Here’s Why and How You Need to Master The Art of Storytelling

Storytelling is an art, and requires creativity (a lot of it), vision (thoroughly), skill (of course), and practice. You cannot master this art in a sitting or two. It’s a trial-and-error process that takes a lot of practice. Storytelling has become a crucial step in successful marketing campaigns, it smartly sets vibrant brands apart from simple businesses and loyal consumers from one-time shoppers. Further, it’s the heart and lungs of inbound marketing.

If you can’t understand why it’s so important, consider this: what does a copywriter do? Sells with words. What do salesmen do? They sell by telling awesome stories. And the most popular copywriting story that at least I have heard of a billion times begins with the headline, “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano, But When I Started to Play!-” Read the story here if you know nothing about it and then proceed with this post. On a side note, you may or may not know that Salman Rushdie, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph Heller all started as copywriters before becoming excellent novelists!

One thing that moves people to action is good stories. Stories create sympathy and empathy that makes people willing enough to open their wallets for purchase and donations. Not just that, a good story can start a revolution of sorts, it is memorable and a great influential component that can increase sales. When you use a story in your content, you are essentially painting an imaginary town for the reader that they reside in, so that they can envision themselves using your product or service without even buying them.

For those who believe in scientific evidence and facts, this has been proven in theory so you can trust it. Let’s pick up our pens, keyboards, or whatever you use to write and start mastering the art of storytelling and dive in.

Why Storytelling?

Stories sell; you can tell stories to entertain, educate, or brag. They overshine data-driven powerpoint presentations because -

Stories simplify complex messages and solidify abstract concepts

Have you ever been confused by a brand new idea that’s doing the rounds on the internet? Say, a viral video of a man protesting something and the world is talking about it, while you’re wondering what the beef is about? Those ideas can be simplified by storytelling because they can help you understand the concept by putting you in the shoes of who it is around. It generates empathy and sympathy. For example, think of how your math teacher used to give you real-life examples to explain math problems, which was a much better way of doing it than just drawing characters and numbers on the chalk-board.

Apple has been able to describe computers and smartphones, which are rather complicated to a typical consumer, and has been successfully selling them too. They do so by using real-life stories to describe how the products benefit the users instead of using technical information that consumers rarely find enticing.

Stories bring us together

Cavemen used to imprint their stories and messages using characters and pictures. We don’t fully understand them and are still trying to decode them; but this draws attention to the fact that stories don’t have a language. They themselves are a language - very universally so. We all understand the hero, the heartbreak, the underdog, the emotions the characters go through, and everything else a story depicts. We, in fact, go through those emotions as we read a story or watch it in a film or a play. Sharing a story gives people a sense of commonality and community. They feel the same emotions as they are shown, in unison.

Despite the multitude of things that differentiate and divide us, stories can unite people, removing the differences that our religion, ethnicity, language, or political preferences make; stories bring us together through our common humanity.

TOMS shares stories of both customers and the people they serve through purchases. By this, they have greatly benefited and created a movement that hasn’t only increased sales but also built a community.

Stories inspire and motivate us

When brands are transparent and authentic, they are perceived as down-to-earth, which helps consumers to connect with them. Stories tap into people’s emotions and bare both the good and the bad and therefore motivate and inspire. Stories, eventually, drive action. They also foster brand loyalty. When you create a narrative around your brand, you aren’t only humanizing your brand, but you’re also inherently marketing your business.

Some brands also use inspiration as a selling tactic, but some like ModCloth have done it all too well. It shares the touching, real story of their founder, which makes the brand relatable and worth purchasing. Not only this, but it also inspires other founders and business owners.

How to Write a Good Story

What is a good story

Good and bad are relative terms. But there are a few components that we can’t negotiate on that make for a great storytelling experience for both the teller and the reader.

In all aspects, - Good stories are:

Entertaining. They keep the reader involved and intrigued in what’s going to happen next.
Educational. They spark curiosity and adds to the reader’s knowledge.
Universal. They are relatable and sync with the emotions and experiences that most people commonly undergo.
Organized. They follow a succinct structure of the organization that conveys the message easily and help readers to grasp it.
Memorable. They stick in the reader’s mind for the message they convey.

