It’s the Friday Fix --chock full of vitamins and now with fewer calories! If you’re like me and are ashamed of the work you’ve been doing on leftover Halloween candy, then you’re seeing anything nutrient-laden as a lifeline (which brings us to the Friday Fix). Quite a few writers this week return their focus to the importance of storytelling. But why is storytelling so important? Well, for one, it helps people relate; for example, whether or not you gorged on candy like your 5 year-old nephew and I did, you find the experience amusing and relatable, right? So what else does storytelling do for content marketing? Read on and find out!
The Art of Storytelling in 6 Content Marketing Context Questions
In a lot of ways, though storytelling is an ancient art, its role in content marketing is still relatively new and is thus being explored. For these reasons, some people are missing the main points. According to J-P De Clerck, sure, they’re getting plot on a page, but storytelling in content marketing has to do more –it has to raise questions as it continually evolves. So, if one of your questions is, “What’s the difference?” this article is for you.
Visual Storytelling for Brands
If you’re just now getting on the storytelling bandwagon, the idea of telling a story visually might feel overwhelming, but really, the fact that stories can be told in multiple mediums is great because some stories are simply better received in visual mediums. Maria Peagler breaks down the art of visual storytelling and even talks about other important considerations like which social media and other outlets are best for which demographics.
The Argument for Adopting a Storytelling Structure for Your Content Marketing
Storytelling in content marketing is a real heavy-hitter. Why? Because, as Kaitlin Stich points out, stories provide an opportunity to audiences to play active roles in them, which leads the audience to feel more like they’re being connected with rather than marketed to. In this piece, Kaitlin also lays out the essence of four storytelling structures that will serve as a foundation for your best-spun yarns.
4 Lessons on Video Storytelling from Pet Brands
In this article, Kaitlyn Smith provides examples of how pet brands use video storytelling to evoke more emotions than the ASPCA’s Sarah McLaughlin commercial. She shares Purina and Buzzfeed’s obscenely successful two-minute video, “A Cat’s Guide to Taking Care of you Human”, which will make you instantly forgive your cat for what it did to your new rug. One important thing Kaitlyn touches on is that it’s not enough to engage your audience with humor; to make them sing like canaries, you also have toappeal to their emotions.
Coldwell Banker Combats ‘Listing Zombies’ with New, Narrative-Rich Website
According to E.J. Schultz, listing zombies are those real estate marketers who want to make a sell and move on the next client. The follies of listing zombies can easily befall you; likewise, the cleverness of Coldwell Banker’s sentimental storytelling approach can also boost your ratings. In a nutshell, Coldwell’s approach involves making houses homes by sharing real stories like how a husband went from carrying his bride across the threshold to a proud new daddy and carried his newborn baby across the same threshold three years later. Check out Schultz’s article to see how you can bring your storytelling home for your audience.
How to Build a Lead Generation Machine Online with Content Marketing
If you’ve been following the Fix, you’ll have noticed a few things that are constantly coming up. Two of those things are storytelling and social media; a third is the very important idea of quality. This two-part post by Stephen Fairley covers eight best practices that will help you help yourself. Though Stephen also links to part one of this to-be-continued post, you can get to it faster by clicking here.
10 Quick Answers to Your Best Social Media Questions
This week, Brad Kuenn steps up to the plate and candidly answers 10 important questions to social media –you could literally turn this article into a PowerPoint and present it to your boss on why –YES—you need Google+ and that social media and brand engagement go hand in hand. He also covers how you can measure social media ROI and use Twitter (both are explained in such a way that will please your boss (who may or may not understand a word you’re saying (#likemymom)) who will be pleased with your apparent expertise and will give the green flag to make social media part of your content marketing strategy.
Content in Crisis: Content Marketing vs. Sales Enablement
Content marketing success is like an A-list party that everyone is trying to get into. John Koetsier looks closer at the guest list and draws some logical conclusions one of which is that not all ways to get invited to the party work for everyone. Sure, some people have an automatic in because of who they are; others are invited because they’re super unique. Everyone else, well, they still need to find their niche before they can make the guest list. So, if you’re trying to achieve content marketing success, read this article and then reconfigure your method accordingly.
The Fourth Wave of Content Marketing
I love it when a show has a character who speaks entirely in business jargon: “If you analyze the quantifiers for this problematic schema, you’ll see there’s a decreasing scope of productivity in the lunch meat sector.” All I got out of that was “lunch meat,” and it’s my sentence. The thing is, a lot of content producers are the same way…they’re doing it, but they don’t get it. Nicola Kemp explains (in perfectly clear detail) some major missteps (like Joan Rivers’ posthumous endorsement for the iPhone 6) in these formulaic content marketing approaches along with directions for the right steps.
Credit: Launch Marketing
Only 16% of B2B Marketers Target Revenue as a Top Goal of Content Marketing
If you can’t seem to find the platform 9 ¾ entryway that leads to content marketing greatness, it might be because your priorities are skewed. For example, if you’re trying to see revenue results too quickly, you’re missing some other important steps along the way like lead generation and brand awareness (this is the marketing equivalent of proposing to your eHarmony match on the second date. Don’t do that.). Read on as Kelsey Jones shares other stats and commonalities from the B2B Content Marketing Spotlight Report for you to check yourself against.
Developing a Multilingual Content Marketing Strategy
Hats off to Christian Amo for keeping this conversation going; we posted previously about why you want to incorporate multilingual elements into your content strategy, and this article not only reiterates why that is really important, it also lays out a strategy for going multilingual if you’re ready to capture a whole new audience.
Amy Delcambre is a freelance content and travel writer from Mobile, Alabama with a Master's in Creative Writing. When she's not painting the page with nouns, verbs, and adverbs, she's slaying grammar beasts as a freelance editor and saving the world one sentence fragment at a time teaching university writing classes. In her free time, Amy enjoys cooking, traveling, and testing which plant species best survive prolonged neglect.
Connect with Amy: LinkedIn