The Narrative Science Recipe for Ultra-Successful B2B Virtual Events

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches. Today, I have Cassidy Shield, VP of Marketing with Narrative Science, which offers AI-powered software that creates content that turns enterprise data into easy-to-understand reports, transforms statistics into stories, and converts numbers into knowledge. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Cassidy.

Cassidy Shield: Hey, thanks, Mark, for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.

Mark Evans: As people who listen to this podcast know, I am huge into brand storytelling. So I'm really looking forward to talking to you about how storytelling has evolved and how it's resonating with target audiences in the current marketing and sales landscape. I want to start with getting your thoughts about the value of storytelling and, of course, data-driven storytelling.

Cassidy Shield: Yeah, sure. So, obviously, as a company who considers themselves a data storytelling company, storytelling is at the heart of everything we do. The reason for that is quite simple, and that is we as humans, we're telling ourselves stories all the time. So when you think about, in this instance, as you mentioned, Mark, data, if you're looking at a report, whether it's in your work setting or your personal setting, or you're getting information from somebody verbally, you are, as a human, forming stories in your mind because stories are how we understand. And once you understand, stories are what drive action. So we're a big believer in that. We don't think the industry as a whole is well served in helping all of us in our day-to-day work understand data in a way that we can tell stories from it and drive action. That's why we exist as a company, and we aim to change that. So we're a big believer in storytelling and a big believer in data storytelling.

Mark Evans: Let's talk a little bit about data because I'm not a data person. I am more on the brand experience and content and strategy side. I appreciate the value of data, and a lot of it has been focused on growth hacking and optimization and conversions and all that. But maybe you can connect the dots between data and storytelling because that doesn't happen very often. I understand that there are lots of good stories within data. Why aren't companies taking advantage of their data to drive brand storytelling? Is it a lack of knowledge? Do they not understand that there are stories to be extracted from data?

Cassidy Shield: Well, I think, Mark, you kind of hit on this at the beginning when you said you're not somebody who considers themselves a data person. And I think that's really the issue we have today is people are forced to kind of pick and choose which direction they're going. Are they somebody who's on the creative brand side, or are they somebody who's more data-driven and data-centric? And we shouldn't have to make that choice. But the reason we have to make that choice is because it takes a hell of a lot of effort to get data, the data out of your systems in your company. Takes a lot of time to make sense of that and then to figure out what to do with it. So the real issue is kind of the barrier to the ability to get that information. And so if we can make that really easy, especially for people like you, Mark, who you just want to know the insight. You just want to know if the, for example, the content or the campaign you're running is working or not. You don't really care about how you get the data and how you analyze it. You just want to know the outcome, the insight. And that's what's really difficult today. And so if we can make that much more simple, then we can get to a point where we're not picking and choosing between am I a creative person or am I a data person? You're just a person, obviously, who can do both. And so the real reason that companies don't do more of this is because it's really hard, and it's hard because the tools and processes and systems out there don't make it easy.

Mark Evans: Okay. So that obviously lends itself to asking you what Narrative Science does and how it helps marketers and other kinds of people leverage data for better brand storytelling. Because, obviously, as a brand storyteller, I want to use all the tools at my disposal. And if I can start to use data in a very user-friendly, easy way, I'm all over that. So maybe you can get into, you know, how does Narrative Science work? Walk me through, like, how I as a marketer could start to leverage the power of data.

Cassidy Shield: Think about the status quo. How do we do that today? Assuming you have somebody on your team who can get the information for you, you're either looking at a chart or you're looking at a report. And you have two choices at that point. You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out what that information tells you or that data tells you so you can glean some insight and some understanding from it, or you can ask somebody to do it for you. And typically, in either of those scenarios, what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out in, you know, human terms, what is this telling me, and what is the key insight, and what is it that I need to understand in order for myself to take better action. And that process just takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of a lot of time for you as an individual to figure it out or for you to go find somebody that you may have on your team to help explain it to you. And so what we do with technology and AI, as you pointed out at the beginning, is we try to make that a lot easier. So instead of looking at a chart or a report, we have the system tell you what you need to know in plain English. So the system does the analysis for you. It understands what the drivers are behind the analysis that you're looking at and then it explains to you in human terms what you need to know. And so the idea is if we can explain it to somebody in human terms—language, stories—when they're not a data person, it just helps them understand the data and take action. What I'm confident about in any function, and let's take marketing for example, is that if I can create an understanding within my team, my team knows what to do. That's really the problem we're trying to solve is not to tell the team what to do, it's to help them understand the data in a way that they can take action and be creative and be innovative. And so that's what we try to do with our software. We lower that barrier. We shift the status quo. So instead of you needing to figure it out or you needing to ask an analyst, we let the system tell you what you need to know for you in a way that you can understand.

