for a business-to-business (B2B) audience.
When determining potential topics — whether for a white paper, blog series or editorial infographic — most communications professionals have four main considerations.
Success comes from finding the story that holds up across all four:
- Audience need
- Newsworthiness
- Business priority
- Marketing strategy
Let’s look closer at each.
Audience need
B2B content professionals can spend a great deal of time developing audience personas. If you already have them, use them. If not, simply make sure you know the answers to these questions:
- Who is my audience? (type of business, roles at that business, motivations)
- Where are they in their decision-making process by the time they read this? (e.g. awareness, consideration, purchase)
- To make that decision, what do they need to know that they don’t already know?
- What might be their objections to what I want to communicate, and how can I anticipate and proactively overcome those?
Newsworthiness
Even though today’s B2B marketers can “pay-to-play,” getting any content in front of the right audience for a fee to the publishing partner, it’s always beneficial to create content that’s both interesting and urgent for your audience.
In journalism school, we learned to look for timeliness and proximity when determining newsworthiness. In my marketing work, I simply ask myself: What are the topics that matter most and that matter now? From there, I look for an interesting angle to the story that will make the reader feel more like they’re eating dessert than eating their vegetables.
Business Priority
If you’re a B2B communicator, always align to your business’ goals. Understand the reason your business is paying you to create compelling stories. Is it to influence potential investors? Convince partners to work with you? Overcome common objections? Think about where the business priorities map to your audience need and newsworthiness.
Marketing Strategy
While mapping your topic to principles of Audience Need, Newsworthiness and Business Priority, also be sure you’re clear on what outcome you want to achieve with your storytelling and how you’ll measure success.
For sponsored (pay-to-play) content, your publishing partner should include a plan to promote your story and offer benchmarks for measuring reach and engagement. You should still include a call to action, giving your audience direction to the logical next step on your business’ website.
For content published on owned channels like your website and blog, be sure you know exactly what you’re aiming for and how to measure it. Is your objective new sales leads? If so, be sure you’ve got the content gated with a lead form. Or, if you’re aiming to get the story in as many minds as possible without concern about leads, forget the form fill and simply measure traffic and social engagement.
Finding an Impactful Story
Now that you know the main considerations for an impactful story, you can brainstorm content topics that hit that sweet spot across all four.
If you’re a marketer building a creative brief, giving your writer direction in these four areas is a great place to start.
If you’re a seasoned B2B writer, you’ll instinctively know how to integrate these into a compelling story… and you’ll also know when to ditch part of this (or any other formula) to create something innovative.
