'Need to know' storytelling tips for content and social media marketers

Next week and the week after I'm hosting two separate workshops for B2B marketers to help them get more from existing social media and content marketing strategies.

If you join me for the morning (UK time) on Tuesday 18th you'll be a part of the Smarter Social Storytelling workshop. The following Tuesday, the morning of the 25th, is my Elite Content Marketing course.

Both workshops are aimed at B2B marketing manager level execs and above. The content will be valuable right up to the level of directors who might be under pressure to drive more impact from their wider team or function.

Some of the more timeless lessons will be adapted from the work I did to write 'Boring2Brave', the 2021 bestselling book on B2B marketing.

Other topics will be fresh up to date such as the role of AI in our marketing and content creation.

Both courses cost ￡350 + VAT per person. There are discount codes available for those currently looking for work - PM me on Linkedin if this is you.

Course details available after filling out the short form in the link below.

Here are a few topics we'll cover together in the workshops and notes on why they matter to different personas.

FOR SOCIAL MEDIA AND CONTENT MARKETERS

Do you know your story? Or are you spending precious marketing budget making yourself invisible to your prospects?

Many B2B companies - especially startups - resent having to spend large budgets on marketing because it "never seems to work for them".?

There’s a good reason for this lack of success. B2B companies often work super hard but not very intelligently on marketing and end up spending all their money on being quietly invisible. Their marketing budget is all geared towards generating and progressing individual leads and closing deals.?

You can count on one hand the enterprise technology startups that have spent their budget establishing a unique positioning, building a brand and making it famous through the brilliant telling of big stories. (A clue: they’re the very successful ones we’ve all heard of.)

Without those elements: the brand, the positioning, the stories and the fame those stories build, you’re not really doing marketing. What you’re doing is 'channels'.

The website, the investment into SEO and paid search; the exhibition stall; the webinar; the e-book series; the paid social strategy; the blog and the PR. These are all just channels.

The far too well-trodden path into marketing for most B2B SMEs (and many larger, more mature organisations are also guilty of this) is to completely ignore the crucial ‘what’s our story and what do we become known for’ stage of building a marketing strategy and jump straight into tactics.

That way, your content - once you've 'distributed' it onto the vast mountainside of bland collateral out there on the internet, holds almost zero value.

What we'll cover on the course: I'll show you how establish the unique story you should be telling; if you're already there with a powerful story that's agreed and approved by the business, I'll show you frameworks to help reinforce and energise that story with dynamic new thinking.

FOR MARKETING TEAMS

What does any of this have to do with 'bravery'?

Matthew Robinson , vice president for the APAC region at digital experience analytics leader Contentsquare, has built his reputation on brave ideas, energy and creativity.

His pet hate, he shares, is seeing brilliant ideas ‘clipped, trimmed and stifled’ until they’ve lost everything that made them so potent and exciting in the first place.?

"It happens constantly in B2B," Robinson says. "You pitch an idea which knocks everyone’s socks off but then the business starts ‘spreadsheeting’ it. Launch is put on hold, to be scheduled only after you’ve written the copy for every communication: every social post, every blog, every notification – that you plan to release over the three-month campaign. Every word requires sign-off along with the ‘A’ and ‘B’ test version for every headline and email subject header.

"Sometimes mapping out every detail of a big idea for multiple internal presentations and committee scrutiny, before it’s even out in the world, kills the idea before it’s born.

Robinson says he firmly believes in planning for quality and originality. "But with that said, there’s also something to be said for ‘let’s get this out the door – let’s launch it and respond to the reaction we receive’. Yes, there will be mistakes and necessary tweaks but for me, that’s preferable to the particular sort of ‘innovation death march’ that we’re so good at in B2B.

In Robinson’s view, what we do to prune and shear big ideas in B2B is less about safety and more about fear.?

"I wouldn’t be surprised if more good ideas get stifled in B2B than in any other industry or sector."

"I wouldn't be surprised if more good ideas get stifled in B2B than in any other industry or sector."

What we'll cover on the course: I'll present you four 'bold B2B marketing' case studies for us to discuss and will draw a straight line between their bravery and their commercial success.

FOR DIRECTORS AND HEADS OF MARKETING

The marketing metrics you need to keep to yourself

It can be exhausting being the marketer in management and leadership meetings, reporting back on progress in metrics that mean little to anyone else in the room.

Some digital marketing metrics are important to share with colleagues from other functions to illustrate growth; other metrics however shouldn’t be talked about anywhere else than in marketing team meetings. Sure, this week’s uplift in engagement metrics or website visitors are things to celebrate internally among the team – they show you’re doing some of the right things.

But those of us who stuff our reports with these metrics for management team meetings are often the same ones wondering why our work in social or content marketing lacks internal respect and engagement.?

To elevate our role and profile within our businesses we need to take more responsibility as marketers to gather the right data, stories and evidence required to bring our colleagues from other functions to our door wanting more of our 'product' and thinking. Whatever level of seniority we hold, it’s our responsibility to teach, not to blindly obey.?

What we'll cover on the course: we'll discuss how some internal 'marketing briefs' may need to be (skilfully and tactfully) de-prioritised or renegotiated to ensure we're replacing less meaningful day-to-day work with outputs that really matter. You'll leave the course with a personalised guide and checklist to be sure you're optimising your skills and talent to increase the value of your every working day.

FOR ANYONE LOOKING TO ADD MORE CREATIVITY TO THEIR WORK

The tyranny of ‘best practice’

One of my favourite first-page introductions of any business book out there is that in Zero to One by Peter Thiel. ‘Today’s best practices lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried,’ Thiel writes. The Paypal co-founder states that the single most powerful pattern he’s tracked in ‘successful’ people is that they find value in unexpected places by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.?

The problem with best practice is it stops you having to think. It prevents you from looking a bit harder and considering all the angles of a problem or opportunity.?

Of course, we should look to create templates for certain processes. That's a key part of how we scale. The people that need to look for templates and repeatable, scalable processes, though, are operations directors. That’s their job.?

It’s not the job of the marketer. What marketers should look to scale is a culture of freedom, innovation, ‘test and learn’. We should be gently pushing back at 'last year's' templates wherever possible in favour of creative, original or innovative thinking that stands to get us an advantage if only because nobody else could possibly have imagined our solution.

"An under-discussed problem in marketing is that nearly half of brands are today mistaken for their competitors. In other words, most marketing today triggers buyers to purchase a competitive brand, not the brand doing the marketing."

Jon Lombardo, Global Lead, The B2B Institute

In his book, Hegarty on Advertising: Turning Intelligence into Magic, BBH founder and creative director John Hegarty writes: ‘The only space worth buying is the space between someone’s ears. How you get your idea there is irrelevant. Technology is only a delivery system.’

The technology that helps us all execute in our jobs as marketers is, without a doubt, awesomely powerful and developing all the time. But it’s also accessible to everyone, cheap and pervasive. If everybody has access to the same technologies, then all we have to distinguish us as sellers of B2B technology is the quality of our thinking.?

What we'll cover on the course: How to widen our diet of inputs and stimuli and alter our perspectives on 'permission' around the stories we tell, in order to upgrade the quality of our thinking.