In this episode of the B2B Brand180 Podcast, Linda Fanaras sits down with David Ebner, President of Content Workshop and author of Kingmakers, to unpack what effective brand storytelling really looks like in today’s B2B landscape.
David shares why most companies get brand storytelling wrong by leading with their own story instead of their audience’s—and how shifting that perspective can dramatically improve clarity, trust, and conversion. Together, Linda and David break down a simple, four-step framework for building a story-driven brand, rooted in understanding your ideal customer, identifying real pain points, and showing—clearly and concisely—how you make life better for the people you serve.
01:05 Why Most Brand Stories Miss the Mark
04:10 Shifting the Focus From Founder Stories to the Audience
07:25 Getting Leadership Buy-In to Change the Narrative
14:30 Using Story to Build Trust in Cybersecurity and SaaS
24:05 The Role of AI in Content Creation and Storytelling
34:20 Advice for CEOs Who Overcomplicate Their Message
37:10 Key Takeaways from Kingmakers for B2B Leaders
40:05 Rapid Fire Questions and Final Advice
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjebner/
Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/
Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/
Linda’s Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/
Linda:
Welcome to the B2B Brand180 podcast, where we cut through the noise and talk about branding and marketing strategies that actually move businesses forward. I’m Linda Fanaras, CEO of Millennium Agency and your host today. Today I’m joined by David Ebner, president of Content Workshop. David is a storyteller at scale, and he started as a creative writer, shifted into strategy and now leads a story-first content marketing agency serving B2B tech brands in cybersecurity, SaaS and manufacturing. His team has produced over 30,000 content assets across America, and he’s also the author of Kingmakers, a content marketing story, and a leading voice on brand voice narrative strategy, and the evolving role of AI and storytelling. Today, before you leave, you will learn how to build a story brand in four simple steps. We’re going to keep today pretty direct and simple: How you need to know your audience. You have to pinpoint those pain points, you have to deliver solutions and show how you make their life better, why clarity around your ICP or your ideal customer profile is the backbone of great storytelling, and how to keep your message simple, human and effective. And then lastly, how real client stories can transform both perception and conversion. David, thank you for coming on today. Looking forward to covering this conversation. What do you think the biggest mistake companies make when telling their brand story and how do you fix it?
David:
Yeah, thanks for having me, Linda. I get asked that question a lot, as you can probably imagine, right? I think the first mistake that a lot of brands make is that they focus their brand storytelling on the founder’s story, or maybe even later, just the story of the company itself. We focus on why we went to market, our unique differentiators, which is great. All that stuff is important. However, when people consume content specifically or any piece of marketing, what they’re looking for is how they can see themselves in that piece of content. So when you think about your brand story, the best place to start, opposed to starting with the founder story or actually about the company, focus with the audience first, right? Your brand story is really about how you help people and how their lives are better. As we just mentioned at the top, that’s really it. It’s not really much more complicated than that, but it’s hard for us to step out of our own selves for a second and focus on the other group.
Linda:
Yeah, that’s a great point because I think a lot of companies that are putting together content, they really want to boast who they are, what they do, why they’re different, but from a prospect coming into something like that, they really want to know is how are you going to fix our problem? How can you really address that? We find that a lot too, especially when it comes to telling that brand story and it’s really taking a step back, it seems to me, and maybe, I always say you got to change hats, right, David? You have to be that person. You can’t be you right now. You have to look at it from their perspective, so that’s great. Good. So how do you get leaders to actually shift focus from themselves to their audience, which was maybe a little challenging from time to time if they’re used to doing that?
David:
There’s a reason why these founders and the leaders of these companies got into the business to begin with, and for the most part, they get as much joy out of the idea of helping people and making people’s lives better as they do with their paycheck. I know we’re very focused on this economy about money and how much we accumulate, but there’s nothing better than seeing somebody smile or somebody say, thank you for helping me. There’s no amount of money that equals that. So I think by allowing there to be more of those experiences for the clients and focusing on that more heavily is a lot easier for executives to take a little bit of a step back. Also, from a natural evolution of a business, no one person can ever be a linchpin in a company, right? That is recipe for failure. You’re going to eventually go on vacation or something like that. So you need to be able to take yourself out of the equation. That’s a hard thing for founders to do and executives to do, but the company will be more efficient, it will make more money and be more prosperous, and you’ll help people if you just take a step back for a second.
Linda:
And look at it from that other person’s perspective. I’m assuming there’s some education involved when you have to get those leaders to make that shift.