In essence, there are three components that make a story successful, no matter what message you’re trying to convey:

Characters: A story should feature at least one character, and this character is the key that audiences relate to. This component is the bridge between the storyteller and the audience. If you can put your audience through the very emotion that the character goes through, your job is done. The audience will be much more likely to comply with your call-to-action than otherwise.
Conflict: The conflict elicits emotions and connects the audience through relatable experiences. Though the conflicts vary in everybody’s lives, they are a lesson of how the character overcomes a challenge and, consequently, how the audience can too. When you’re telling a story, the power lies in how you’re conveying what you’re conveying. If a conflict isn’t there in a story, the story isn’t going to be received as a story.
Resolution: Each and every good story has an enclosure - whether or not it’s good. Your story’s conclusion should wrap up the story and provide context around the characters and conflicts, thereby leaving the audience with a call-to-action.

Now that we know what a good story is let’s talk about how we can craft a story.

Into The Storytelling Process

Storytelling is a creative process that tests your experience and skill. Just like painters, artists and sculptors and potters follow their own creativity when producing their art; you have to, too. They go by their process, and they know where to start, how to go forward developing their vision, and how to perfect it over time. Here are a few cues for you.

1. Know your audience

Who do you want to tell your story? Who is going to benefit and respond with the highest strength?

Before you create a final story, it’s important that you understand your readers and how they will respond to it and take further action.

Knowing your audience will require thorough research on your target market and define your buyer personas. This will get you acquainted with your readers, viewers, or listeners, which will make your story more relevant in its approach. You will be able to write in a direction that’s crucial for your audience after you build out the foundation of your story.

2. Define your message

However long your story is, it must have a message to deliver. And just like the foundation of a new structure, it must be established before the story’s structure is created.

Is your story trying to sell a product or raising funds? Is it explaining a service or advocating for a trending issue? What is the point of your story? To do this, you can maybe try to summarize your story in six to ten words first. If you aren’t able to do that, your story, unfortunately, doesn’t have a core message.

3. Decide the kind of story you want to tell

To determine the kind of story you’re telling, you can try to figure out how you want your audience to feel as they go about reading, listening or watching it.

This helps determine how the story is going to be weaved and what objective you’re pursuing.

So, if you intend to:

Incite action: Your story should describe how an action was successfully completed in the past and explain how the readers might be able to bring the same kind of change. Avoid excessive or exaggerated details so that your audience can focus on the action or the change that the story is encouraging.
Tell people about yourself: When you intend to tell a story that describes yourself or your brand, you should tell the genuine, humanizing struggles, wins, and failures too. Consumers nowadays appreciate and trust the brands that market with authenticity and storytelling stands without an exception.
Convey values: To convey values, you should aim to tell a story that taps into familiar feelings, emotions, characters, and situations so the readers can relate with and understand the story as it applies in their own life. This is particularly essential when discussing values that some people might not understand or agree with.
Foster community or collaborations: To do this, you need to tell a story that influences readers to discuss and share your story with others. You can use a situation or an experience that people can find relatable enough to say, “Me too!”. You want to keep the characters neutral to attract the widest variety of readers.
Educate or impart knowledge: You would have to create a story that tells a trial-and-error experience that can make the readers learn about a problem and how the solution was finally discovered and applied. You can also discuss other alternative solutions so the readers can take cues.

4. Establish a call-to-action

Objective and call-to-action are similar, but the call-to-action is used to establish the action that you want your audience to take after reading.

What exactly do you want the audience to do after they’ve consumed your story - do you want them to purchase something, subscribe to a newsletter, take a course, or donate money? Outline this alongside your objective to ensure that they line up.

So if your objective, for example, is to foster community, your call-to-action can be in the lines of ‘Tap the share button below’.

5. Chose the medium of your story

A story can take many shapes and forms. Some stories are watched, some read and others listened to. Your medium doesn’t only depend on the type of story you want to tell but also resources like time and money.

Here are some ways you can tell your story:

A written story can be told through articles, books or blog posts. These mostly include texts, but may include images. Written stories are the most affordable and attainable method of storytelling as they require just a pen and a paper or a word processing tool like Google Docs.
A spoken story is usually told in person, like a pitch, panel, or presentation. The most prominent example is TED Talks that are considered as spoken stories. Since spoken stories can’t be edited, they typically require more practice and skill to convey the message and induce emotions in others.
An audio story is spoken but also recorded so it can be edited - which makes it different from a spoken story. Audio stories are usually in podcast form, and because of advancing technology, creating an audio story is more affordable than ever.
A digital story can be told through media like video, interactive stories, games, and animation. This option is actually the most effective to elicit an emotional response, and therefore is also the most expensive. But don’t worry, the quality of the video doesn’t matter as much as the message you want to convey.

