Marketing’s Dark Star: B2B Storytelling with Matt Potter
Is our industry facing a content crisis? In our 2024 B2B Content Marketing Summit, multi-award-winning journalist, author, marketer and more, Matt Potter lifted the lid on the current state of content marketing and the art of B2B storytelling.
Is the content in content marketing facing a creativity crisis?
In an industry driven by data, short-term performance, and vanity metrics, have we lost our sense of the importance of storytelling with not only engaging audiences but influencing their thoughts and feelings?
To shed some light on the matter, we’ve shared some of the key talking points from Matt Potter’s fascinating talk at our 2024 B2B Content Marketing Summit.
Matt Potter | Chief Content/Creative/Strategy Officer
As diverse a writer and content creator as they come, for 25 years, Matt Potter has helped turn stories people love into deep, durable and profitable connections.
From arms-dealer journalism in Afghanistan to Hollywood movies and bestselling nonfiction thrillers, Matt’s reputation proceeds home with a contribution to the B2B industry that includes working as a leading content, creative and strategy officer for global brands like WPP, Dentsu, Omnicom and more.
With a diverse career and creative background that transcends sectors, it’s the power of stories which continues to fascinate Matt, and thankfully, it’s this fascination and passion that’s led him to be one of our guest speakers at the B2B Content Marketing Summit.
Marketing’s Dark Star: How Stories Bend Brains to Change Minds
“What we need to do is make brands into the fascinating thing. B2B is uniquely placed for this.”
Content can quickly become a slippery slope when we try to define it. While we live in a heavily saturated marketing world where anyone can identify an ad or performance marketing, when storytelling becomes part of the discussion, things go from clear to abstract.
Because, unlike performance marketing, how do we measure storytelling?
When banking on human, emotional connections, can we prove to our clients/directors that storytelling is the best strategy?
For example, how does it relate to cost-per-acquisition alongside lifetime value?
As we learned from Rupert Bedell in his discussion, these are the metrics our clients or directors will demand from our campaigns.
So, B2B storytelling finds itself in a sticky situation, where content creators are battling metrics, formats, and “dwindling attention spans” to tell a story that might bend someone’s brain and change their mind.
B2B Storytelling
““Out in the world of humans, the stories are the story. The platform formats are not important. They are clutter.””
In our data-driven industry, businesses have become so laser-focused on how the content they produce affects the bottom line that the incentive is now more about the format and less about the function.
Whether it’s finding the best SEO keywords or riding on the latest social media trends, the focus remains on the success we can measure, not on the unknown potential of original content that can inspire and move people.
Therefore, the function of engaging audiences has become a formula. A science. A proven methodology.
Ditch creativity and interrupt your consumer at all costs appears to be the current consensus, and if we can incorporate AI to do the work instead, then all the better, right?
However, the obsession with the format and the facts can force us to overlook what remains the most powerful form of content across all mediums.
Storytelling.
Stories are powerful because they stick in the memory and rouse emotions.
As American scientist Jennifer Aaker states, “Stories are remembered up to 22 times more than facts alone.”
The Measurement Trap
“People are measuring the wrong things. They’re measuring clicks on the one side and brand outcomes on the other.”
Matt Potter believes brands need storytellers to help them evolve. Reversing a culture in the industry from interrupting what people are interested in, to being what they’re interested in.
How do we do this?
Firstly, with an external focus back to the audience, away from our internal understanding of marketing formulas and formats. He found through an experiment comparing marketing professionals and the public when asking about their experience of the content they showed.
On the one side, the marketers spoke in technical terms about formats and platforms. Things like "Short-form videos" and "50-word JPGs".
On the other hand, the public communicated with emotional references to the content. They said, “It was heartbreaking”, “It stopped me in my tracks”, or “It enlightened me”.
The public spoke about emotional moments. These were things that changed their minds and had nothing to do with platforms and formats.
So, it’s no wonder that ads with emotional content performed nearly twice as well (31% vs. 16%) compared to those with rational content.
However, emotional connection doesn’t show up in our analytics. We can’t measure the impact it makes, and that’s the issue with storytelling in B2B because we struggle to prove its worth in terms of data and facts.
A model for measuring the impact of storytelling in B2B doesn’t yet exist or is much more complicated to integrate. However, the outcomes of good storytelling are real and much more impactful than we know.
Stop Interrupting. Start interesting.
“B2B consumers are not consumers. They’re humans. Brands talk to consumers about their thing. Consumers want the brand to talk to them about all the parts of their lives.”
Matt Potter believes one way B2B brand storytelling can reengage with audiences and prove its value to clients and directors is through thought leadership.
In his research, he detailed:
50% of senior ODMs say that a company’s thought leadership directly leads to new business.
63% of ODMs regard thought leadership as “one of the best ways to get a sense of the type and calibre of thinking an organisation is likely to deliver.”
82% of ODMs agree that thought leadership increases trust in an organisation.
79% of CXOs want thought leadership to identify new trends or issues.
With thought leadership to support our storytelling, this is one of the ways we can begin to tackle the “content crisis” currently dominating the B2B content marketing landscape.
Improve Your B2B Storytelling With the CMA
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