Mark Evans: So in simple terms, what the technology does is extract insights that marketers can understand quickly and then leverage into creating different types of content because the data is actually providing them with signals about what to do and what to say. Is that an accurate depiction?

Cassidy Shield: Yeah. We analyze the data for you and we tell you what you need to know.

Mark Evans: When you look at the marketing landscape these days, you know, I'm a big advocate of brand storytelling, and I think in the last little while, it's gotten lost behind the power of data. Everyone's all over data. What have you seen differently this year in terms of how companies are approaching storytelling and how the tools that they're using or the approaches that they're taking are different than even eight or nine months ago?

Cassidy Shield: So, a few ways. I'd love to—I love this topic. What's happened, let's say, since COVID in the last eight or nine months? And I'll use it in the lens of kind of us as a company as well, and that is the options you had as a marketing team have been dramatically limited. Obviously, we all know this by now. What that's really put a bigger emphasis on is telling the story of your company and your brand and kind of the value of what you provide. So you really have fewer channels, you have fewer tactics, and in those channels and tactics, you need to stand out because everybody's kind of rushing to the same thing. I don't know if the art of being a brand storyteller has ever disappeared, but the increase in emphasis over the last eight or nine months, as you pointed out, is because you need to stand out. Like, there are only a few ways you can reach your audience, and everybody's rushing to the same channels. And I think that's why we're seeing a heightened emphasis in kind of brand and brand storytelling is because we don't have an option as a marketing organization or as, you know, a marketing community because of the limited options to get out there in front of your, you know, your customers and your prospects.

Mark Evans: So maybe you can talk about Narrative Science and perhaps how your own story has evolved and how you've been able to or had to reposition the company to connect with prospects at a time when, for example, you can't go to conferences and you can't visit prospects and you can't do that one-on-one personal engagement, has the company reloaded on its own story?

Cassidy Shield: There are a few things here. Like, one of the reasons that works well for us in general, and I'll talk about what specifically has changed, is we build technology that we consider early adopter technology. Right? So we need to find people who are looking to drive a different type of change inside their company, are not satisfied with the status quo, etc. To do that, these people tend to seek you out. It's important for us to be able to tell a brand story because we're trying to entice people who want to think different and do different to kind of come seek us out. So it's always been kind of an important thing for us. The heightened emphasis in the last eight or nine months is how do we go about doing that? As a company and as a marketing team, we've decided we're going to be really good at two things, and that's it. One is what we call or what we took from, you know, SweetFish Media is this notion of content marketing. So we started our own virtual events. These events weren't about us. These are events about the community and bringing in people to be able to share their experiences. And the idea being that if we can bring people together to share their experiences and their learnings for others, then we're providing good to the community and to the people that we want to engage with. And we've continued doing this in a variety of different ways, whether that's small events, whether that's content we create that we give away for free, whether it's a podcast, whether it's larger virtual events. One of the things we've done around that is just kind of created a brand and a story around us giving back to what, in this case, is the analytics community because that's who we're trying to target. And then the second thing we did is we've just become really good at doing paid and organic social. And so that's the channel of choice for us. This is an interesting kind of compare and contrast between data and brand. When I say we've gotten really good at it, we've gotten really good in two ways. One is we know how to test these channels in a variety of different ways. We're very good at looking at the data and acting on our strategy on social. Super confident in our ability to look at data and take action and understand it and take action on it and adapt our strategy. But ultimately, the reason we're successful is because of message. It's because of design. And so when you go back to think about, like, what really works on digital channels, yes, you can look at data all day and you can test and test and test, and that's important. But the thing that works at the end of the day is your brand and your story. Well, that's what we found out through all our testing that stands out the most, and that is old-school stuff, being really good at copywriting, being really good at design, being really good at positioning your company versus the alternative. We've gotten really good at that, and a lot of that's because we have had no choice. As I said, there's been fewer options, and the way we need to stand out is really through brand and storytelling and positioning and messaging.

