The Wager: B2B Marketing Lessons from the Epic True Story of the Shipwrecked HMS Wager with Former Director of Content Marketing at Authentic8, Shannon Ragan

“Each man carried, along with a sea chest, his own burdensome story.” - Excerpt from The Wager, by David Grann

This is true not only for the men that sailed on the HMS Wager, but your audience and customers (minus the sea chests). 

Just as David Grann took those burdensome stories from journal entries to write The Wager, so too can you use the burdensome stories of your customers in your marketing.

This is one of the things we’re talking about in this episode of Remarkable with the help of our special guest, former Director of Content Marketing at Authentic8, Shannon Ragan.

Together, we draw marketing lessons from David Grann’s book, The Wager, including going to the source, shaping your stories as stranger than fiction, and sourcing those stories from the smallest footnote.

About our guest, Shannon Ragan

Shannon Ragan is the former Director of Content Marketing at Authentic8. She joined the company in September 2020 as Content Marketing Senior Manager. She is also a producer and co-host of NeedleStack: the OSINT podcast. She previously served as Senior Marketing Communications Manager at Skybox Security. She has been blogging in the cybersecurity industry for ten years and vows to never write another Patch Tuesday update again.

What B2B Companies Can Learn From The Wager:

• Go to the source. Talk to your customers to understand what matters most to them. And use that in your messaging. Shannon says, “Experience it yourself, as authentically as you can. I think that is a huge thing in content marketing. I feel like there is often a lot of gatekeeping between sales and marketing to customers that it's like, ‘No, I don't want the marketing team to talk to my customers.’ It's the practitioners, the people using your tool, your product, that you need to talk to the most. And so any amount of time that you can get with them [is valuable].” In The Wager, David Grann actually sailed the same route that the crew of the HMS Wager did to see what it was really like. That was the only way he could write authentically about the experience.
• Shape your stories as stranger than fiction. When you do talk to your audience or your customers, get their war stories about the struggles they’ve had that your product will solve. Shannon says that having a podcast has been a great platform for sharing those stories. She says, “I think the true stories are the most interesting. And so getting  people that live it, walk the walk, do it every day to kind of tell their war stories and their learnings along the way, and be able to share those with our audience under our brand without really having to talk too much about ourselves has just been a great brand builder and gotten people into our orbit. And then once they know us and like us and love us, then it's really easy to be like, ‘By the way, we have this great product I think you'll like.’” It’s like how The Wager is a true story that, in David Grann’s telling, feels closer to fiction because of the detail and expressive voices he includes. And he was able to do that through the use of primary sources. So use your primary sources - your audience and customers - to write your marketing messages. 
• Stories can start with the smallest footnote. When David Grann was doing research for The Wager, he was looking through lists of people who boarded the ship. And next to many names, he saw “DD,” which he discovered meant “Dispatched Dead.” It was through researching the deeper story behind this two-letter abbreviation that he uncovered stories of scurvy and the overall human toll of the voyage. Look for the small footnotes that could tell you a much deeper story for use in your marketing.

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