We’ve put brand building on the back burner

Vincent Rousselet, Senior Associate, Momentum ITSMA, answers the question of how to refocus on brand-building after your attention has been averted for a while. With his response, Vincent addresses a very real problem of the pandemic: the focus on crisis management means B2B marketers have neglected the work of building the brand.

His recommendation is to remember the basics of storytelling and in this three-minute video, he walks through the steps you can take to inject storytelling into your communication, your content, and your brand building.

What strong storytelling does, effectively, is three things:

• It catches the attention of your audience, whether customers, prospects, partners, or employees
• It captivates the audience and brings them into your story
• It convinces the audience to act or to do something different, as a result of the story you’ve told

A good story follows a timeline of a beginning, middle, and end, and has an element of tension, but often in B2B marketing we forget to bring in that dimension. That’s a mistake! The tension is what fascinates the audience and keeps them engaged.

A story also has peaks and troughs: the opening scene, a crisis or complications, the climax, and the dénouement, where some equilibrium has been restored.

In B2B marketing, storytelling is typically used in advertising, or blogs, but why stop there? Storytelling can be very effective when it’s injected right at the heart of your brand building.