Mark Evans: Let me circle back on both of those. I think I owe Narrative Science an apology because I wrote a post on LinkedIn recently suggesting that no one had nailed the idea of a virtual event. A lot of them weren't terribly interesting. In hindsight, the reason that I connected with you was because of the virtual event that you guys put on probably a month or so ago, and it stuck out because amid a sea of all these bad virtual events, there was something different that you guys did. So maybe you can talk a little bit about why you did what you did and how you've made them successful because by and large, virtual events aren't successful.

Cassidy Shield: Yeah. We actually just had one yesterday too, which I consider a success. We had over 3,000 people register. And, you know, we're able to put this event on at a third of the cost that we've been able to put on other events, and that cost is all absorbed by us. We don't charge people to come to the event. We don't pay speakers that come to the event. Like, this is an event for the community. Yeah. How do we make this interesting? First and foremost, we make it not about us. You really have to put your mind into the position of, like, what can I do for the community? And what we do is we try to bring in really interesting speakers to talk about really interesting topics that are going to help people day-to-day. We don't keep it at the high level where it's really kind of fluff and kind of visionary statements and speakers. We want to get people who are practitioners, who are leaders, and people who are driving change within their organization so the audience can learn something from that and take action on it. So it's almost like it's about education versus inspiration. We've mixed up formats. We make it fun with our promotion around this. We give all the content away for free. So we had the event yesterday. All the content is on our website for free. There's no gate. You can go look at it at any time. And we do a good job promoting the speakers. That's what it's about. It's about the audience. It's about the speakers and giving people in our industry a platform to share their knowledge. And when you take yourself out, I think where events go wrong is you're trying to put yourself in the event as the company running the event. We've done a good job of keeping it fresh and kind of taking ourselves out of this, that it's really about the audience and the community and providing value to them. It's not about promoting Narrative Science. You know, the team's been really creative around that. We haven't stuck to one format. We've mixed it up. When things don't work, we adjust it. We try something else. It's a strategy that's worked for us. I mean, I obviously see a lot of posts out there, and there are a lot of bad virtual events. Fortunately, I think I have a good team, and we've been able to do that really well. And we're not kind of resting on doing the same thing over and over. We're mixing formats. We continually try new things out. Some of those things work, some of them don't, but a lot of experimentation on just kind of this format of getting a community together in different ways in order to be able to share and provide value to each other.

Mark Evans: So I'm curious about how you have emulated or tried to emulate the whole connection, serendipity, accidental conversations that go on at a conference. Because my take is that for the most part, conferences are conferences. The, you know, the content is the content, but the value is going to a conference and meeting somebody by sitting beside them and having an interesting conversation, and now you've all of a sudden got a new connection or even a new friendship. How do you make that happen in a virtual event? How do you give people the opportunity to interact with your speakers and vice versa so that there's an energy there? There's a sense of people being connected and really feeling like they're an integrated part of the experience.

Cassidy Shield: First, we have to realize that out of all the people who register, not everybody attends the event live. With the people who attend the event live, obviously, they're very committed to the speaker and the topic and so forth. We do a few things that we've learned over time. We try to make the sessions very human. So if you go and you listen to this, we're joking around, we're having fun, we're sharing personal anecdotes about day-to-day life as well as the topic we're talking about. We do this on Zoom where the audience is encouraged to interact. We're always taking questions. Sometimes we'll leave it to the end, but a lot of the time we're encouraging the audience to just ask questions and get engaged, make comments during the session. And our speakers are actually asking—we had one I was doing yesterday, and our panelists were asking the audience questions, and the audience was responding. We try to make this very approachable and very human, and now it's not perfect because we're all sitting on our computers at home. We do our best to try to make it so the audience feels like they are a part of the conference. And then two, what you do after the follow-up. What you do after the conference, and that is the encouragement to get everybody connected, whether that's on LinkedIn or through email. We do a lot of sharing and follow-up with the audience. We give them all our email addresses. So if we can't address something within the conference, we'll address it afterwards, and we'll actually do address it. We don't make the conference just one thing that comes and goes. We want to make this as kind of the start of a relationship with both our speakers and our audience from that point forward. It's not perfect. It's very difficult to do. You know, we try to put ourselves into the shoes of, what would we want at an event like this and then try to make sure that we can deliver it as best we can to those who choose to attend and spend time with us.

