Nobody cares about your business – is it true?

One of the biggest points we push in content marketing is focusing on the ‘what’s in it for me’ factor for your audience. It’s a reaction to some forms of old-school advertising: rather than simply pushing unwanted products onto people, win them over by finding the ‘sweet spot’ between what you want to say and what they want to hear.

Taking this even further, I’ve heard plenty of commentators suggest ‘Your audience doesn’t care about you or your products. They only care what’s in it for them’. They don’t believe brand storytelling has any great value.

I think this is an over-simplification that undervalues the relationship many people have with certain brands and products that they choose to buy.

Here are three situations in which I believe sharing a bit about you and your business’s story makes all the difference.

If your organisation is doing good in the world

There’s plenty of research out there about how huge proportions of Gen Zs prefer to buy from, and are willing to pay more for, ethically-minded brands. According to McKinsey, 70% of Gen Zs say they try to purchase products from companies they consider ethical, and 65% try to learn the origins of anything they buy.

This consumer group isn’t the only one looking for companies and social enterprises to share what they’re doing to better the world. While facts and figures are useful, stories tend to resonate best – and that means talking about yourself a bit.

The local social enterprise Thankyou is a great example. While it might be true that the local social enterprise makes (among other products) great-smelling hand soap that looks good in your bathroom, it’s their origin story that really makes me feel good about using their products.

Back in 2008 when Daniel and Justine Flynn founded Thankyou, I remember it was highly fashionable to carry around a disposable bottle of water. When I was at uni, I wouldn’t be seen dead carrying a reusable bottle around! Looking for a way to fundraise to help extreme poverty, the Flynns figured, ‘why not tap into this ridiculous trend and turn something good out of it’. They’ve since stopped making bottled water (single use plastic has finally gone off-trend) but I still love the quirky thinking behind this.

What’s in it for me? A cool story to share with friends, perhaps. A feeling that I’ve made a good choice buying their products. Whatever it is, there’s certainly more to it than straight product benefits.

If you sell products with interesting provenance

I spent a bit of time selling boutique food and beverages, and although being good-tasting and high quality were obviously essential, in so many cases it was the story behind the brands that tipped customers towards a sale.

Maybe they’d started up as a side hustle, working nights in their home kitchen; or were using an old family recipe transported from their homeland; or had invented their product to serve a family member’s dietary requirement after a difficult diagnosis.

I love visiting wineries, distilleries and breweries to learn about how they make their products. Seeing their processes and hearing their stories certainly impacts on how I feel about choosing and consuming what they make.

The same goes for anything handcrafted. Many people would agree that basically anything you can find at a craft market – jewellery, pottery, clothing, toys – makes for a better gift than something store-bought simply because of the little chat you get to have with the maker to find out more about them to share along with the gift.

How do we make up for that in the digital space? Sharing content with stories. What’s in it for the customer? Quite simply, the story – and the feeling they get when they hear and retell that story.

If you’re leading category-breaking innovation

If your business is so innovative or interesting that it's attracting attention in mainstream media, you should be using your own platforms to tell more of your stories.

It’s easy to forget now, but in the early days, Uber was illegal. The company made a strategic – and very bold – decision to stick it to governments all over the world and simply pay millions of dollars in fines until they changed the taxi laws. That’s a story worth talking about.

The leaps Tesla has made with electric vehicles have been category-breaking enough to be newsworthy. “Our goal all along has been to try to get the rest of the car industry to go electric,” CEO Elon Musk said recently – and it’s worked. Not only are people from all walks of life discussing the future of electric vehicles in their own time, they are specifically talking about Tesla. That’s something all the advertising dollars in the world can’t buy.

The music industry was on its knees before streaming services, led by Spotify, swooped in to revolutionise the way we listen. Now it seems you can’t go to a house-party or barbeque without coming across a Spotify playlist. Those days of painstakingly selecting songs and ripping CDs using dodgy shareware, and before them, the manual craft of recording an actual mixtape, are now just memories (which many of us nostalgically cherish, by the way).

When you’re doing something really different, people want to know what’s behind it. Who are the people driving the innovation, what do they believe and what are they planning to do next?

None of these businesses I mention are without their critics, which is yet another reason for them to take control of their own narratives. While the wild success of these few examples might feel remote to many smaller players, it’s important to remember that breaking category norms is possible for any organisation of any size.

And if you’re doing it, you should be making content about it.

This is still not a license to make it all about you

Being customer-centric and always being able to answer, ‘what’s in it for me?’ for your target audience should still be the main focus of many brand communications. It’s true that some people simply don’t care about the stories, people, opinions and dreams behind certain businesses. But some do.

And perhaps, if more businesses could identify what makes them really interesting, and find a way to share it, more people would listen up.