Why your B2B brand needs to tell it's story

In the world of B2B and, in particular, professional services where facts and figures dominate, most marketing campaigns lack the human warmth and emotion of a good story well told (think supermarket Christmas adverts). Are professional services companies missing a trick? After all, consumer marketers have been successfully using stories to make their brands memorable for years. Where are all the stories in the business sector and why are customers being left out in the cold?

Anyone who works in this space knows that B2B marketing looks different. Marketers tend to skew activity towards short-term, rational and tightly targeted campaigns and rely on senior partners to cultivate the long term relationships. In fact, research from the B2B Institute shows that long term creative campaigns targeting a broad audience are largely absent in B2B. As a consequence, marketers use less emotion, humour and storytelling to connect with their audience.

Why, what’s different?
It’s a question we’ve asked ourselves. The answer in many cases is that professional services brands just don’t think of their audience as consumers in the way business to consumer (B2C) brands do. We’re all humans, so why are brands in our space so reluctant to use the same tactics as B2C to engage and draw people in? After all, since 95% of the B2B audience isn’t buying right now, the brand has to stick.

Firstly, there’s a perception that decision-making in this market is more rational and logical than elsewhere and therefore brands should focus on product features. The ‘product delusion’ is well documented in the wider B2B market. It’s perpetuated furthermore in professional services by passionate internal brand advocates, whose enthusiasm for the brand’s offering, leads them to value product features over and above extolling benefits.

Secondly, there’s sometimes a sensitivity about B2C marketing tactics and execution being too frivolous or too edgy. Research by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute cites fear of brand rejection as a major concern for B2B brands in their marketing strategies. Brands worrying about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time hampers creativity and leads to a more serious problem: lack of awareness.

Plus, in professional services companies where, senior partners are highly influential, marketing can ironically be hampered by the brilliance of the people within the firm. It’s not uncommon to sense a fear, within the senior team, of over-simplifying what the firm does because partners feel that the brand is integral to their own credibility.

Lastly, in this space, firms often want to look to their competitors (rather than their consumers) to guide how to market their business. So they end up with more of the same. More logical fact-packed campaigns to generate marketing qualified leads, leaving emotion out of the communication and customers out in the cold because there’s no brand story to connect with.

Above the line, below the line, no line
Look at any professional services marketing plan and, odds are, it’ll be strong on below the line activity (targeted campaigns, email marketing, closed-shop webinars). Although bigger brands invest heavily in above the line (brand awareness, advertising, PR), storytelling is pretty much absent.

Is it time to re-draw the line? Or perhaps do away with the line altogether and think about the way we best connect with each other through stories? B2B brands including SAP, Shopify, Cisco, Slack, IBM, Oracle and Volvo can be seen to have moved away from functional, benefit-led marketing towards emotional connection, creativity and storytelling.

Why stories? Because whilst facts tell, it’s stories that sell. Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools marketers have. Stories are proven to be more effective than facts at generating positive sentiment, changing behaviour, and embedding thoughts in memory. We’re 12 times more likely to remember something when it has been wrapped in a story because stories engage our emotions.

So, even if your potential consumers are stressed out, overwhelmed and chronically busy, you can still connect with a story. That’s why we, at Storians, have brought together leading talent from the professional services, B2B and B2C worlds. A perfect marriage that combines the magic of storytelling with the logic of driving awareness, creating conversations and generating leads and sales.

Ever-changing perspectives of how and why consumers buy, mean telling our clients’ stories has never been more important. Have you begun to tell yours?