Mark Evans: What I really like about what you're doing and the fact that you've, you know, completely embraced virtual events is that, as you say, there are fewer channels available these days. There are fewer options for marketers, and that the ability and the willingness to focus on one particular thing and do it in different or creative or even radical ways to engage your audience makes a lot of sense these days because if you have to be known for something. You have to stick out. You have to differentiate. And, of course, having a great brand story is great, but if you can do something that sparks conversations, I think that's a formula for success.

Cassidy Shield: You know, I had a board meeting yesterday, we're updating the board. And it's always nice to be able to tell your board when things are going well. We do a lot of things in our marketing team, and we've gotten what I consider pretty sophisticated, but they all really come back to two different approaches, and that's it. So at the heart of it, we keep it pretty simple, like you said. Like, one of those things is running events and doing content-based networking and getting people to engage with us in a community, and that's it. And we may do a bunch of different tactics and ways within that tactic to experiment and try things out and figure out what works, but at the heart of it, it's just one thing we're doing, that is creating a virtual space where people can get together. To your point, we're not trying to do many different things. We're trying to do a couple things and do them really well.

Mark Evans: One final question, and it's a question that I've asked a lot of marketers recently because I had a client who said to me, how are B2B companies sparking conversations with prospects? And by that, he meant real conversations, not people downloading an ebook or engaging with you on social media, but actually having conversations because at this time when, again, conferences aren't happening and there's a lot of noise and a lot of content being produced, it's hard to get somebody to agree to actually talk to you. So what are your thoughts on sparking conversations? How do you make that happen?

Cassidy Shield: I think companies out there need to up their provocativeness and in the way they position themselves in the industry and be very clear about that 10x in this world because you can't, for all the reasons you said, as easily spark a conversation. So what I mean by that is one of the big shifts, and this ties back to brand and positioning that we made is we became very declarative about our position mid-year, and it's had a huge impact on increasing kind of the engagement we've had, true engagement with prospects and real conversations. We just picked a position, and we're not everything to everybody. We're one thing, and if this is something you believe in, then let's talk. And if it's something you don't believe in, that's okay as well. Good luck. We talk about this a lot, go look at B2B brands out there, and everybody's trying to play the middle road. Nobody's picking a side. And I think right now, you have to pick a side with your brand and be known for something and be very specific about it. And when you're known for something, that means you're also known for things that you're not. You have to be comfortable with that. That's how you get people really interested in having dialogue. I mean, it won't be for everybody, but the dialogue you do have will be substantive and substantial.

Mark Evans: Specifically, what did Narrative Science do? Like, what did you go from and what did you go to?

Cassidy Shield: This is inside baseball for our industry, but, you know, we've been about data storytelling and turning data into stories and so forth. And we've always known the status quo didn't work. There's a better way. We just started coming out and saying things like no more dashboards. You know, for our industry, that's basically saying the way you've been doing it for 20 years, stop. There's a better way. And then we played off that and we went into other messaging and tactics, but it's all back to there's an old way and there's a new way. The old way is dashboards. The new way is data storytelling. And we just pounded this over and over. And it may not mean much to Mark to you, but in the analytics community, they knew exactly what we're talking about. When you say something like that, because the status quo is dashboards and visualizations. And when you say there's a better way, people raise their head and they're like, they're at least intrigued to find out what you're talking about. We had kind of played it. We've talked about this all the time within the company or privately with customers. We're never that declarative in the market. And as soon as we started becoming declarative in the market and picking a side, we saw a huge influx in demand and interest at conversations with us.

Mark Evans: That is terrific insight, and I think you're right. I think a lot of brands need to be provocative, think outside the box, do things that feel uncomfortable because at this day and age when it's really hard to capture someone's attention, you have to do something different. Really great insight, Cassidy. I really appreciate the time that you spent with me on the podcast and really telling the story of Narrative Science. Where can people find you online to learn about you and about Narrative Science?

Cassidy Shield: Certainly. So you can find out about Narrative Science at narrativescience.com. You can follow us on Twitter. You can follow us on LinkedIn. For myself, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. That's where I spend most of my time on social media. You can also email me at cshield@narrativescience.com. I'm happy to engage on email as well. So appreciate the time, Mark. Always enjoy talking about this stuff and honored that you had me on.

Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Cassidy, visit marketingspark.co/blog. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest, or want to learn more about how I help B2B companies as a fractional CMO, consultant, and adviser, send an email to mark@marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.