The goal of any successful B2B marketing campaign is not just to attract the attention of potential customers, but also to engage them in conversations around your product or service. And one powerful way of entering into these conversations is through storytelling.
Storytelling in this B2B context means telling stories about your product or service that other people are going to want to read and discuss. What makes these business stories different from conventional stories is that they are not scripted and often occur in real-time on the Internet.
Take, for example, an industry event that your company is planning to attend. The conventional way that you would connect with customers about this event is through sending out a press release listing the details of what, when and where you plan to be, and who’s attending from your company (especially if they’re giving a keynote speech). You might also include a few lines about the event in the email newsletter that you send out weekly.
Contrast that approach, though, to a storytelling approach enabled by a platform like Storify, which makes it possible to deliver breaking news or carry out live blogging coverage very quickly and easily. With Storify, you literally click and drop social media content into a story narrative that you are building as you go along.
You can see how this plays out in Mashable’s #BizChats on Storify, where they use a hashtag (#BizChats) as a way to find social media content to include in the ongoing story. One recent example was a live event that Mashable hosted in which they asked business leaders about ways that they could empower women within the tech industry. They sent out questions to the audience via Twitter and asked people to respond via Twitter, while using the hashtag #BizChats. Then, they put it all together – they made the tweets the “story” – and people following along in real-time could see the actual conversation taking place, and how different tweets were helping to shape the overall story.
That same type of Storify approach can be used for other events as well. Think about an upcoming product launch. That could be a great way to engage clients and customers around the product, and get them to share their ideas about it. Or, think about hosting a live Q&A with one of the thought leaders within your company. They would then have the ability to connect and engage your audience.
There are plenty of other content marketing platforms that make the ability to tell stories and share them with your audience easy and effective. For example, with Scoop.it, you can create and grow your presence online in minutes by publishing curated content that you find on the Web. Scoop.it is so convinced in the power of this approach to win over customers that it has published an e-book called “How to blog consistently in 30 minutes a day or less.”
Think about it – using the power of storytelling on the Web, you could be building your brand’s long-term presence on the Internet and telling stories that lead to customer conversions later down the road.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.