6. Write

Next, you write. Take out your pen and paper or your word processing tool to start crafting your story. Keep your message and objective straight in your head and simply start with adding detail and creative flair to your draft.

7. Share the story

Don’t shy from sharing and promoting your story. Like with any piece of content, creating is only half the battle since post-production is also an important step in storytelling.

Depending on your type and chosen medium, you should unquestionably share your story on social media and wherever you find fit, like emails and newsletters.

In addition, your stories can also be promoted on your blog or by guest posting on other platforms. Digital stories can be shared on YouTube and Vimeo. While spoken stories are best delivered in person, you can record a live performance to share later.

The more you share your story, the more engagement you can expect from your audience.

Takeaway

Storytelling is definitely a great way of conveying your message to your audience, whether it’s in the form of a blog, a podcast, a short film, or even simply a newsletter. Stories make us human, and we all connect to them if we can relate to them. So understanding your audience is also an essential part of the process along with the creative and practical aspects.

You can use the art of storytelling to move your audience to subscribe to your newsletters, take up a course, purchase a product or service, donate or just register on your website.

How to Generate Leads with Content Marketing

Are you struggling to generate leads for your business? If you’re looking for one of the best and most effective ways to generate leads for your organization, then content marketing is the right choice. Demand Metric revealed that content marketing alone could generate three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.

However, executing content marketing the wrong way can lead to poor results and frustration. In a recent study by CMI, only 30% of B2B marketers said organizations achieved successful results after implementing content marketing.

In terms of SEO, there is a massive demand from users/customers for high-value content for lead generation. If you meet that need and answer their questions, your users will trust you with whatever social media marketing you throw their way.

Aside from traditional advertising, blogging is the primary avenue through which both B2C and B2B marketers today generate leads in different social media marketing channels like blogs, videos, podcasts and social media sites.

Here are six practical ways you can start implementing to generate leads with content marketing.

Step 1: Create a buyer persona

Capturing the wrong leads is equivalent to capturing no leads. In fact, it’s worse because you’ll end up wasting your resources on a lead that’s unlikely to be your customer. When it comes to lead generation, it typically means generating the right leads. And to do this, you need to specify the type of people or audience you want as your leads.

A buyer persona is a fictional document that contains the details of your ideal customer or end-user. Some of these details are their: name, age, income group, gender, location, ambition and solutions they’re looking for. Your buyer personas should be as detailed as possible. You can have a few buyer personas depending on the product or services you provide. Your buyer persona can help attract the right type of people. You can preferably use the Facebook Audience Insights tool available through the Facebook Ads Manager to find more details about your ideal buyer persona or audience.

Step 2: Leverage content syndication

Having valuable and relevant content on your company blog or website can automatically bring in many leads for your business. But what if you have an obscure blog that nobody reads? The content you’ve invested a lot in would underperform and all your efforts would be wasted. A way out of this challenge is content syndication or content re-publishing.

What is content syndication?

Content syndication is the process of re-publishing your content on third-party websites that are more popular or have a higher domain authority than yours, in an effort to reach a much bigger audience. Syndication in the social media industry is nothing new. Before the internet, newspapers and magazines with large circulation and readership often published syndicated content provided by freelance writers and smaller publication house. Both benefited in the process. The smaller player gets a greater audience and exposure, whereas the large publication house gets good content, they can use to satisfy their audience, without having to invest resources in creating it.

In the age of the internet, it’s the same story. You can ‘recycle’ or ‘reuse your online content by syndicating it. And if it performs well, syndication can go a long way to promoting your content online, reaching a wider audience, driving traffic to your website and hopefully turning some of them into conversions. When you syndicate your content with the sole purpose of capturing leads to a website with your ideal audience - it’s a massive opportunity to capture many more leads. Companies like Netline offer such content syndication services. They syndicate your content in their B2B lead generation networks, helping to improve your lead acquisition efforts.

What about the big issue of duplicate content or plagiarism though? Syndicated content, as we know is duplicated content, and it can wreak havoc with your SEO. When ranking for SEO, Google is smart enough and will not rank multiple versions of the same content. According to Google's algorithm, it will only index one, and it is more likely to choose the version that appears on a high-traffic website. But most syndication companies use canonical tags to tell the search engines that your website content is the preferred version. This automatically eliminates the possibility of attracting a penalty.

Step 3: Provide lead magnets and content upgrades

Every business needs a lead magnet. Nowadays, you might have noticed people being too reluctant to share their contact information because their mailboxes are already full of junk. In order to capture that lead, you have to first provide value and lead magnets that can achieve that.

