The 7 stages of effective B2B storytelling

B2B decision-makers may be over-targeted and elusive, but, as 7C3’s Business and Technology Editor Kenny MacIver has witnessed first-hand, they are always drawn to compelling stories about business and people.

Storytelling – with its narrative journey and emotional pull – is an indispensable component of every successful business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy – just as it is in consumer marketing. Like all classic tales, B2B stories take the audience on a journey of challenges and conflicts; aspirations, goals and heroes; resolutions and triumphs.

To industry outsiders, many business contexts and the groups working within them might seem decidedly arcane, making them unfertile ground for such narratives. The targeted decision-makers for a particular story might be senior figures in accounts, tech, logistics, security or any number of other areas. But the prize can be large: such CXOs will often control budgets in the millions, if not hundreds of thousands of millions.

Depending on their industry, these executives might be potential customers for surety bonds, indirect tax services, airport security systems, retail IT, cash processing centres, pulp paper machinery or car service management systems. These are just some of the B2B industries we are working closely with at 7C3 to help create the compelling stories they need, whether that’s via videos, long-form thought-leadership articles or social campaigns.

Whatever the sector, we know there is a fundamental structure for a B2B story that invariably gets the audience’s attention. Extended engagement and creative and content expertise can get under the skin of the audience by delivering different aspects of the narrative in a variety of formats.

There are seven stages for this storytelling part of content creation:

1.    Customer challenge: B2B storytelling starts with the business problem that the end-customer is trying to solve. The aim is to portray ‘the conflict’ that the business is wrestling with in an engaging and dramatic way. Take an example of a story we have worked on for a major B2B insurance company in recent months that is designed to support the introduction of a new product line. The article focuses on the major challenges of a finance team at a well-known European DIY chain and on the results of the company’s early adoption of the insurance client’s new product. The big challenge that the DIY chain is seeking to address? Tracking the solvency levels of its 2,500+ suppliers – a topic that is made all the more relevant by today’s turbulent economic climate.

2.    Pain points: Any B2B story needs to express why solving that problem is so crucial: the day-to-day pain caused by the challenge and the impact on the overall business performance. With our insurance client, the DIY customer (by not having full transparency into the credit statuses of its suppliers) was exposed to supply chain risk and lost revenue when a key supplier went bust, as well as reputational damage when gaps appeared on its retail shelves.

3.    Journey: All B2B stories should take the reader on a journey of how the customer explores and decides on the solution. But to be convincing, this has to be done subtly and without disparaging alternative solutions, which is why content creation expertise is key.

4.    Resolution: The journey should always point to a concrete resolution of the business challenge. In the case of our client’s DIY customer, that came in the form of a new data visualisation system that presents the finance team with an accurate, up-to-date grade on any supplier’s creditworthiness. It is a service the DIY chain has plugged into its risk management processes to help it flag when a supplier is in trouble or when assessing the solvency of new suppliers.

5.    Heroes: Overcoming the challenge produces heroes that can be a focal point for the story. On the surface, the hero in the example is our insurance company client, as the innovator behind the solution to the business challenge. But the story portrays the real heroes as the DIY company’s finance leaders who made the buying decision and solved the business’s problem. Often that is how they see it too and it’s the reason they will have agreed to help tell the story. Involving them in the narrative also raises individual and team profiles within their own organisation and among their industry peers, and maybe even supports future career progression. In that sense, this is as much an argument for B2B storytelling as B2P (business-to-person) storytelling – a topic we will explore further in the future (so watch this space).

6.    Paybacks: The aim is to show that there are measurable business benefits from engaging with the product and the brand at the centre of the story. With our insurance client, the story shows the product adoption has substantially reduced costs associated with tracking the credit statuses of its suppliers, helped to de-risk the supply chain, and reduced the potential for bad debt. When such cases can be quantified with hard numbers, all the better.

7.    Looking forward: The B2B story could finish there. But it helps to fire the reader’s imagination further by looking to the future. Exploring what comes next in the relationship between the customer and the solution provider, pointing to an evolving partnership rather than a one-off commercial transaction.

Above all, though, a B2B story needs to have emotional resonance, so it prompts an audience of other potential customers to contemplate how they could have that positive experience as well. If you’re struggling to tell your B2B story and want ideas, support and content creation to prompt that story, then do get in touch.

B2B engagement is always rooted in a value exchange. But knowing how to create that value for a hard-to-reach audience takes expertise and insight into their objectives and challenges. Here at 7C3, we work with companies in all kinds of sectors – tech, banking, insurance, security, automotive, management consultancy, and many more – to build engagement with their key audiences and, ultimately, support their business goals. If we can do it for them, we can do it for you. Please reach out if you’d like to know more: hello@seven.co.uk.