National Geographic: Giving the world’s greatest storytellers a B2B platform
Most people know National Geographic. But what about National Geographic Storytellers Collective? National Geographic needed help building buzz around an entirely new (and B2B!) offering. Employing precision targeting and compelling creative, this brand-to-demand campaign drove brand and solution awareness and delivered revenue-generating results—while staying true to the National Geographic brand.
New territory for a tremendous brand
Since 1888, National Geographic Society has been leading the world with the most compelling stories about the planet and those we share it with. Given their top-tier content and unwavering brand promise, National Geographic’s brand awareness has historically been off the charts. Fast forward to 2023, when the brand began to offer storytelling workshops to help businesses and non-profit organizations develop their own storytelling skills—an initiative called National Geographic Storytellers Collective.
Led by National Geographic Explorers—the scientists, journalists, photographers and experts in their fields—these immersive, in-person workshops give teams access to the brilliant minds behind National Geographic’s content to help them develop their own compelling corporate stories. National Geographic needed help generating brand awareness for an entirely new B2B offering.
Keywords:
Connecting storytelling to business building
Our agenda was to close the awareness gap by showing the value that storytelling brings to businesses and non-profits that want to connect more deeply with their target audiences, drive sales and motivate donations. Our campaign objectives were to:
Increase awareness and consideration
Boost web traffic and
search volume
Drive engagement
and lead gen
“This integrated campaign not only captured the spirit of curiosity that our brand evokes but also helped tell an engaging awareness story about a new line of business that we introduced to the marketplace.”
Sage advice for corporate storytellers
The brief was clear: We needed to connect the dots between the value of storytelling and business outcomes like donations for non-profits. To do it, we leaned on National Geographic’s brand equity to cultivate a sense of adventure, intrigue and excitement around the Storytellers Collective workshops—even in the most corporate B2B contexts. We treated every touchpoint as an opportunity to tell a compelling story, intentionally crafted to cut through the B2B noise, and infused National Geographic’s storytelling prowess into every headline, caption and soundbite. This concept not only gave audiences a sense of what the Storytellers Collective offers but why storytelling matters.
Our product is our primary tactic (how meta!)
To build resonance with busy HR and C-Suite audiences at corporate and non-profit businesses, we combined the high-quality footage captured by National Geographic’s Explorers with audio and video clips from Explorer interviews.
We scripted, produced and edited four 30-second and 15-second video spots, featuring hero Explorers that teased the storytelling workshop experience. Display banners and LinkedIn paid social complemented the primary video work. To keep content fresh as the campaign progressed, we strategically timed out four additional videos to go live across our paid placements on Google and YouTube.
Tactics included:
- Display banners
- Paid search (Google, YouTube Video & Reels)
- LinkedIn paid campaigns
- OTT TV streaming video (leveraging MNTN)
- Conversion-focused landing page
Storytelling works. Just ask the internet.
Between the high volume of video views and the increase in website engagements and form fills, this campaign not only made a name for the National Geographic Storytellers Collective, it drove tangible business results—to the tune of hundreds of workshop bookings.
increase in YoY webpage visits
increase in lead gen
vs. baseline
video views
“We saw a notable increase in MQLs and prospects that can be attributed to the personalized creative and demand generation marketing tactics.”