Disruption Stories: Engaging Narratives That Highlight Your Differentiators & Drive Qualified Leads

For the last 6 years, we’ve been using disruption stories as a way to drive conversions from readers that are not actively searching for a solution.

What is a disruption story?

A disruption story is a story that aims to capture the reason why your business, product, or service exists. Almost every founder starts a business because they were trying to solve an existing problem that they faced, and they came up with a better solution to solve it.

Disruption stories share that problem/solution combination to help grab the attention of people who face similar challenges and can be convinced that your solution is better than how they’re currently doing it.

This is in contrast to our Pain Point SEO methodology where a brand identifies and ranks for high-intent SEO keywords to drive conversions from people actively searching for a solution to their problem.

Disruption stories, though, aren’t based on search. They’re fundamentally different from a content strategy perspective. They have no SEO angle or keyword associated with them at all. They simply share the core value of the problem your business, product, or service solves with readers who would benefit from it. You get disruption stories in front of these target customers via paid and organic social media (instead of search).

What really makes disruption stories unique is their ability to be highly shareable while also providing the opportunity to sell your product or service. 

That’s also what separates them from what we call “top of funnel” content — the whitepapers, ebooks, and guides many brands create — which don’t directly sell the product or service. Disruption stories do sell the product. In fact, they are all about the product or service and why it was created. 

Below, we share the marketing benefits of disruption stories based on our experience creating dozens of them for various clients over the years, give tips on how to write them, and show examples of various disruption stories we’ve created and the results we’ve seen.

You can also listen to us talk about disruption stories here: Episode 15: Disruption Stories – What They Are and How to Write Them

Benefits of Disruption Stories

As we covered above, the main benefit of disruption stories is their ability to convert readers who aren’t actively searching for your solution but who would make good customers. 

However, there are also other benefits:

1. Disruption stories are a sales tool and reference article for other blog posts. Because they clearly outline the most fundamental pain points your business was created to solve and how you solve it, disruption stories can be used again and again by your sales team and whenever you refer to your main value proposition in any other blog post (or social media post).
   
   
2. To align the founders, marketing team, and sales team on the core value props. We’ve worked with multiple companies where the sales team, marketing teams, and founders all have different answers when asked what their main value props are (yes, really). Putting your story down in writing helps you align the entire company and clarify the most important pain points that you solve. (We cover this in more detail below.)
   
   
3. To gain traction as a new product/service in the industry. If you have a disruptive story to tell, chances are your target audience doesn’t know a solution like yours even exists. And, if you’re just starting out, chances are your website will have a low domain authority, which means you’ll need patience for SEO rankings to take hold. Sharing a disruption story on social media and through paid ads can help you build awareness for your product/service while you wait for rankings.  

How We Use Disruption Stories and Their Results

The number one benefit of disruption stories is that they convert — meaning they bring in visitors who match your target customer profile and resonate with the pain points you’ve positioned your product and service against. 

Whether you’re doing that successfully or not can be measured in conversions. We’ve had disruption stories convert for dozens of clients. While it’s not appropriate for us to show exact conversion metrics from a single article for a given client, we can show the results of disruption stories in a few ways. 

Our Own Conversion Stats

We have many articles on our site that can be considered disruption stories: Pain Point SEO, Mirage Content, Specificity Strategy, Content Brand, among others — and we’ve seen each of them bring in high quality leads for our agency. 

Here is one such example showing leads in the first few months of 2024 from our article on why we started Grow and Convert (that follows the format outlined above of typical disruption stories), which we promote regularly on paid social. 

Praise on Clients’ Social Media and Online Communities

We also routinely see disruption stories we write for our clients being shared or discussed on social media. For example, here is someone sharing the disruption story we wrote for our past client Rainforest QA:

If you really nail the pain point and value props, this kind of organic social sharing is common with disruption stories. It’s also an indication of bringing in the right audience. If it’s resonating and the people sharing it are your target customer, it is likely also bringing in conversions (you can learn how to set up conversion tracking here). 

Or here’s an example of a customer and user of our client’s product, Mirascope, commenting that he liked the disruption story we wrote for them and that it’s the reason he got interested in Mirascope. He wrote this in the Mirascope Community Slack channel:

Long Term SEO Benefits: Organic Backlinks

Finally, some disruption stories (not all) that really strike a chord with your audience can be a long-term link building asset. Take Pain Point SEO, for example. It describes our foundational SEO strategy of going after bottom-of-funnel keywords first instead of the usual content and SEO culture of chasing traffic and search volume and “nurturing” prospects down the funnel. 

