“I Don’t Want to Listen to You, But I’ll Listen to Your Stories.”
Find the stories in your organization. Then turn them into marketing content.
The biggest problems around creating new, interesting content are:
- Finding time to do it consistently.
- Finding talent to do it “magnetically.”
- Finding an angle to do it “engagingly.”
These problems go away if you think in terms of stories. Prospects won’t listen to you, but they’ll listen to your stories.
So, What’s a Story?
Tell the truth and make it rhyme.
Songwriter Terry Black quotes that line from a 1990s Pirates of the Mississippi song. A few years before that, Homer conveyed The Iliad and The Odyssey in much the same way: he told the truth and made it rhyme. All the poets in all the languages do it.
Why? Because it’s:
- consistent, as Steve Shaw points out on his Article Marketing Blog
- magnetic, as Jason Cohen describes on Copyblogger (point #9)
- engaging, as in the Chris Baggott Guide to Blogging
But most of all, it’s the way we want to hear things, and the way in which we best remember them almost from the beginning of our lives.
As a marketing manager, you need to set the tone and message for your content. Can you keep it coming back to stories? The same format you’ve known since you were a toddler?
Case Studies: Stories out of Whack?
Think about the last case study you read. Wasn’t it a story gone wrong? Some writer took all the fun out of a perfectly good story by shoehorning it into a problem-solution-result structure. “It makes for better reading,” he said.
What if he had simply told the truth and made it rhyme? Wouldn’t it have been more interesting? For that matter, why bother publishing the case study if there’s no story to it?
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it.
