There's a great article over at Marketing Profs, Marketing via Story: The Selling Power of Narrative in a Conceptual Age.
"As marketers, we need to present universal truths with which our customers can more easily identify. Sharing the stories of our customers, employees, or related communities (people who benefit from our brand's philanthropy, for example) is how consumers discover those Truths with a capital 'T.'"
The basic gist of the article is that having a list of features and benefits is fine, but the real connection that people will make to your products is by experiencing them vicariously through stories. Stories bring your products to life. They also touch people in a way that messaging does not.
The article lists these five ways that stories can make a difference:
- Context: Story gives facts context and delivers the whole package with emotional impact (every marketer's dream).
- Common ground: Stories are slices of life that can subtly reflect bits and pieces of common ground between consumer and brand.
- Brand intersections: In this more holistically thinking world, a consumer's buying path may be complex. Stories give you a way to show consumers that there are more places than they may have imagined where their lives and your brand intersect.
- Increased relevance: By paying more attention to the stories surrounding your brand and taking place in the daily lives of your customers, your marketing is naturally more prone to relevance.
- Future chapters: Start gathering and telling stories now and you will have those initial narrative threads to which you can always refer for continuity in messaging.
For B2B organizations, storytelling is a great way to present your case studies. In fact, if your case studies focus only on the problem/solution, without any context, then they aren't really helpful. How many times have you read a case study only to scratch your head and think, "Yeah, but what did they get out of it?" or "How did they really do that?"
The trick here is to humanize what can often be dry and factual reports/analysis from a B2B perspective and add in the emotion. People buy based on emotion. Just because they're making a purchase for their organization doesn't mean emotions don't come into play. At least subconsciously.
There's another short post worth reading over on Sam Decker's blog, 3 Emotions Drive Execs to Action, where he talks about the properties of Fear, Excitement and Pride. Worth a read.