In all the time I’ve been writing this newsletter, one question keeps coming up over and over again. It goes to the heart of some of the things that I have written about often, and therefore bears repeating.
It is this: What is storytelling in marketing?
The abstraction that accompanies that question does not help. There consequently are a bunch of snake-oil sellers in our ecosystem peddling the concept as something magical that can only be conjured up by a gaggle of witches under a banyan tree on a full moon night.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the hustle inherent in this kind of nonsense, and it is fascinating (not to mention entertaining) to see. Except that in SaaS, this kind of catering to the lowest common denominator can never work. B2B is a different world, the brands are more subtle, the buyers are very discerning, and value cannot be dissociated from the brand promise.
I’m thankful at times for the sophistication this entails, though that means more work.
Let me try to define storytelling in marketing, then, as simply and as functionally as I can.
Storytelling in marketing entails the use of narrative as a tool to mould opinion, influence decisions, and build a brand, in whatever form and function your marketing machinery can deploy it in.
Please note the whatever form and function part. It’s important to this discussion.
After the pandemic struck early this year, the recruiting world had to go remote. Things that were so easily done face-to-face became operational nightmares. And as a skill assessment product, iMocha was right at the centre of it all.
The product and engineering team at iMocha realised that everyone was now assessing, rating, and hiring candidates remotely. Our core solution, skill assessment itself, was remote-ready, but as hiring picked up, there were a slew of new use cases to model and build for.
One of them was that of the coding interview. When coders are hired, it is usual that the interviewer (a senior engineer, mostly) actually looks at the solution being produced, while being in the same room. That experience was important, it turned out, what in the industry is called a whiteboard interview, and these were not happening. This was turning out to be a dampener for recruiters and hiring managers.
So we built it into iMocha.
Essentially a mini-Zoom inside iMocha, but specifically for tech interviews, our Live Coding Interview was an instant hit among prospects and customers.
Sometime last quarter, Microsoft reached out to us to talk about how we had innovated and built a module like this in less than a quarter.
What resulted is a story that Microsoft’s Nikita Puri wrote out for their India Stories portal. It is a masterclass in case study writing.
Why am I calling it a case study? Because that is what it is: A case study in how iMocha used Azure to develop this particular feature as fast as we could. The story is able to bring that out, but it is also able to do much more: Simplify and humanise what is essentially a feature description, and we all know how boring these can be.
As you read it, please pay attention to these:
See how she starts with an actual story about a specific person. This gives the narrative a what-happens-next tension that keeps you reading.
Note how she makes iMocha’s engineers, developers, and designers the heroes of the story. This is important, because Microsoft’s audience is them, not you and me. By making them the heroes, the writer is making sure they are happy, and that they will share the story, and you know who engineers are connected to on social platforms? Other engineers. Who also happen to be Microsoft’s audience.
Genius.
Lastly, the brilliant use of imagery - the photographs, the product screengrabs, the layout - everything is in service of a feel-good story about a startup doing something amazing. You read it, and feel good about the world, about the dude who got a job, about iMocha, and especially about Microsoft. This is how brands are built, by replicating this feeling over and over and over again.
Let’s go back to the definition from before.
Storytelling in marketing entails the use of narrative as a tool to mould opinion, influence decisions, and build a brand, in whatever form and function your marketing machinery can deploy it in.
Please note the whatever form and function part, again.
Microsoft deployed some brilliant storytelling in the above case study. But that’s not why it’s so good. It’s so good because it takes something routine, everyday, almost banal, from the marketing toolkit and elevates it to something brilliant. It’s not easy, sure, nor are the tactics associated (which I point out above) immediately apparent. But that’s the job.
Freshworks deployed it in the names of their pricing plans. We at iMocha did it in our strategic narrative, and we are trying to do it in the corporate deck we just finalised.
Storytelling in marketing is not just your website, your origin story, a blog post, a whitepaper, or a sales deck. It is an approach to marketing, a philosophy even. It is not easy to do, but every single part of our marketing mix can be influenced and made better by asking the question of what story we are telling.
That is your opportunity.