Listen to this blog post as a podcast:
Marketers are constantly hearing about the importance of
storytelling in their marketing. They should be trying to tell
their brand story. Lead with a story. Connect with a story.
For the average marketer, this can feel like a daunting change.
You may just be getting the hang of this whole content marketing
thing, where you are trying to provide value by educating your
prospects instead of telling them about your products and services.
And now you have to tell them a story. Is that in addition to
trying to educate them, or instead of that? You feel like a new
parent with that deer-in-the-headlights look. If only someone would
tell you what to do.
There are plenty of resources about storytelling if
you want to get started in a big way, but what if you want to get
started in a small way? This blog post may be just the thing.
I work for a big company, and there are already plenty of
stories about the company, and even our specific product suite. But
that’s not where I’m going with our content. I have been thinking
about story differently. I am using small moments of story
to catch people off guard. (highlight to tweet) They are
reading about a marketing topic, and suddenly they encounter a
brief scene that they were not expecting. It could be a simple
visual metaphor, but it could also feel like a very short story. In
the middle of an ebook or other type of top-of-funnel content, I’ve
created a short story in their mind.
Let’s look at some ideas that make these kinds of small story
moments work. These are embedded in content that is helping to
build trust, so a prospect will ultimately buy from your
company.
Be Relatable
These stories have to be about things that people recognize from
their own lives, or in this case, their own offices. In a piece
about the importance of tools that help you manage resources, I
included the following sentence: “It also lets you identify
bottlenecks—we’re looking at you, Sandra—and brings efficiency to
your content team.”
Every team has someone that is a bottleneck. Not only
did I create a moment that is relatable, but I called out a
specific person in a way that is totally unexpected. But
when you read the sentence, you get an…
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