Content marketing is about creating accessible content catering to your audience with the end goal of funneling in leads.

There’s one great way of figuring out what your audience wants, and it involves an underrated tool: listening.

Listen to subject-matter experts. Listen to your product teams. Listen to your sales team. Listen to as many people as you can in your company.

This isn’t the type of listening you’d do in a second-year English literature course while sitting in the back of the lecture hall.

This involves active listening. The type of listening that demands your participation and follow ups.

As a former journalist, I can attest that journalism schools teach you this skill. But it’s a skill anyone can learn. Here are a few ways you can begin to actively listen.

Enjoy The Silence

Ever notice how many of us want to fill those voids of silence in conversation with more talking? It’s because long pauses of silence can get uncomfortable.

Yet it’s in these long pauses you can get great bits of information from those you interview. If you jump in to kill the silence, it could make the conversation less illuminating. And if you’re interviewing someone for a story, that means the story may miss valuable insights.

Next time you’re stuck in a spell of silence during a conversation, don’t be so keen on jumping in to talk.

Think Like A Journalist

When reporters are taught to speak to sources, they ask open-ended questions. These are questions that get the reporter to participate in active listening. The questions are: Who? What? Where? Why? When? How?

Get used to asking these questions. They create responses that you can delve farther into with your interviewees. It’s important to avoid asking questions that lead to ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, which don’t really add much to your story. Nor do they utilize your active listening skills.

There Are No Dumb Questions

I noticed a dramatic shift between the culture of journalism school and business school. When I was completing my undergrad in journalism, I was taught there are no dumb questions.

Teaching this to budding reporters allows them to ask questions without inhibition. This helps you get to the bottom of a story.

Meanwhile, when I was completing my MBA, I noticed that business school students were more prone to asking questions that seemed tailored. There was a hesitancy around asking questions that might make you look like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

As content marketers, however, we should think more like journalists, and not worry about asking questions that we don’t have the answers to no matter how dumb they sound.

This is especially important as many content marketers work in technical spaces where language is often weighed down by complex terms and jargon.

Most may pretend they understand the jargon, but you, dear content marketer, aren’t one to pretend.

It’s important to remember that if you don’t know the answer to a question, chances are members of your audience won’t either. And by asking questions that comes across as dumb, you’ll find yourself participating in active listening as you listen to your source’s response to a question they’re rarely asked. You might even get more colourful quotes for your story.

Most importantly, you’ll be creating content that adds value for your listeners and readers. All thanks to your wonderful questions and listening skills.

Humans are wired for stories.
 
“You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built in the human plan. We come with it,” says author Margaret Atwood.
 
Atwood’s right.
 
Storytelling is what kept the spirits of our primitive ancestors going when they would sit by a roaring fire after a long day of hunting thousands of years ago.
 
Today, storytelling keeps us feeling connected in our remote, pandemic-weary world. It brings out our emotions at a time when disassociation from reality is often our only means of pushing through the current circumstances.

It’s no surprise that the business world has taken on storytelling, often through content marketing, with the aim to gather larger audiences.
 
Businesses that use storytelling are tapping into the depths of the human psyche to connect people to their brand, products, and services.
 
But what are some reasons why businesses should use storytelling?

• It humanizes your brand and that means more people relate to your business
• Storytelling allow you to build a strong connection with audiences
• When you talk about your business through riveting narratives in the B2B space, it gives you an advantage over competition that isn’t using stories to create inbound leads

 
And it pays.
 
In the B2B SaaS space, for example, businesses using content—storytelling through mediums like blog, podcast, and video, saw 30% higher growth and a 10% higher retention rate than SaaS businesses with no content marketing, according to Inc42.
 
Still not sold on the power of storytelling?

The B2B space is predicated on statistics, logic, facts and technical acumen, and you’ll see that spill out on company blogs.

Some B2B companies are beginning to see the value of going beyond that into the emotional realm to connect with people.

And it’s working. A study conducted by Google, Motista, and CEB saw that 50% of B2B customers are more likely to buy a product or service if they relate to the brand on an emotional level.

It makes sense.

Brands that use storytelling evoke positive emotions in potential customers, and that engenders trust.
That same study notes that 71% of B2B buyers make a purchase when they see personal value in a brand.

Storytelling is a powerful tool in personalizing brands. 

And finally, the study found 68.8% of B2B buyers would pay a higher price for a product or service if they believe in the business.

Storytelling also gives people faith in your business.

If you’re a B2B business looking to scale, consider adding storytelling to your marketing strategy.

Imagine you had two options to write a story on the dangers of winter driving.
 
You can start off by looking at the stats on the number of people killed on icy roads each winter.
 
Or you can start by looking at a father killed on his way to work after losing control of his vehicle on black ice. A father who leaves behind a daughter starting university in the fall.
 
What grabs your attention?
 
If you think the version with the father is more interesting, you’re not alone.
 
Humanizing storytelling has been around for thousands of years. We relate to the pain and joy of others. It gets us hooked. It gets us reading.
 
Today, however, we have access to ample amounts of data and numbers in the mix. And many content marketers working in the B2B space have to deal with dense, convoluted content that often goes through one ear and out the other.
 
What can content marketers do to humanize businesses through storytelling?
 

Here’s a hint: talk about people!
 
I’m sure your product or service is great and in demand if it continues to sell.
 
But how can you take your inbound marketing strategy to the next level?
 
Do what our cavemen ancestors did when they sat around fires telling each other stories: focus on the human angle.
 
How does your product or service make the lives of your customers better?
 
If you sell electrical safety equipment to electricians, for example, how has your product made your customer feel safer on the job?
 
Showcasing the success of your product by writing about how it has helped a customer is more powerful than just listing product features, which can quickly make readers zone out.

Other times we take ourselves too seriously.
 
“So often, when we get stuck just thinking about the business results, we conflate really boring, dry stuff with the stuff that’ll actually work. This white paper; it has graphs, it uses academic language, we sound super serious, it’s authoritative. No, it’s not. It’s boring. No one’s going to want to read it,” said Joe Lazauskas, co-author of The Storytelling Edge.
 
He's right.

“Stories make us remember and they make us care. The reason content marketing works isn’t artsy-fartsy. It’s because our brains are programmed for stories,” Lazauskas added.
 
Humanizing storytelling in the B2B space has a long way to go.
 
But doing so is a necessity for businesses that want to scale with content marketing.