Three Attention-Grabbing Story Structures (That Aren't the Hero's Journey)

Three Attention-Grabbing Story Structures (That Aren't the Hero's Journey)

Stories have power. As B2B marketers, we tap into that power to capture attention—and business.

But implementing story elements in content (especially pithy social posts) can feel like more work than it's worth.

There's a reason it feels impossible to make stories work across typical marketing efforts: the Hero's Journey. Before we start throwing things at this narrative structure's creator, Joseph Campbell, let's identify why it hinders B2B storytelling.

The Hero's Journey is considered by many to be the end-all, be-all roadmap for marketers. The cycle of the journey is at the core of the Star Wars franchise and other hit media. It's popular because when done well, it works—and because people inherently understand the structure.

The Hero's Journey Cycle

The problem is clunkiness.

The Hero's Journey is enormous, requiring a lot of set up. And it's almost impossible to pull off within the short attention spans and character counts of modern B2B content.

But the good news is that there are many other narrative structures B2B marketers can use to tell better stories.

Let's dive into some effective modes of storytelling that capture and keep audience attention.

The Collective Journey

What It Is

A collective journey focuses on a group of characters, rather than one hero, working toward a common goal. Popular in fantasy, science fiction, and comic books, this narrative structure engages multiple perspectives and often reveals the value of interconnectedness. Think of The Avengers movies.

Why It Works

Buyer journeys today include multiple stakeholders. You're looking to reach a cadre of job roles. Using a collective journey, you can create multiple narrative threads for your campaigns that speak directly to them all.

How to Apply It

Use collective journey storytelling to create multiple paths for potential customers that speak directly to their roles and concerns.

You could use Instagram for end users and brand recognition, LinkedIn for the c-suite interested in efficiency, and email to reach mid-level managers about training and support.

Collective Journey Example

For brands providing products regulated for public safety, like fire sprinkler systems, it's common to target governing bodies, specifying engineers and end users.

For a new sprinkler launch, a collective journey structure could weave three narrative paths focused on the main priorities of each: one on compliance, another on ease of installation, and a third on cleanup and cost savings.

Kishōtenketsu

What It Is

Pronounced "kee-show-ten-ketsu," this storytelling structure is all about the cycle. It establishes a situation, develops it, introduces a twist, and explores how the situation responds to that twist.

This story pattern is perfect for brands using social media to tell a story over months or years.

Why It Works

Some stories don't end because they're ongoing. And now, with always-on social media, the brand story can be a living thing.

This style allows for a story to be tweaked, repeated, and resolved in a way that doesn't stop the conversation. Your "story" on social might be singular, but it likely has dozens of threads.

Kishōtenketsu leaves plenty of room for new products and ideas without radically shifting the overall narrative.

How to Apply It

Kishōtenketsu is best used to continue an established story—like part of ongoing social media efforts.

Use this storytelling mode to explain how a new product fits within the rest of your solution lineup.

Because this storytelling model doesn't require the typical problem-solution formula, you can use it to create social posts that illustrate your brand's personality and culture.

Kishōtenketsu Example

A good example of this storytelling technique can be seen on Squarespace's Instagram. Because they are in the business of helping businesses, their Instagram is full of stories about those businesses succeeding or finding surprising results.

Squarespace certainly scatter tips and tricks throughout their social posts, but they have embraced a continual story model, whether it's about the company itself or about the people it serves.

Trickster Stories

What It Is

From Loki and Anansi to Coyote and Māui, people around the world have delighted in mischievous characters.

Besides a slippery protagonist, trickster stories typically include disruption, clever problem-solving, and the potential for transformative change. In this way, the structure can help folks navigate the complexity and discomfort of uncertainty and adapt to forces out of their control.

Why It Works

Like many engineers, tricksters are typically curious and use their ingenuity to solve problems in unexpected ways. The playful nature of a trickster story keeps the audience guessing, acting as a hook that pulls their attention back to your brand.

How to Apply It

If your brand or product breaks industry rules, lean into the mischief while communicating the benefits. Give it character and a confident, carefree voice that reminds your audience about the fun and creativity that fuels innovation.

Trickster Stories Example

Look no further than snack food social media.

In 2017, the century-old brand MoonPie racked up 1.1 billion impressions for a single, six-character post. After Hostess tweeted its golden cupcakes were the official snack cake of the 2017 solar eclipse, MoonPie retweeted "Lol ok."

Tell New Stories That Leave a Lasting Impact

Storytelling is a proven tactic for making sure your message—big or small—is memorable. People are more engaged when presented stories in an unexpected way. And it's our job as marketers to craft those tales.

By moving beyond the Hero's Journey and exploring different narrative techniques, you can tell more effective B2B stories that stand out, impacting audiences anew and forging lasting connections with your brand.

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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 330-815-1803 or email me at john@x2media.us

Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!

