15 B2B Resources For Better Storytelling

Telling a story is an essential part of building your brand for both B2C and B2B companies. Stories are commonly used in B2C marketing, but even in B2B campaigns, stories can help you get the attention of someone who is making a business decision.

As a result, a B2B company needs a good story just as much as a B2C company. The following 15 resources will help you craft a compelling story that helps draw new customers to your brand:

Goal Setting

Before you can tell your story, you first need to know why you’re sharing it. What response are you hoping to get? How will sharing your story help you meet your business goals?

A service like Brainrider can help you answer those questions with their free template for defining and prioritizing success. Once you've determined what your specific digital marketing goals are, Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking your progress.

Content Planning and Sharing

Now that you know what you want to achieve, it’s time to plan how you’ll tell your story and how you’ll create the content that will connect with your potential customers.

Callidus Cloud offers plenty of free resources on creating a content calendar and filling it with engaging content. You can also try Content Marketer, a great tool that helps you promote your content and increase traffic.

Content Creation

Once you have your strategy written out, your next step is - unsurprisingly - to actually create the content.

Contently is a great starting point, offering tools to help you create your brand story quickly and easily. Contently also has experts available to write your content for you, should you decide that outsourcing is necessary to meet your campaign objectives.

In addition, check out Scoop.it, which will aggregate existing content based on your industry or niche, giving you an excellent base for fast content creation.

Social Media

B2B social media strategies tend to differ from B2C, as B2B sales funnels are generally longer and require deeper layers of social interaction to move prospects through each buying stage.

Social storytelling can play a key role in creating these deeper relationships. A tool like Pardot from Salesforce will help you post and track your social storytelling efforts effectively. With Pardot you can post cross-platform to different social sites at once, schedule posts in advance, and track the response you get and the number of social contacts who go on to become buyers.

Percolate is another similarly helpful social tool that larger companies may want to take advantage of.

Video and Visual Storytelling

Videos are well established as an advertising medium and storytelling tool, but many B2B marketers feel they lack the expertise needed to create great videos.

Vidyard Studio makes the process easy, allowing you to easily build custom videos and track engagement. For another take on visual storytelling, check out LookBookHQ, which helps you assemble content in a tile format with included analytics.

Case Studies

Another important way to tell your brand story is through the use of case studies. Research has shown that case studies are the most influential type of content in both the awareness stage and the evaluation stage of B2B sales. B2B Marketing has a Free Case Study Outline you can use.

Then, take a look at LinkedIn Publisher, which is a great way to spread awareness about your case studies (in addition to posting them to your website and sharing over social media).

Analytics and Evaluation

Once you start creating and sharing your story in various formats, you need to track the results you've achieved and make sure you’re prompting the desired actions from your readers.

Optimizely is a useful tool you can use to A/B split test your different content pieces, while Track Maven allows you to compare your results to those of your competitors to see how you measure up.

Finally, SharedCount is an excellent tool that tracks social shares of your content, helping you to determine where your campaigns need work and how to better allocate your marketing resources in the future.

Final Words

It’s a common misconception that storytelling is too “touchy-feely” for B2B companies, but telling your brand story is just as important in the world of B2B as it is to B2C retailers.

Using these 15 tools will help you to set goals, design and tell your story, spread your message across the web, and track your results. There’s truly never been a better time to be a B2B storyteller.

How do you share your B2B brand story? Share your experiences and suggestions in the comments below!