Just like suitcases come hard-sided and soft-sided, I’ve started to think of blog writing in similar terms. What crystallized my thinking was when a newsletter subscriber reached out to me last week asking how to create “soft marketing, essay-of-the-month sort of writing.” How should she go about picking topics and structuring the articles?

Much of the thought leadership I ghost-write for startups channels the founder’s vision or seeks to explain key trends of their market or nuances of their product or service. Kind of hard-sided, I came to realize.

But here was a biotech with limited interest in technological explanations. She was looking to write stories that captured the broader sweep of their mission. Not in a sales-y way, she emphasized, but regular posts on LinkedIn and elsewhere that put the organization in a good light.

It’s a great question, and as I formulated my answer, I realized I wanted to share it with the community.

The best approach to get inspired about the What is to first answer the Why and the How.

Why: Every piece you publish should underscore the importance of your organization and its mission. In other words, why you do what you do.

How: Use the proven Hero’s Journey story structure to give that Why real emotional power.

A simplified version of the Journey is this: We meet the hero, that hero is challenged, almost fails, and then ultimately succeeds—and in doing so, is transformed in some way. That transformation should reflect positively on the Why of your organization.

Let’s get practical with 3 fictitious examples:

—Your organization receives a grant. You could simply write “we’re humbled and honored to announce that we received $XXm from such-and-such foundation!” (For some reason ostentatious humility is fashionable on LinkedIn.) Instead, turn it into a hero’s journey. For example, write about the person who applied for the grant, the challenges involved, the worthy competition, and why it was such a long shot, and then the amazing news of receiving it, and what it made you realize about the world’s hunger for the solution your organization is creating.

—Let’s say that your industry currently operates in an environmentally devastating way, which you’re working to change. You could write a statistic-filled article about the poisoning of the environment and how we must do better. Or you could write about a person (or community) that has suffered from this poisoning, the struggles you and your organization are making to solve this problem, and perhaps some early successes.

—You recently hired a person for a key role. A standard announcement is an option. Or you write a story either from the person’s perspective on what led them to the job, or you write from the organization’s perspective of struggling to find that person. In either case, the outcome is showing the personal importance of your organization’s mission and the dedication of the people working behind the scenes to achieve it.

All three examples above sound clunky when described in this way, much the way a skyscraper would lose its glamor if you ripped off its sheathing to understand the structural framework. Your articles should either address or imply each of these story beats, but they don’t need to be literal.

Another great category are case studies; they’re also hero’s journeys. You meet the client (or partner), who has been given some seemingly insurmountable challenge. Then they engage your company, which brings all kinds of great results. The transformation is from desperation to gratitude.

All stories are human. Climate change is important; lives disrupted by climate change is powerful.

Statistics are inherently flat and static. The people behind them are what move the audience.

One of the most powerful examples of soft marketing I’ve seen is by Adobe for their Photoshop product. They sent a group of students to flood victims and helped them restore precious photos damaged by the water. The video does such a good job of taking something so neutral—Photoshop is just a tool—and focusing instead entirely on the emotional power that this tool can create. This is a large company with a consumer-facing product, but even if you’re smaller and B2B, I hope their ability to reimagine their storytelling inspires you too.

Watch it here (under 4 min long): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeTpdqoVbUo

To start collecting human stories, start by speaking with your colleagues: why are they doing this? They’re smart people and could be doing lots of things. Yet they’re motivated by important ideas, a sense of injustice, of lives disrupted by the status quo, and they’re here to fight. I want to learn about them and their mission.

Hard-sided articles have an important place. But to build out the contours of your mission and gently inspire the world around you, consider adding soft-sided articles to your story luggage.