 

3 Tests to Decide When AI Improves Video Conversion—or Kills It

3 Tests to Decide When AI Improves Video Conversion—or Kills It

AI video generation got cheap quickly, and B2B marketing teams have rushed to use it. The output looks smooth, yet a lot of it doesn't convert. The reason is rarely the tool; it's placement.

Marketers keep considering whether to use AI-supported or real video for an entire project when the decision that actually protects conversion happens shot-by-shot.

An agency that produces across live-action, 3D, and AI, has no reason to oversell any one of them. What follows is the decision model their team uses on real B2B work, and it's simple enough to hand to any enterprise marketing lead.

The False Choice That Flattens Good Campaigns

Every video is layered. A single, 30-second commercial might include a human face selling trust, a product rendered with engineering precision, and a generic office backdrop nobody will ever study.

Treating these layers as one "AI vs. traditional" call is how strong concepts go flat. AI belongs in some layers and destroys others. So don't judge the project. Judge each layer, with three quick tests.

Test 1: The Emotion Test

Ask: does this shot need to make someone feel something to convert?

This nuance matters, because AI doesn't fail at emotion in general—it fails at photorealistic human micro-emotion.

A bank spot was produced in which a woman picks a purchase on her phone; at one beat, her smile reads as real longing—you catch it in the dimples at the edge of her lips. Prompt AI for "a smiling woman choosing a dessert" and you get technically correct results that are emotionally generic. In a trust-driven industry like financial services, viewers pick up on that generic quality, even if they can't articulate why—and it costs you the sale.

Now flip the register. For an environmental-consulting firm, a 90-second animated film narrated by desert animals was produced. Stylized characters carry no uncanny-valley penalty, so AI delivered a studio-grade emotional story at a fraction of the cost of traditional animation.

So the rule to follow is: if the emotion has to come from a photoreal human face, cast a person. If the style is animated or illustrated, AI is fair game.

Test 2: The Accuracy Test

Ask: would one wrong detail break trust?

For a medical-device startup, controlled 3D over AI for the product itself was chosen. The client had computer-aided design (CAD) files, which gave the production team total control—and in medtech, a hallucinated texture or a misplaced component isn't a glitch; it's a credibility loss. The same logic covers technical diagrams, data visualization, and product user interfaces (UI).

AI can hit accuracy, but only under close human supervision. On the animal film, early generations sized a desert tortoise like a dog and produced a common red fox instead of the specific local species. It was caught and fixed both. AI won't police its own facts; a human has to.

Test 3: The Recognition Test

A person at an office desk. Someone relaxing at home with a phone. Nobody studies these shots—the viewer just needs to recognize the context and move on, and these are the layers where AI earns its keep.

For a B2B tech client, this exact contrast was needed—a professional in an office versus a consumer at home—and AI generated the base plates faster and cheaper than a shoot or a stock library.

When a shot only needs to be recognized—not felt and not verified—AI is simply the faster, cheaper option.

AI Is Not a Magic Button

This is the part budget owners underestimate.

Even when AI is the right call, a polished result takes heavy manual work. On that tech commercial, the first office shot came out cluttered with distracting props that had to be regenerated, and an AI character's finger didn't align with the interface that was compositing onto the phone, so the motion had to be regenerated.  Also, the custom 3D environment behind it all came from human visual effects work—AI simply couldn't handle that level of spatial precision.

There are two more traps that teams repeatedly miscalculate.

• AI doesn't understand editing. To make animated clips cut together, a plan for establishing shots and shot-reverse-shot angles during prompting, not after.

• AI loses character consistency the moment a figure moves or steps back from camera—keeping one recognizable spokesperson steady across a series took dozens of iterations.

• Break the script into layers before choosing any tool

• Run each layer through three tests: emotion, accuracy, recognition

• Photoreal human emotion needs live actors; AI is a viable option for stylized emotion

• Trust-critical accuracy needs controlled 3D or AI with strict human fact-checking

• Generic, recognizable context can be a good use of AI for speed and cost

• Budget iteration time and set expectations because edits often mean regeneration, not tweaks

Budget for revision time, because "just tweak that shot" usually means a full regeneration, and stakeholders should understand this need before timelines are locked.

A Checklist You Can Use Tomorrow

The teams getting real conversion from AI video aren't the ones generating the most. They're the ones who know which layer of the frame deserves a human—and which doesn't.

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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 330-815-1803 or email me at john@x2media.us

Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!

 

Why Multi-Threaded B2B Sales Requires Better Coordination—Not More Tools

Why Multi-Threaded B2B Sales Requires Better Coordination—Not More Tools

B2B SaaS companies are spending more on go-to-market tools than at any point in history while generating less pipeline clarity than ever before.

The average revenue team now runs between six and ten sales and marketing tools simultaneously, according to Gartner. Sequencers, intent platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, enrichment tools, conversation intelligence software—tech stacks keep growing while the ability to use them coherently shrinks.