Over the years, this approach has resonated with lots of marketers and companies, and while it didn’t “go viral” immediately, it has naturally acquired 167 backlinks from 113 domains over the past few years: 

And while disruption stories aren’t created with SEO in mind, the term ‘pain point seo’ even has its own search volume now: 

This example (pain point SEO) isn’t indicative of typical results for most disruption stories, but it simply shows what the potential is. The key is getting the pain point you’re talking about and the presentation of your solution to it (your product or service) just right, which is what we talk about next. 

How to Write Disruption Stories

There are three things that you need to get right in order to have a successful disruption story: 

1. The overarching narrative. This is your 2-3 sentence pitch for why your business exists, i.e., the pain it was designed to solve and how you solve it. It’s the foundation of your entire disruption story. Getting this right and having it be about a problem that your target audience really cares about is the absolute most important aspect to a disruption story.
   
   
2. The title. While titles are always important, how you craft them is even more important with disruption stories. Unlike SEO posts — where the reader is looking for an answer or solution — disruption story titles have to grab the reader’s attention and convince them to click into the post.
   
   
3. The introduction. Again, introductions are always important, but especially here. Consider a typical “Top 10 Time Management Tools” SEO post. How many readers skim past the intro and go straight to the list? While we don’t have exact numbers, it’s logical to guess that quite a few skip the intro because they know what’s coming and jump straight to the part that interests them most. (We still think you should write a quality intro for all SEO posts though.) But with disruption stories, your readers don’t know what’s coming, so they’ll read the intro in order to find out and decide whether or not to keep on reading. 

Below, we cover how to approach each of these in more detail. Then, we give some additional tips for how to write the body of the story. 

The Overarching Narrative: Why Does Your Product or Company Exist?

Most companies love to talk about how their product solves multiple problems and provides numerous benefits. That’s fine to list on your website, but in a disruption story, you need to be very clear about the primary pain you solve, because it’s just not that interesting to run into an article on social media that has an angle of “Here’s our product and its 10 core features”. 

You’re not creating a Product Hunt listing, you’re writing a story. It needs to lean into the why behind your product or service. 

• Why was it created? 
  
  
• What problems were so severe that you set out to create your own solution to solve them? 
  
  
• What are you disrupting and why? 

Above all else, this is what you need to get clear. 

The entire company needs to be aligned on these answers. Very often, companies come to us and the sales team, marketing team, product development team, and founders all have different answers for what their overarching value proposition is. This is healthy and there’s nothing really wrong with it, you should just view the act of crafting your disruption story as an opportunity to get aligned on your core value proposition and positioning. 

A good exercise to test whether or not you’re aligned is to ask each team (or each person if your company is small enough) to write down the main problem your company solves and how you solve it. 

We did this with our own team and here are a few of the answers: 

Notice the common theme of: pain point = content that doesn’t produce results + solution = we produce content that converts. 

This is precisely what’s written on our homepage: 

We put a lot of effort into clarifying and communicating this to our team and our clients, which is why our team gave such consistent answers. 

Here are some other examples from our clients: 

“Most companies have software engineers own QA. Our platform lets anyone own QA.” 

“Creating video testimonials typically takes a lot of time and resources. Our tool makes it easy to create quality video testimonials in minutes.”

The Title

The title of a disruption story is what summarizes the core angle and value proposition you decided on above. Since the title is key to getting attention and clicks via social promotion, we’ve found it’s best to make it provocative so it raises some eyebrows or is worth stopping and clicking on while still being clear and not esoteric or over the top. 

You’re not going for some artsy phrasing or clever wordplay here, this isn’t a billboard or magazine ad. Your target audience should understand exactly what you’re solving and what your product does — but be compelled enough to read the article. 

Here are a few examples:

“Producing Video Testimonials Used to Be a Huge Pain. Here’s How We’re Fixing It.”

For our client Vocal Video, their disruption story uses the formula of “name the pain” + “we fix it”. 

Another variation of this same idea is “here’s what everyone else is doing (and we think it’s flawed)” + “we do it differently”. For example, our client Rainforest QA used the title… 

“Asking Developers to Own QA is Broken. Here’s a Better Way.” 