In simple terms, a lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their mobile number, email address or other contacts. Lead magnets help to solve a problem for your buyers and serve as a reason for visitors to release their personal details. Lead magnets usually offer a small piece of digital, downloadable content, such as a free PDF checklist, ebook, report, whitepaper, video, course, quiz, webinars etc.

What makes a good lead magnet?

They solve a specific problem
They’re short enough to be used immediately
They’re instantly accessible
They solve a real-life problem
They promise a quick win

Content Upgrades

Another similar concept in content marketing is the content upgrade. Content upgrades are pieces of content offered to a page visitor that are relevant to the page content. Or a bonus content matched with the topic of a particular article on the blog the visitor is reading. Technically, they’re a type of lead magnet, but they have proved to generate higher conversions because they’re closely related to what the visitor is currently reading.

In some cases, this could just be a PDF copy of the present page the visitor is reading or another format of the page content that readers may need for future reference.

What type of results can you expect from content upgrades? Blogger Brian Dean implemented a content upgrade and achieved a remarkable 785.01% increase in conversions just within a month. Yes, the figures are true; you get more subscribers by using the content upgrade technique.

Step 4: Creating high-converting landing pages

Most landing pages on the internet do not perform well and they may only occasionally get a few opt-ins. There are a lot of underperforming landing pages that aren’t maximizing leads and converting them into customers, which is essentially just a waste of resources.

The first thing that you need to understand is the anatomy of a perfect landing page. The page should begin with a compelling headline, have a captivating opening and then build interest as readers scrolls down through the copy. This format will help you create more compelling content for any social media channel you choose to release on. What you need to take note of is that the focus should be on the usability, not the aesthetics. When people click from social media channels, such as Intagam or Facebook, you want them to have a pleasant user experience. The landing page should therefore be designed to ensure the page is strong, persuasive and professional for all visitors opening the website page.

Moreover, your landing page also has to be super fast. In fact, recent statistics provided by KISSmetrics show that a one second delay in landing page load time will most likely reduce conversion rate by 7%. So, ensure that your landing page is super fast.

Here are some of the best practices when designing a landing page.

Remove the navigation bar

One of the major mistakes marketers make is that they distract their landing page visitors from converting. The visitors should not be provided any opportunity to click away from the landing page. In fact they should only have the option to click away from the landing page without converting.

A landing page visitor should only have two options: either to close the page or convert.

The navigation bar from the landing page should be removed. By adding this feature, Yuppiechef increased signups by 100%.

Make the CTA button visible.

The color and position of your CTA button needs to stand out on the landing page. You want your visitors to click it, and so it should grab their attention in order for them to do so.

Run A/B tests

Landing pages are never perfect. Therefore, you need to keep testing to improve your conversions constantly. Using the A/B test, you can test different elements on your web page and track their effects on conversions. Some page elements you can test are page copy, call to action, images and number of form fields. Here, it’s important to note that while testing, you should only test one element at a time. This will help you to track the changes, actually affecting your conversions.

Step 5: Use guest blogging to capture leads

Guest blogging is a valuable activity to improve brand awareness and gain good quality backlinks. Guest blogging is a great way to reach out to other blogs and steal some of their loyal members to your blog, so leverage it. However, one advantage that most marketers fail to make use of is capturing leads through guest posts. How can that be done?

Most websites allow you to leave a link in the author bio section after a guest post. Taking advantage of this option, you can leave a link to the landing page by providing a lead magnet to your guest post readers rather than a normal link to your home page. The key here is to make your lead magnet relevant to your guest post. You can also share the link in the body of your post where it is relevant.

Step 6: Target long-tail keywords with the right intent

If you run a mid-size business, then targeting long-tail keywords is the way to go. Firstly, it’s easy to detect these long-tail keywords. Secondly, there’s low competition for these keywords. To win the SEO game, targeting long-tail keywords is a good option as they tend to rank higher in Google’s search results. It’s all about targeting keywords that your competitors have either neglected or don’t know how to discover and use themselves. Tools like SEMrush can be used to carry out keyword research, and can effectively help you find the long-tail keywords a potential lead might use in search engines.

Once you have shortlisted long-tail keywords, you should create your content to target these keywords. Furthermore, you should also try to optimize your website page for these keywords. This includes adding the keyword to the headlines, url, first few paras, subheadings, image alt text, and image name.