Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As content takes its rightful place at the forefront of marketing, I'm seeing many marketers fail at basic storytelling.

 

Marketers are ineffective when they use the classic "customer testimonial" format and pop that onto their blog or make it into a video. "Here’s our product. It is great. Here are customers who say it is great. Now buy some of our product." This just doesn't hold people's attention.

 

How interesting would a book or movie be were it to have this plot?:
Boy meets girl.
They fall in love.
They get married.

 

That's what most people do with their business writing....

Consumers don't care about you. They care about what you mean to them. And meaning comes from stories. When you tell your company story, you become more relatable. And when consumers relate to your brand, they'll buy from you.

 

Social media allows you to tell your stories at scale and build powerful relationships with your customers. In the past, storytelling to the masses was expensive and only possible via large media firms. Now, storytelling is free, or near-free, via accessible social media tools. 

 

Here are seven simple ways you can become a more effective storyteller on social media

...A story must have something unanticipated in it. Enough for you to exclaim, Oh! that's interesting. Something needs to happen that is unexpected (but not overly so). Of course great stories have so much more than that, but at a story's core you need things happening, people doing things, it's happening in a time and a place and there is something unanticipated.

LeFever's example starts out like a story, … she recently created a website (time marker). But what follows is merely a description.

 

As Mallary Jean Tenore beautifully puts in a recent Poynton article, "A story is a promise that the end is worth waiting for."...

Whatever happened to Cinderella's shoe? Who knows? It didn't go viral. Put another way: Story generation and the way we develop content has changed, and you must change with it.

Once upon a time, every brand and entrepreneur had a story to tell. The story line largely followed the same format. As in an elementary school English assignment, storytellers would introduce readers to the big five: characters, setting, plot, conflict, and resolution. Every story ended the same, too: "And they all lived happily ever after as leaders in the industry."

But frequently, the heart of the story—the meat that would resonate with consumers—was lost in the telling. Awareness might have been the key goal, but relevance and engagement with the target audience were often elusive. We just didn't dive that deep. And we couldn't. We were telling the story through 30-second broadcast spots or—when PR was employed—through earned media with word count restraints and editorial gatekeepers....