Where martech stacks break down most visibly and most expensively is with multi-stakeholder account engagement. Enterprise and mid-market B2B deals now involve an average of 6.8 stakeholders, according to Gartner's 2023 Buying Trends report.

Most revenue teams know this, but are still building their outreach around one contact per account because it's all their workflow can realistically support when their tools do not talk to each other properly.

The result is a coordination failure dressed up as a pipeline problem, and most teams are trying to solve it by simply buying another tool.

The Tool Stacking Crisis Is Real

Companies invest in intent data platforms like ZoomInfo and Bombora to identify accounts showing buying signals. But then they fail to route the signals to the right sequence for the right stakeholder because their CRM and sequencer are not properly integrated.

Marketing sees the account as warm while sales is still cold calling the one outdated contact they found on LinkedIn six months ago. And no one is talking to the CFO who may block the deal.

This is not a hypothetical scenario; it is the default state of most B2B revenue teams operating a modern stack without a coordination layer underneath it. The tools exist to support multi-stakeholder engagement, but the workflow to execute it does not.

Automation has made this worse in a specific way. Platforms like Clay, Outreach, and HubSpot Sequences can theoretically support multi-stakeholder workflows, but only if someone has built the logic first.

Most revenue teams are using automation to do more of what they were already doing badly rather than to execute a fundamentally different approach. Automating single-threaded outreach faster is not multi-threading—it is single-threaded outreach with a higher send volume and a faster path to being ignored.

Multi-Threading Is a Coordination Problem—Not a Volume Problem

Engaging five stakeholders per account does not mean sending five versions of the same email. It means mapping each stakeholder to a distinct business problem, a distinct content asset, and a distinct conversation track.

A VP of Sales cares about quota attainment. A CFO cares about payback period. A CTO cares about integration lift. Sending each of them the same product-led sequence is not personalization; it is the appearance of personalization with none of the substance.

Coordination requires marketing and sales to build a joint playbook before the account enters the sequence, not after it stalls.

Building outbound pipelines from scratch across SaaS and fintech markets in EMEA, I've seen what happens when revenue teams treat multi-stakeholder engagement as a sequencing problem rather than a coordination problem. The pattern is consistent:

• Sales picks one or two contacts per account based on whoever is easiest to find
• Marketing runs account-level campaigns with no stakeholder differentiation
• Both teams look at the same account and see different things because they're working from different data in different tools

Deals stall not because the product is a wrong fit, but because the right people inside the account were never invited to the conversation.

What Works: A Three Layer Approach

The SaaS revenue teams I've seen crack multi-stakeholder engagement are not necessarily running more tools. They're running fewer tools with cleaner integration and a clearer playbook underneath them. The difference comes down to three things.

Build a Stakeholder Map Before You Build Sequences

For each ideal client profile (ICP) account type, identify the typical buying committee, their individual priorities, and where they sit in the decision process.

This is not a one-time exercise. It should be a living document sales and marketing update together as you get new deal data.

Without this map, every sequence is built on assumptions rather than evidence.

Create Role-Specific Messaging Variants—Not Just Personalized Subject Lines

A case study that demonstrates ROI for a CFO is a different asset to one that demonstrates implementation speed for a CTO.

Both can reference the same customer win. But they should not be the same document.

Marketing's job is to build the asset library that makes sharing these stories possible. The sales team's job is to deploy the right asset at the right moment in the right conversations.

Automate the Logic—Not Just the Sends

When an account hits a trigger signal—a job change, a funding announcement, a G2 review, a page visit—the workflow should automatically route the right stakeholder-specific touchpoint.

This requires someone to build decision logic up front. It is not complex; it's deliberate. But most teams skip it because it feels like slowing down when they're trying to scale.

A Counterargument Worth Addressing

Some revenue leaders will argue that multi-threading at scale is only realistic for enterprise teams with large headcount and mature RevOps functions. The data does not support this.

Outreach published findings showing that deals with three or more stakeholders engaged were 2.5 times more likely to close than single-threaded deals regardless of company size.

The barrier is not headcount. It is the absence of a repeatable system.

Early-stage SaaS teams can execute this with a CRM, a sequencer, and a shared Notion doc that both marketing and sales actually use.

The constraint is never the tools. It is the willingness to build a coordination layer that makes the tools useful.

The Real Question

Before your next tool evaluation, ask a simple question: Does your current tech stack know who the CFO, the CTO, and the VP of Sales are inside your top 20 target accounts?

And if it does, is it talking to all three of them with something relevant?

If your answer to either question is a no, your issue is not a lack of the right tools. It's that you haven't yet built the system to strategically connect them.

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If you need help with your email, web site, video, or other presentation to promote your company, product, or service, please give me a call at 330-815-1803 or email me at john@x2media.us

Until next month. . . .remember. "you don't get a 2nd chance to make a 1st impression." Always make it a good one!!