There was this woman. She was a hard worker. In fact, you’ve probably never seen anyone that worked as hard as this woman.
She wanted to grow her business and she understood that meant sacrifice. So she sacrificed time with friends and family so that she could create content for her business.
Day and night she was up creating amazing content. She knew this was the content that was going to bring her a flood of customers and she also knew she had to be patient.
After one month, not much was happening, but everyone had told her that it takes time.
After two months, there still wasn’t much happening but patience was key.
After three months, she started to grow concerned. She had spent 90 days straight creating content but nothing was happening.
She was following all of the steps that the experts said she needed to follow. What was wrong?
One day, she was talking to her friend who also owned a business and who was incredibly successful. She told her what was happening and her friend offered to take a look at her content.
Almost immediately a look of dread washed over her friend’s face.
“What’s the point of this content”, her friend asked. “Where’s the story?”
Story? What was she talking about?
This is usually the reaction that anyone has when talking about storytelling marketing. When you’re doing marketing why do you need a story?
All Content Is the Same
Every person, brand, and company is creating content. They are creating content at such a phenomenal pace that none of us can keep track of it all.
And a lot of them are getting really good at creating content that follows specific steps. They test 1000s of pieces of content to find the ones that convert the best.
They have content creation down to a science.
Throw in the use of AI for content creation and you begin to have a lot of content that feels similar. Just check out any Google search result and you’ll find it hard to differentiate between the first result and the tenth.
This makes it almost impossible to stand out in the crowd and so instead of trying to create better content, everyone is simply creating more content.
Fortunately, there is a way to stand out but it requires that you look at content differently.
What We Gravitate To
Look at different brands online. This isn’t the 60s where people are looking for a brand that does something practical.
People are gravitating towards brands that represent something that they believe in.
When ConvertKit was getting started, it looked like it didn’t stand a chance of making a dent in the Email Service Provider market. But what they did was smart.
They targeted content creators and not businesses.
By focusing on content creators they built up a reputation of a company that wanted to help the individual find success. That content creators were the ones who were going to rule the world and because of this people flocked to them.
They built a story that people could believe in and that’s exactly what people gravitate towards.
Those who tell the best story and are able to get it out into the world are the ones who win.
So much of the content that is being produced today lacks a story which means people treat it like they do a billboard on the side of the highway. Check the info and move on.
The challenge is keeping people’s attention so that you can do what is needed to convert them into customers and simply giving them information isn’t enough.
They need to have a purpose for stick around and that usually comes in the form of a belief or worldview.
We are constantly seeking out others who share our worldviews so that we can grow our Tribe of people that we want to be around. And while brands aren’t people, they still get to communicate like everyone else online.
But really, how necessary is it to tell stories? What if people just want information?
The answer to this question lies in something called The Pocket Business Framework.
Why Storytelling in Content Marketing Is So Important
For over a decade we’ve been building brands and helping others do the same. Over time you get to see how some people fail while others succeed and that has allowed us to create a framework which defines success or failure.
It’s called The Pocket Business Framework and it’s a framework that every single business in the world follows whether they know it or not. It’s a simple framework that helps to define what your content must do.
- Get them to notice you
- Get them to pay attention to you
- Get them to trust you
- Convert that trust into money
That’s it.
For every person and brand that we work with, we go through this framework to see how effective their content marketing is.
Looking at the framework you can see that most brands spend time on getting people to notice them. That’s why there is so much emphasis on hooks, clickbait titles, and thumbnails.
They make it seem like getting people to notice you is the only step. But it’s also the reason why so many people bounce after a couple of seconds.
Because guess what the algorithm has taught us? That there is someone else just a screen action away from getting our attention so if the current person isn’t doing a good job we can easily say goodbye.
And this is why storytelling is so important in your content marketing.
People pay attention to stories but only the ones that resonate with them.
This leads to the next question how do you create stories that resonate with an audience?
The Story Playing in Their Mind
Your customer wakes up every day playing a story in their mind. The better you get at telling that story, the better you’ll get at creating more customers.
Think about when we share an entertaining piece of social media with someone. Most of the time we share it because we can relate to it.
If you’re a mom you might know how this works because every social network has a mom space where moms show how ridiculous their days are.
You see a piece of content and say, “That’s me!” and so now you have to share it.
That’s storytelling marketing. It doesn’t have to be an Aesop Fable. It simply has to be something that your customer can relate to.
This post started with a simple story meant to relate to you. That doesn’t mean the rest of the post has to appear as a regular story but this post is still telling a story.