Create an E-Marketing Story Campaign

Have you tackled the concept of “story” for nurturing marketing campaigns yet? The idea of “content” is a given, but when the context is changed to “story,” marketers panic. This may be due to the product-focused mindset many companies have used in the past. But, it’s also due to the implied creativity and un-businesslike notion that people have about stories. When did your mom ever tell you the story of IBM before you went to sleep as a kid?

What’s important is the perspective of your marketing content. If you don't stop talking about features and move to a higher degree of embraceable relevance, you're communications are just more meaningless noise. What counts is context. Stories help people internalize things. It's the way your brain works. Marketing is not about getting people to memorize facts and features so they can recount them on a quiz.

Stories help people gain familiarity with the thought process around why and how they choose to change will improve their situation. They consider and evaluate options for how to achieve a strategic goal, forward their career, get another department off their back, increase revenues, decrease costs, re-align staff, increase their contribution to company achievements, etc. The path a buyer’s mind goes through during the buying process gives marketers a lot to think about.

Stories help people generate discussions that forward the initiative. Take a story and a features list and tell me which one helps you more easily talk to your boss or the others in your consensus group about why change should happen. Aside from that, which one would you take the time to consider? A features list you scan. A story that matches your perspective is more compelling. You willingly spend time with it.

Stories generate empathy. Empathy inspires trust. Trust is the emotion of business and helps build active relationships.

A story campaign is a series of connected communications that, taken together, give your buyer the insights they need to evaluate options, get comfortable with the specifics of change and make the choice to add your company to their trusted advisor roster. Each communication gives buyers something valuable. Each one builds off the last and pushes forward a bit toward the next along the same lines as a buyer progresses through their purchasing journey.

Below are some questions to designed to help you align the context of your content to drive buyer engagement when you set out to build a serial story campaign:

• What's your customer/prospect's situation today?
• Where can you help them to be in the future? (Help them visualize the project outcome's impact)
• Where do they want to be? And why? (Think individual as well as company)

You've got to connect to your buyer’s current situation, before you can engage them. If you have "me too" experience, this is a good time to use it. Showing buyers your company understands what they're dealing with now invites engagement. People want to connect with people who can empathize with them.

It's also important to realize that where you think buyers want to go and where they actually want to go are often two different things. The same is true with why they want to get there. Marketing needs to be on the same page. In order to make this connection, marketing needs to know a few things about who they’re talking to.

• How big a project is it to get the buyer to the outcome they want? Is iteration with incremental milestones an option?
• Why hasn't the buyer solved this problem to date?
• What's the status quo the buyer is encountering in moving forward?
• Who else has to be persuaded to get the trigger pulled on the project.

Often, people don't even try when they perceive the project to be overwhelming. There's too much risk if they choose incorrectly. Too much exposure—both personally and professionally. In addition, a complex sale has a lot of angles. The journey is not a straight line. If it was, taking it on would be a no-brainer.

• How will marketing help buyers progress more easily through the journey?
• Is the way you communicate helping them envision the future your products can help them achieve?

What happens with complex projects is that your prospects can only see so far before the road curves. It's what's around that corner that's scary. So break the story into chunks that get them to the corner, then around the bend, through the next straight-away. You get the idea.

• What other options do they have?
• Why is choosing your option better, easier and more strategic?

Chances are that your company isn't the only one selling a solution your prospects could choose. How compelling your story is and the emotional pull you add by creating a conversational interaction with that story will help your offering stand out.

Capitalize on your uniqueness. What's your expertise? No, this is not about the product. It's what your company brings to the project that is not otherwise available to the buyer. A value they won't receive if they choose another option.

• What evidence do you have to back you up? (Note: customer case stories, quotes, analyst reports)

It goes without saying that the evidence is also based on engaging stories, right? Not dry engineering verbiage or product-focused communications.

• How do they take that first step? And after that?

If you've told your story well, buyers will propel the story to the end for you because staying with the status quo is now ridiculous and more risky than taking their next step with your company. Delivering what you promise will take care of what's next. Keep taking them around that next curve.

****

B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee helps companies significantly increase their marketing momentum by generating more and better leads for their sales organizations. She helps them capture the attention of web site visitors, and strengthen engagement with high value content till they are "sales ready." Visit the Marketing Interactions website: www.marketinginteractions.com.