Both titles work well because anyone who could benefit from either tool would immediately be able to identify with the pain points described in the first half of the title. Then, instead of stating the solution (like is done in the following example), saying “we fix it” makes the reader want to click on the story and find out how. Plus, the bold, direct language causes an emotional reaction, which further motivates the viewer to read the story.

“Engineers Should Handle Prompting LLMs (and Prompts Should Live in Your Codebase)”

Instead of naming the problem and saying they fix it, this disruption story title for our client Mirascope simply states how they think it should be handled — which is the opposite of what everyone else in the industry is currently doing. 

This model works well when the solution can be stated very clearly and simply. However, it doesn’t work when the solution requires a bit more explanation or if it isn’t immediately obvious that it’s an entirely different way of handling the problem. 

“Why the Large Law Firm Business Model Is Dying and What We’re Doing Instead”

For our previous client LAWCLERK, the title for their disruption story names a problem that many in the industry either (a) hadn’t yet put a name to but were feeling the effects of, or (b) were avoiding the problem altogether. 

Essentially, we’re calling out the elephant in the room. 

Again, this strikes a cord with potential clients because it immediately shows the reader that you see and understand the problem and that you have a solution for it.

The Introduction

The number one goal of the intro is to get the problem that you solve right. Your target audience should read the first few sentences and immediately be thinking “Yes! That’s exactly it. They get me.”

For example, let’s look at the opening line of Vocal Video’s disruption story:

“Creating video testimonials is time consuming, difficult to coordinate, and expensive, no matter what video testimonial service you use — and even if you’re doing it yourself.”

They didn’t just say ‘Companies struggle to create video testimonials”. They named the things that make video testimonials a pain: it’s time consuming, difficult to coordinate, and expensive. Then, they even address the solution that most companies turn to to fix these pain points: doing it yourself.

Anyone who is also experiencing this pain would immediately resonate with the first few lines of their intro and feel compelled to keep reading. 

How you do this will depend entirely on your audience (i.e., how much do they understand the details of the problem vs. just the pains that it causes), how many layers there are to the problem, and how you solve the problem (i.e., is it a simple solution or is it on the complicated side). 

Introductions need to include some combination of “here’s what everyone else is doing/how it’s typically done” + “here’s why we think that’s flawed/what led us to believe it was a problem” + “a preview of the solution you provide”. 

Here are a couple of examples. 

Example 1: Mirascope

Example 2: Vocal Video

Completing the Story

If you get the angle (overarching narrative), title, and intro right, the rest of the post should be straightforward. You simply complete the story and share how your product or service is designed to solve the problems you laid out. At some point in the body of a disruption story, you get into the details of your product or solution, its features, how it works, how it helps, results it’s provided for customers, etc. 

This takes different forms for different stories, but regardless there is always a heavy “sales” aspect to disruption stories. 

Finally, just note that even when you are selling your product, it’s still a story, and you should write it with that in mind. Meaning the features and benefits have to be constantly tied back to the problems you laid out in the introduction. There’s an art and a finesse to writing disruption stories. 

Here are some examples from the body of disruption stories we’ve written for clients; note how they keep the story tone:

Innovation Management at most companies is broken. Here is how we are fixing it. | InnovationCast

Why the Large Law Firm Business Model Is Dying | LAWCLERK

We should also warn that it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole when sharing your personal story. So, you need to be careful to stick to the overarching narrative and only cover topics that:

• Show you understand/have lived the reader’s pains.
• Show why/how your company solves those pains. 

The subtleties and care required to get a disruption story just right means that you need to choose your writer carefully.

Be careful about outsourcing this. Most freelance writers won’t be able to write an effective disruption story — especially if they’re just handed a brief or outline. Most “blog writers” or “content writers” are used to writing top of funnel SEO content that outlines beginner level concepts in an industry and doesn’t sell the product or service. 

In order for a disruption story to be effective, the writer has to have a thorough understanding of not only the audience’s pain points, but also the details of your product. So consider writing these in-house. 

If you decide to have your disruption story written by an agency or freelancer, be sure they have experience producing pieces like this and a process by which they can get this information about the positioning, pain points, and value props. For example, we interview the founders of your company and work closely with you throughout the entire outline and drafting process. 

How to Work With Us or Learn More

• Work with our agency: If you want to hire us to create and execute an SEO strategy by identifying your best keywords, creating content that is laser-focused on ranking and driving conversions, and link building to improve your ranking positions, you can learn more about working with us here.
  
  
• Join our team: If you’re a content marketer or writer who wants to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
  
  
• Learn our methods in our content marketing course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.