David:
Most of the brands that we work with today are quite large. Back five, ten years ago, we were working with a lot of small companies, and that was much more difficult with the smaller entities. Today, if your company’s publicly traded, you don’t have those issues. For the most part, it’s just all about stock price, stock price, stock price, right? It can be challenging, and it takes some education, it takes some, you got to sit people down and have a brief conversation, but once you get to the point that you can just help more people and be more successful, if it’s not just about you, they usually turn the page.
Linda:
Oh, that’s great. So there’s a lot of complex industries out there, SaaS, all kinds of different software products like cybersecurity, even energy can get a little tricky from time to time. So how do you take these super complex industries with a lot of depth to them and start to create stories that people really do understand? How do you simplify that?
David:
Yeah, I mean, Linda, the problem of the era for sure is that. However, the one thing that makes it a lot easier is that we’re still, no matter what, no matter how educated or informed or how busy somebody’s life is, we’re all still just people. So when you’re marketing, you might be marketing to a specific company, but there’s another person on the other side of that screen, that person still buys things. Buying is still an emotional experience for those people. They do justify with logic if they’re buying something on behalf of a business, it’s not just all emotion, but it’s easy to tap into that with just about any human. If you just take things and break them down to something that’s a little more simple. The way we do that is just you have to be informed and understand the information. You have to be almost an expert in the information so that you can break it down and explain it in a more simple fashion.
And I think there’s a little bit of a misconception that to demonstrate your expertise or your intelligence, you have to say more. When typically I’ve been in a room with some very educated, smart people, and usually the smartest people say the least in the room. Demonstrating your expertise and your knowledge can be more about being concise and being direct than it can be about the actual verboseness of what you say. And that works in any industry and in cybersecurity specifically, people, they want to know that you know what you’re talking about. Immediately they realize if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you break authenticity. You’re not going to get those people back in that industry. However, they are still just people and they want things explained simply and quickly, and that’s usually just the transition we have to make with the content.
Linda:
Is there a particular campaign where the brand story actually moved the needle, took something maybe a little complex or muddled and you made it clear and concise and you got it out into the market and it really moved the needle for the client?
David:
Everything we’re talking about is very hard to measure. Let me just start there, right? We’re talking about sentiment, public sentiment with our brand, trust building with individuals, they don’t exactly tell us that we’ve done that. Either they buy or they don’t, and that’s an end indicator, but we don’t know how we’re doing along the way. We’ve worked with many — cybersecurity is a great example — many cybersecurity companies on this process, significantly. I don’t believe I can actually say the name of the brand, but I’ll say this: one of the very large companies in the space, we help them with a report that they fill in. All these brands do giant reports every year, every single one of them, right? What we’ve done with them is help turn and essentially atomize those reports, and that’s really just taking the big thing and breaking it down into a bunch of small pieces that are easier to digest, right?
Linda:
Okay. Yep.
David:
That process, by the way, fantastic content strategy. You can build something big, do a data report, spend a lot of time and energy into it, and then just break it up into a bunch of pieces that lead into it, not advertisements as much as give away information and say, “Hey, if you want to know more here you go.” Go back to the report. That allows us to take something complex and important. Obviously, we want to make it concise and break it down and move people to it.
Linda:
Yeah, and you can use teaser copy or whatever the case may be to build something like that. No, that’s super helpful. I can see, and I agree with you, I mean, sometimes it can be really hard to see how something moves the needle, unless it’s a truly integrated process where you’ve honed in on something that, wow, this is really it, and then you make sure that every touchpoint really hits on that. That can help move the needle for sure. So there’s a lot going on with AI, especially in the marketing space and content writing. How do you see it reshaping the content creation and storytelling, especially in the B2B space? Are you finding it challenging? Do you think it’s just a tool? Any feedback on that? Any thoughts?
David:
Yes, to all of the above, right? It is challenging. It is just a tool, but it’s changing perception faster than it’s changing reality, essentially. Yeah, there’s a perception that this tool is a replacement, certainly for a lot of creativity, a lot of human labor, particularly on the marketing side, it’s being seen as that, and then the actual application of it as a replacement isn’t going so well for a lot of brands, just from clients that we’ve worked with, I’ve heard that. However, it doesn’t mean that it has to go that way. It doesn’t have to, right? I think of AI as an implement, as a tool. AI can help you do a lot of things at scale. However, it doesn’t mean that everything’s going to be of high quality. In fact, a lot of base AI content is of very poor quality, or I would consider poor quality, but it allows us to have a lot more to look at and a lot more to assess.
