December 7, 2015 - No Comments!

Get Your Story Straight

A good story, well-told, makes good things happen. So tell yours.

Most brands already are busy promoting, tracking, analyzing, and any number of other –ings of their content. But what are many forgetting? The actual story.

How did this happen? How did we get to a place where companies worry more about how people access their content than what that actual content says? Better yet, how can we reverse the trend and get content people not only read, they seek out—customers not only interact with, they request more of?

Sell the story.

Whether it’s a book, movie, or website, people love a good story. Stories delight and entertain. And, most importantly, stories engage our brains. Researchers found that reading action-based passages stimulated the same areas of the brain as actually performing the action. Meaning that reading content about climbing a tower stimulates the brain as if actually climbing the tower.

Use this to leverage audience behavior. Instead of providing facts and statistics, provide a first- hand story of a customer experiencing and interacting with a product or service.

Providing the story around a product or service drives behavior and engages the customer in ways data and numbers cannot.

Oh the possibilities...

Companies love to talk about the benefits of a new product. How much better, faster, or amazing-er it is than the competition. But customers don’t respond to superlatives. I can almost hear you objecting. “But, but...” No buts. Customers are bombarded with these messages until they become meaningless.

So what should you say? Talk about the possibilities of your new product or service—show what you can accomplish by using them. Think about Apple commercials. They don’t talk about processor speed or megapixels. It’s people using their products to conquer the world.

For brands, this means no more content touting a 3% stronger product or 7.2% tastier. Produce content that illustrates enhanced strength and tastiness.

Take a chance.

Your audience demands content that is new and exciting. Quality content anticipates customer problems before they even know they are problems.

Take risks and reinvent your content. Not everything will work for you. Maybe the idea didn’t resonate; maybe it didn’t feel authentic for your audience. But you won’t know what works until you try it.

Do these three things and you will have content worth promoting, tracking, analyzing, and any other –ing you can dream up.

Published by: admin in Insights

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