Words: Caroline Petvin – Content Director
Category(s): Branding, Content, Positioning
Date: 11th February 2025
There’s a certain whimsy attached to the idea of storytelling. A magic associated with childhood adventures and mythical creatures. A feeling that stories are somehow detached from the mundane realities of everyday existence.
But the truth is we all use storytelling all the time, both in our personal lives and in the workplace. Working in B2B marketing, I’ve already flexed my storytelling muscles twice this morning (our weekly team meeting and a new project briefing, in case you were wondering) and I haven’t even had my 10am coffee yet.
B2B storytelling, however, isn’t simply telling stories in a business context. For B2B brands that know how to use it, it’s a powerful skill that confers a competitive advantage.
What is B2B storytelling?
Every B2B business has a story to tell – at Beneath we call it your brand narrative. It’s not necessarily your founding story, or the thinking behind your brand values, although these can be influencing factors. It’s a story about the reason your business exists – the distinct value it brings to a particular kind of customer with a specific need. Or, as Jane Dotsenko of Procore Technologies recently put it, “the story of a problem that someone can’t solve without your skillset.”
B2B brand storytelling is about how you communicate your brand story to the people who need to hear it. How you make it the foundation of your marketing strategy and use it to inform all communications. The target audience for your story will usually be the customers buying your products or services – the people that have the specific need. But there are many other people that may need to hear your story (or tailored versions of it), from investors to employees.
The importance of B2B storytelling
To understand the importance of B2B storytelling, we only need to ignore the “2B” and think about the importance of business storytelling more widely.
The use of a compelling story to reach people on an emotional level and make a lasting impression is now standard practice for B2C brands. This was evident during the recent festive period – from AirBnB’s entertaining ‘Santastrohpe’ ad, in which a frustrated Santa reinforces the brand’s narrative that an AirBnB is better than a hotel, to O2’s heartwarming commercial about data poverty which supports the brand’s positioning as the carrier where you “get a great deal more”. B2C brands understand how they can use a good story to provide a solution to people’s problems as they create an emotional connection.
It’s easy to think the rules are different for B2B. That there’s less need for emotion or drama to engage customers. But B2B customers are exactly the same people that B2C brands are appealing to. They may have different goals or pain points when they’re in work mode but B2B buyers aren’t robots (or at least not yet). They’re real people that will make subconscious decisions based on emotion, then justify those decisions later with logic.
You might get excited about the features of your B2B products or services (and we really like it that you do), but to your customers the tech and specs aren’t usually the interesting, attention grabbing bits. Those folks tend to be more interested in how your product will help them overcome a particular challenge, achieve their targets, or make them look like an indispensable superhero to the people that determine whether they get promoted or not. Effective B2B storytelling is vital to capturing and holding your audience’s attention long enough to get them interested in all those features you’re already so excited about.
In fact, it could be argued that brand storytelling is actually more important in B2B than it is in B2C. B2C brands only need to sweep their customers up in their story for relatively short periods of time – the time it takes to book holiday accommodation or to choose a mobile carrier when their contract is up for renewal. These sorts of decisions can easily be swayed by slick-but-superficial stories.
In a B2B company, on the other hand, products and services are usually highly complex with long buying cycles. It can take months or even years for buyers to make a decision about your product. So you need a coherent brand story that stands up to buyer scrutiny for more than just a couple of weeks, can be used throughout all your B2B content, and sets a course for growth.
Check out the five Cs of a great B2B story, to see whether your narrative makes the grade.
The commercial benefits of B2B storytelling
Convincing people of the value of B2B storytelling isn’t always easy. Even a Beneath founder took a bit of convincing – so much so he ended up issuing an apology to B2B storytelling’s pioneers when he was ultimately converted to the ‘storyful’ side.
Your CFO in particular might need some persuasion to allocate B2B marketing budget to telling your story. So, to help you make the case, here’s a handful of the commercial benefits of B2B storytelling:
- Increased revenue: Compelling, coherent stories stand up to the scrutiny of B2B buyers.
- Bigger margins: Storytelling is an effective mechanism for delivering product information to support higher prices.
- Higher customer LTV: Your story constantly reminds your customer of the value of your product.
- Better talent acquisition and retention: Storytelling helps you attract and retain the best candidates.
- Investor capital: Your story is your pitch and your ticket to significant investment.
Discover more about the commercial benefits of B2B storytelling in our guide to securing storytelling budget from the CFO.
Creating a B2B storytelling framework
Crafting a compelling, coherent brand story that wins the hearts and minds of buyers is likely to require some form of B2B storytelling framework. While we firmly believe there’s no single framework that works for everyone, most agencies do use some type of process or template as a starting point. We recently chatted to Velocity Partners founders Stan Woods and Doug Kessler about their Galvanising Story framework, for example.
At Beneath we follow a five step B2B storytelling framework that can be tailored to our clients’ needs.
- Story mining: The foundational stage of creating a brand story, story mining involves extensive research, from analysing competitors to interviewing C-suite members and customers.
- Story crafting: At this stage you’re refining the insights gained from story mining to create your brand positioning and story, which may include your visual identity and tone of voice.
- Storytelling: The storytelling stage is when you bring your story to life in all the places your audiences will encounter it, including your website, content marketing, and thought leadership.
- Story scaling: It’s time to scale your efforts, adding new campaigns and formats into the mix, tailoring your story to your most important audiences, and weaving it into the fabric of your business.
- Story evolving: The best stories aren’t static, so optimise your storytelling to make sure it’s always performing while staying true to your growing business.
Check out our guide How to build a storyful B2B brand to find out more about our five-step approach to B2B storytelling.
B2B storytelling examples
While every brand story is unique, we often see interesting themes or trends emerging in the way brands go about B2B brand storytelling. Here are just a couple of current examples:
Competing stories
Positioning your business against a competitor or alternative is common practice – as we saw earlier with the AirBnB story that positions the brand against hotels. At time of writing, CRM giants Hubspot and Salesforce are telling directly competing stories, with one promising to help customers ‘grow better’, while the other says it will help them ‘grow faster’. Which of these similar-but-strategically-very-different stories would win you over?
A story of place
Another trend is for B2B brands to position themselves as a place where their customer’s problems are solved or their goals are achieved. Slack is perhaps the most obvious example, with its “Where work happens” tagline. But there are other brands using this approach, like payment processing fintech Checkout, which describes itself as the place “Where the world checks out.”
The human AI story
As brand stories continually evolve, a compelling narrative that aligns the brand with the latest industry or technological developments is a popular choice. Right now there are plenty of B2B brands telling stories that focus on the balance between people and AI, from Zendesk’s “AI-first service. Catered to humans.” approach to ServiceNow’s promise to “Put AI agents to work for people”.
Get ready for strategic storytelling
Effective brand storytelling requires a strategic approach. In addition to developing an exceptional brand narrative, based on a well-researched and differentiating brand positioning, you also need to bring this story to life creatively and consistently. For your story to form the basis of your B2B marketing strategy, you need every visual and verbal expression of your brand – from social media posts, to brand illustrations, to brand videos – to align with the story and reinforce it in the minds of your audience.
To find out more, take a look at our free guide, How to build a storyful B2B brand.