Digital and Email communications are a great way to drive interactions with your customers and prospects. Yet, all too often these communications go unread. Usually that’s because they aren’t compelling. Let’s look at your email campaigns more closely.

Which one of these is closest to the type of emails you send?

1. a product focused email with a link to product information
2. a more problem focused communication that helps people understand why and how your product facilitates a solution, with a link to an article or landing page on the topic?

A is focused on you. B is focused on the prospect.

The story you can tell in A is probably focused on you. The story you tell in B is pretty much going to be focused on them. Option B will be much more powerful and compelling to the prospect, unless you hit them at the exact right moment and they’ve already done their homework and concluded your product is on their final options list. Hitting that moment is pure luck, and you can’t depend on that to drive interactions and resulting revenue.

Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, people make decisions based on the stories they tell themselves about their complex lives. That foundation is used to evaluate and make decisions in their business life as well. It helps them rationalize, justify and understand the choices they make, or their particular decisions under certain sets of circumstances.

In marketing for the B2B complex sale, there’s usually a lot of knowledge transfer or education that happens before you get to the purchase decision. How well your marketing communications resonate with prospects will determine if they choose to buy your product or your competitors’, or to not buy at all.

Many marketing messages try to accomplish the whole enchilada with one communication. They try to get the prospect to take action prior to establishing familiarity and trust between the company and the prospect. They also tend to be so enamored with their products that they forget about, or ignore, the problem the prospect is trying to solve. They forget to speak from the prospect’s perspective, exploring the alternative solutions and pros and cons. And they forget to acknowledge that change is sometimes more difficult than staying with the status quo.

As a marketer, you are trying to reduce their comfort with the status quo while simultaneously showing people why its safe to take a new course of action, try a new solution. To get the prospect to this point, they need to know why they should change, they need hard evidence of the benefits they’ll derive. They need to be able to envision themselves both using the product successfully and enjoying those benefits for themselves, and for their company.

This is why case studies and white papers and eBooks are so powerful. A good case study will show the problem faced, before your solution, which is also faced by the prospect you’re speaking to. The case study will show prospects the results they can achieve if they use your product, and how they can go about doing just that. All based on the successful experiences of another prospect, just like them.

The more a prospect identifies with the story, the more compelling your product will be for them. An eBook or a white paper gives you the extra space you need to further build the case for change, with quantitative examples. These are compelling educational vehicles that can drive conversation with your prospect, since they learn enough to feel confident to have a meaningful discussion about the possibilities you offer.

Stories consist of a beginning, middle and end. There are characters, motivation and conflicts before the characters triumph at the end. [It’s helpful if you only think about happily-ever-after stories when applying them to marketing.] The scenario of the case study above has a beginning, the situation before using the product. There is motivation because the prospect has to improve or change to reach a business goal. The conflict is whatever is currently stopping them from achieving that goal. Your product is what helps them overcome the obstacle and get to that goal.

All marketing communications won’t have a complete story every time. But, done strategically, a series of inter-related communications can drive interactions as you pass on enough knowledge to demonstrate why your product solves their problem better than the status quo, or alternative choices. Your communications can also help them envision meeting the business goal they cannot achieve, on their own, today. You’ve shown them some expert approaches or solutions they hadn’t thought about. If they had, they would have made the change already.

By using story concepts in your marketing communications, you have the opportunity to build a relationship gradually.

• The contextual nature of the story provides proof that the status quo is a problem and that there is a solution.
• You’ve used incremental communications to create belief the prospect can achieve a beneficial end result by trusting your expertise.
• You’ve made them comfortable with new knowledge to the point they can convince others in the consensus group that changing the status quo is worthwhile.

And, you did it with more than factual data.

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B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee helps companies significantly increase their marketing momentum by generating more and better leads for their sales organizations. She helps them capture the attention of web site visitors, and strengthen engagement with high value content till they are "sales ready." Visit the Marketing Interactions website: www.marketinginteractions.com.