storytelling

How This Marketing Program Cleaned Up: A Case Study in B2B Storytelling

A version of this story appeared in Total Annarchy, my fortnightly newsletter that helps you be a better writer, storyteller, marketer. Get it in your inbox; you’ll love it. * * * Pop quiz time: You run Marketing at a B2B company that sells industrial floor-cleaning equipment. You want to amp up awareness and demand with your audience of commercial and municipal facilities managers. But it’s… well, industrial, floor, and cleaning. What would you do as a tactic in your 2020 content strategy? Pick one: Point a camera at your CEO in a regular fireside chat to demonstrate how the brand is there for you in these trying times Hire an Instagram influencer and their family to literally eat off a scrubbed, sparkling, Covid-free floor Launch an old-school, year-long essay contest to find stories about janitors If you’re Tennant Company… you go all-in on #3. And I love it. It speaks

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Why We Need Smaller Stories in Content Marketing

 Image source: Gratisography I talk a lot about thinking BIGGER in your marketing: sharing a bigger story to put your company in the larger context of what people care about. But today, I’m focusing not on big… but on small. I’m focusing on the need to tell the smallest story possible. Small stories are specific. Small stories are human-scale. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, spoke at Columbia University about the need to tell important stories—about refugees and climate change, to name but two—even if most of us are sick and tired of hearing about them. We’re sick of them, Ira told the Columbia Journalism School graduating class of 2018, because such stories have “the two key ingredients of any story you don’t want to hear anything else about: (1) it’s depressing and… (2) YOU ALREADY KNOW THE STORY.” Refugees: 60 million displaced people. The largest refugee crisis since

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Content Marketing Grows Up: My 2016 Prediction

Content Marketing wakes up one morning in a place it doesn’t recognize, and tries to piece together what happened last night… and all the previous nights, too. (Because, if it’s being honest, last night wasn’t an occasional bender—it had become a lifestyle.) It takes a hard look at itself and wonders with a measure of regret: “How did I end up here?” Everyone said Content Marketing had such potential. Everyone said it was the hope for the future that would save marketing from itself. Everyone said Content was the very thing that would align storytellers, artists, writers, technologists, and analysts. Everyone said they’d all work together to create marketing that doesn’t feel like marketing. The Content Marketing champions toiling and sweating in marketing departments worldwide stuck out their necks for Content Marketing, too. They believed in it, and they convinced their bosses and clients to believe, too. Everyone said they’d

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Lessons from Skype: Your Story Is about People (Not Your Technology)

Whether you sell technology or toasters, your marketing should always be about people. In other words, your customers should be at the heart of your content, not your products. Your product might be as revolutionary as an escalator to the moon, but your story isn’t about that: It’s not about what you do or what you sell, it’s what you do for others. How does your product help people? How does it shoulder their burdens? How does it ease their pain? How does your product live in the world? That’s a subtle shift. But focusing on how your business connects with people makes a huge difference in your content. It makes the customer—not your product—the hero of your story. In the business-to-business space, especially, it also gives puts flesh and blood on the dry bones of a “solution.” That’s why I really like this new video from Skype, which tells

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