Can You Use Fiction In B2B?

Moonshots, fictional stories, shows, today’s guest does it ALL.

Meet Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, the B2B podcast service working with brands like Zoom, Slack, and Oracle to make consumer grade entertainment content.

Ian had some of the most interesting POVs I’ve heard on The Marketing Millennials podcast, one of which was implementing fiction in B2B content Marketing.

Keep reading to see Ian’s entire take on the B2B content landscape in his own liiiiightly edited words. 👇👇

1) The Edutainment Graph:

“Most Marketers realize that content is in all of Marketing. Your ad copy, emails, building podcasts or blog articles it’s in everything you’re doing.

And to create the best content in B2B I came up with this idea called the edutainment graph.

It’s all about plotting your content on an educational and entertainment graph. Educational on the X axis and entertaining content on the Y axis (and be REALLY honest with yourself).

The blog that you just wrote, where would that land on the graph? 

My guess is your content is a 6 out of 10 educational and a 2 out of 10 entertaining.

The ethos behind what I do is helping brands make content that is actually above a 5 entertaining while also being super educational, so getting them into the top right quadrant of the graph.

It’s not going to be a Marvel movie, but we found out the closest that we could get to doing that was through fiction. Yes, using fiction in B2B (more on that later).

2) Brands Using Fiction In B2B:

Caspian studios is a podcast as a service company. We’re making B2B podcasts and video series for other companies and we’re  always trying to push them to avoid doing “best practices.”

That’s when the idea of fiction came into play. 👀👀

I sent a note out to a bunch of CMOs and was like, “Hey, we have some ideas for fiction series. We’d love to make it for you guys.”

Most of the CMOs laughed, but one was intrigued from the jump.

That’s when I got in touch with the CMO of Wellhub, Ryan Bonnici, who loved the idea of a fiction series. 

Our pitch for them was a show called Murder in HR.

We pitched it as a murder mystery thriller set in a fictional tech company startup where they hire a brand new head of HR who witnesses a murder and has to solve it. 

Instead of just doing it like a normal podcast, we pitched the idea of A-list actors in it. They loved the idea so we cast Kate Mara to play the lead and Brett Gelman to play the other lead. 

We launched the series last year, we’re now working on season 2, 3, and 4.

The show got 1.2 million listeners in the first season and won a bunch of Webby’s.

But it was all based back on that idea of how can we make something that is TRULY entertaining while also teaching a little bit about HR. 

If you can actually make something that’s consumer grade that people enjoy, it will escape your bubble, stimulate word of mouth, build buzz, and do ALL of the tiny things that you’ve been trying to do with the bland educational content that won’t ever break through. 

3) The Problem B2B Companies Face:

The first problem for B2B companies is that they’re beholden to nonfiction, which means they can make 3 types of content: 

1️⃣. Backward looking content, like analyzing what has already happened. 

2️⃣. You can make content that’s very much in the moment, like following trends and building in public.

3️⃣. You can try to predict the future, with bold takes and forward facing content.

In all those cases you have to get practitioners involved in the content, which is very hard and probably not how your team is structured.

On top of that, it’s going to be really hard to scale your distribution unless you’re making serialized content. But let’s say you get really good at scaling that type of content, you never wholly control the narrative. 

If you’re going to do a founder story you’re tied down to follow what actually happened in the story (that’s the downside of building in public). Sometimes those types of stories are really cool, but fiction allows you to tell the aspects of the story that you can’t tell publicly.

For a lot of Marketers it’s liberating when they use fiction, they can actually tell a cooler, more interesting story and weave in all the stuff in there that they’re not allowed to share publicly. 

It’s crazy to me that more people don’t do fiction, but I get it, it’s just not part of the B2B culture. 

It’s not part of our culture to make up stuff in B2B and tell a story that way. I’m not here to say you need to make it your entire Marketing mix, but it’s a great way to cut through the noise that you couldn’t do by following best practices. 

4) Serialized Content Is:

I’m a huge believer in serialized content, so taking one content concept or topic and turning it into a series of chunks of content. (ClickUp with their HR music videos is a PERFECT example of this happening right now in B2B.)

But one thing that brands trip up on with their serialized content is not creating content for each persona that you have.

You should be creating series for each of your personas. 

So much content tries to target multiple people, the content is made with a CMO and CIO in mind because that is the brand’s 2 buyers.

Well guess what? CIOs and CMOs rarely pay attention to the same stuff. 

(Trying to make your content for both will actually make it for NOBODY.)

What you want to do is niche down to the actual personas that you want to target and make your content as specific to them as possible. 

If you were making a show for accountants, that’s way too broad. Take that niche a step further, what types of accountants, what level of accountants, and what types of companies are they working for? 

What are the differences between an accountant that works for a startup vs. one who works for a media company?

These are the questions you need to be asking yourselves and they will ultimately form the content you are going to market with.

Brands most often slip up on this in top of funnel. It’s this very old school thinking like back in the day when consumers used to read very large publications, but now everything is about hyper niche publications.

As a Marketer I would rather have 20 shows that serve all of our different customers than try to make one tent pole piece of content trying to cater to all of your target personas.

5) The Necessity Of Moonshots:

The last thing that Marketers and brands alike need to be focusing more energy, time, and resources into is finding moonshots.

Big, crazy projects that can be a moonshot. A moonshot doesn’t have to be a $10M project, $1M project, or $100K project, it just has to be something that has a chance to go viral. 

Something that has a chance to make an outsized return of money, create a bunch of pipeline or leads.

There’s all sorts of ways that you can do that. We’ve seen people who created song albums. We’ve seen people who have created original comic book series. We’ve seen people who have created original podcast series or fiction series, little fake commercials that do really well with memes.

It can be anything, bottom line it just HAS to cut through the noise.

There’s no traffic on the extra mile, the harder it is to make, the less people are going to do it. Where there is nobody else, that’s where there’s value.

The comic book example is a great one that doesn’t cost that much money.

Go find a comic book designer, get a contract with them, write the script yourself, and see what you get. It’s not that expensive, but at least it’s different. 

If you did a comic book, tell it as if it were a consumer story, don’t try to jam your product and service into it.

You have so much Marketing that already does that, with your moonshot focus on making something that’s truly entertaining. 

Whether it’s taking a marvel movie, the hero’s journey, or whatever your favorite TV show is, use that format, create it for your audience, and don’t worry about talking features and benefits.

Then people will like it and share it with their friends. They’ll go, who made this again? And that’s where the elusive word of mouth comes into play.”