So let’s think about this. As a brand, if you’re producing 10 high quality pieces a month, let’s say, right? AI could help you produce a hundred pieces, but it doesn’t mean all hundred are going to meet the same quality. Absolutely not. In fact, if you try to do that at the same scale, it is likely that it’s going to be much poorer quality and hurt brand trust. However, it allows you to have more options to choose from. It allows you to pick the winners earlier on and spend more time and energy, opposed to spending a lot of your time collecting data and thinking about what should we write about, what are the important topics, what’s out there right now? And doing all that research. AI can help you with a lot of that part, and then you can start focusing on the more important topics and spending more time. So maybe you still only produce 10 items, but they’re of higher quality, or you can produce maybe 15 items of the equal quality. But this idea, I like to think of it as a funnel, like a funnel. The more you put in the top, the more that has the potential to come out the bottom. And with AI, we can put a lot in the top, right?
Linda:
Right.
David:
It’s not a hallway though. It doesn’t mean the top comes out the bottom. And I think that’s a major mistake that a lot of people are making, and it’s probably eroding some brand trust, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do more. You can do more, just have your quality metrics in place.
Linda:
Exactly. No, that’s fantastic. I mean, I think it’s good for ideation and things like that just to get that brain going, looking at things from different perspectives. Super helpful. So David, I have a couple of rapid fire questions I’d love to ask you. I think you could help the audience get a couple more insights, pieces of information about content strategy and writing, but I’ll start out with how do you keep brand voice consistent across thousands of content pieces?
David:
Yeah, you need some consistent editing process and QA, certainly. Having one person really be the owner of brand voice is important. And actually, honestly, AI is not bad at that either. You can feed AI the information on what brand voice is for your brand and have it check content according to it. It’s actually quite good at that, so use AI for that. That’s great.
Linda:
Awesome. Oh, that’s great. So I know we chatted up a little bit about this, but if you could give a CEO some advice who actually overcomplicates their story and they tell you everything under the sun about why they’re different or unique, what advice would you give a CEO?
David:
Oh that’s tough, right? First advice I would give is give me a call and I’ll talk to you about it.
Linda:
Yeah, right. We’ll help you.
David:
It’s a nuanced conversation that really has to happen at a human level. Everything else is going to seem like it’s just boilerplate, but the second you can make a human connection with somebody and show them how they can actually help more people, it’s usually a much easier conversation. So I would take a step back and see, ask yourself truly who you are trying to help and who you help the best, and ask yourself if you’re getting in the way of more people being able to be helped, because I don’t want to say ego, ego is a terrible term, but how things have just always been done for the brand.
Linda:
Right. No, that’s great. And actually, let’s go to the Kingmakers. We chatted a little bit about that earlier, but so what is the one lesson every B2B leader, CMO should actually take away from this?
David:
Which is interesting because Kingmakers is still a little autobiographical. For those that have read it, it talks about me and my story only to give context to the greater story as to why I would listen to you. Humility and hubris certainly are two things that come to mind. This idea of stepping outside of yourself that we’ve talked about quite a bit on this recording today is putting on that other hat, thinking about what you actually bring to marketing to the world and what you want to be known for and how many people you want to actually help. You can do that on any level of a marketing team. You don’t have to be the CEO of the company. You don’t have to be the CMO, you can be the specialist that’s just starting out. But the idea that you are doing this job to help people. Reframe how you think about every piece of content marketing that you put out the door and probably it will give you a bit of a sharper eye on how to build trust with your audience. So I would say take a step back, put that secondary hat on and ask yourself, “How can I help?”
Linda:
That’s great. That’s great advice. So David, thank you for joining me here today. I would love for you to share how our audience can connect with you, or at least through your agency. So I’ll let you take it from here.
David:
Great. Yeah, and thanks for having me, Linda. This has been fantastic.
Linda:
Absolutely.
David:
You can get a hold of me a lot of different ways. You can go on LinkedIn and find me: David J Ebner. If you throw the J in there, I’m really easy to find. There’s other David Ebners out there, believe it or not, and they’re quite popular. So David J Ebner on LinkedIn, you can go to our website contentworkshop.com, and there’s a little chat pane in the bottom right corner that’s got my head. You’ll see my head there, that’s actually coming to my phone. All those chats come to my phone. So if you want to talk to me directly, you can just go on there and start talking. I have a saying that my friendship is free, so whether you are in the market for buying services, that’s great if you are. But if not, that’s okay. Just reach out to me. I’m happy to provide any advice I can.
Linda:
Thank you so much. So I just want to thank our audience for listening in today to the B2B Brand180 podcast, and if you have enjoyed today’s conversation, please hit like, share or subscribe. You can connect with me at mill.agency or lindafanaras.com, and feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thank you for listening in today.
