Compelling Content: Using Storytelling Marketing

Content marketing trends come and go incredibly quickly, but storytelling is evergreen. It is the art of communicating your brand message and engaging your ideal audience using narrative techniques, and it’s what sets you apart from your competitors.

Storytelling is a powerful inbound marketing tool, used to attract customers to your business and get them interacting with you and your brand. Let’s get right into it with an example. Imagine your business is launching a new product. Instead of simply telling your audience that you have a new product, you’re going to share the stories behind it.
 

Let’s start with the reason you created the product. Was it out of necessity? You were really struggling with X and you knew you needed Y, so you created the perfect solution. This is a compelling story in that people will relate. Your ideal customer will understand the struggle and know how frustrating it is trying to find the answer. The further you delve into this story, the more relatable it will become. People will begin to know, like and trust you and your brand.
 

Now, how about the creation process? Think about how easy or hard it was. Did something go wrong? Did anything funny happen? Talk your audience through your process. If it was boring, perhaps you could invent a fictitious story – don’t think fictitious as in misleading, but in entertaining. Make sure people can tell it’s made up and use humour to keep them engaged.
 

You can also think about the outcome your product will provide. A great way to help people see the value in your product is to share what their life will look like after they buy it. For example: we provide virtual assistant services. But we also sell lazy mornings and breakfast in bed. We sell the ability to be at all of your child’s school events – to drop them off and pick them up every day. We sell relaxed, fulfilled entrepreneurs focusing on nothing but their true passions.

• Disney sells magic
• Old Spice sells “manly” men
• Airbnb sells one-of-a-kind adventures
• Dove sells the confidence to feel beautiful in your own skin
• Moleskine sells legendary status

What do you sell?
 

How do you construct a powerful story?
There are a few components every great story needs, and it’s important you include these in your storytelling content. The first thing you need is a compelling hook. If you don’t grab your audience’s attention immediately, they’ll move on and never think twice about your content. Our attention spans are unbelievably short nowadays, probably owing to the huge increase in media consumption over the past 20 years.

You need to ensure you immediately show your audience that your content is for them, and that they’re really going to want to take note. Therefore, it’s important you make sure that your hook sentence is interesting, entertaining, relatable and/or shocking. You could try some A/B testing to see what sort of content performs best for you.

Alright, so you’ve hooked in your audience. Now what? Now, we use emotional content to really connect with the viewer. Think about how you can get them to relate to your narrative, or be entertained by it. The middle part of your story is where you really get to the point, but feel free to include all the detail you want, as long as it’s relevant.

Finally, it’s time to bring it home with a memorable ending. In many cases, this ending will relate directly to your product to help drive sales. If we go back to our earlier examples, the ending of the reason for creation story would be the life-changing effect or outcome. The ending of the outcome story will be someone doing exactly what they’ve always wanted.
 

Some quick tips for storytelling content:

• Know your audience and know them well – think about exactly who your story is for
• Define the objective of your content before you start crafting it
• Focus on connecting with your audience – play to something they’ve thought about, felt or wanted
• Try to make your story memorable
• Try to convey your brand values
• Aim to educate, entertain or inspire
• Be honest and authentic
• Leave room for imagination, especially in inspirational or motivational content
• Speak to your audience one on one
• Consider a cliffhanger for a content series