But fear not; there’s a secret weapon that can lift your brand above the noise: customer storytelling. It’s not just about spinning a good tale; it’s about building trust and creating connections by allowing your customers to do the talking for you.

Because it turns out that only 30% of consumers trust companies. That’s not a great percentage. So, if you run ads listing the six reasons consumers should choose your product, the consumer won’t believe you. However, if you have a verified customer post the six reasons they love your product, consumers will start to trust you.

And companies that are able to gain the trust of their customers outsell their competitors by up to “400% in terms of total market value” and customers are 88% more likely to buy again if they trust the brand.

Sure, you should still talk about yourself, share your origin story on your “About Us” page, and fill your product pages with all the product features your heart desires. But when it comes to telling potential customers why they should buy your product, the message is better received when it comes from actual customers.

While there are countless reasons why customers should be at the center of your marketing strategy, here are the top four reasons customer storytelling will help your business.

1. People trust customers (and even influencers)

Let me tell you a story of when I was trying to choose a travel credit card. I had been researching for weeks, and I just couldn’t decide. Then, a travel influencer on Instagram said she used the Capital One Venture Card. My research was then complete, and I immediately got the Capital One Venture Card.

Was that the best travel credit card for me? Who knows? But someone I trusted said it had good travel rewards, so I went for it.

The thing is, this story isn’t unique. According to a study from Oracle and Brent Leary, “80% of consumers have purchased products in direct response to social media content.” When it comes down to it, consumers are skeptical of businesses, so it’s no surprise they trust social media influencers, peers, and celebrities to give them advice on new products.

The reason influencer marketing is so effective is because influencers have already built a loyal following of people who trust their opinions. So, when an influencer introduces a product, their followers assume they have used the product and are promoting it because they love it. And most of the time, their followers can ignore the fact that the influencer may be getting kickbacks for promoting the product.

The real value of customer storytelling stems from the fact that real people don’t talk like brands. Instead of highlighting the latest technology, newest features, or energy efficiency, real people talk about how the product makes their lives better.

2. Big brands use customer storytelling because it works

I know what you’re thinking. Of course, big, established brands can rely on word-of-mouth marketing—they’re already household names. The truth is, customer-centric storytelling is a sound marketing strategy for any company. But just for fun, let’s check out some word-of-mouth marketing examples.

Tesla’s customer-driven marketing strategy

When was the last time you saw a Tesla ad? The answer should be “never,” because they don’t use traditional advertising and don’t spend any money on paid ads or endorsements. Tesla’s entire marketing strategy relies on customer referrals. Initially, Tesla offered extravagant rewards for referrals, including exclusive access to events, early delivery of new models, and even limited-edition vehicles. But they revamped the program in 2019 to offer more attainable incentives like Supercharging credits, FSD access, and discounts on new vehicles.

Duolingo’s polyglot fans

Duolingo acquires about 80% of its users through word-of-mouth marketing. Duolingo’s gamified approach, coupled with a witty social media presence, has created a loyal and enthusiastic user base. The app’s ability to quickly demonstrate language proficiency has fueled a viral loop, with satisfied learners sharing their success stories and encouraging friends to join.

This organic growth is evident in Duolingo’s impressive user acquisition costs, which are significantly lower than industry averages. By focusing on creating a product people love and leveraging the power of social sharing, Duolingo has proven that word-of-mouth can be a formidable force in driving business growth.

Dyson’s vocal customer base

By consistently introducing groundbreaking products like the bagless vacuum cleaner, the bladeless fan, and the Supersonic hair dryer, Dyson has cultivated a reputation for technological superiority. This innovation, combined with a strong emphasis on design and engineering, has created a loyal customer base eager to share their experiences.

While Dyson launched their brand in the 1990s with traditional marketing, they now let product quality and customer satisfaction drive word-of-mouth. Their focus on WOM marketing has intensified in recent years as social media platforms have amplified consumer voices.

3. Customer marketing strategies provide long-term SEO value

We already mentioned how your “About Us” page and product pages are the perfect places on your website to toot your own horn. These pages are also great for SEO because they’re packed with keywords and phrases. But you also want to include customer-generated content on your site so the SERPs can be filled with authentic, trustworthy content about your brand. Here are some customer-focused pages you might want to add to your website:

Customer reviews

Did you know that 90% of customers read reviews before they buy a product? When you allow your customers to speak for your brand, you get more user-generated content on your site and more engaged followers. It also helps improve your SEO and provides fresh content for search engines to spider.

These reviews can either be in written or video form. And always make sure to post your video reviews to YouTube so you can rank for keywords in two places.

Bonus points: Scour social media for customer reviews and mentions of your brand. Be sure to engage with your customers (both happy and angry), so these interactions will also end up in search results.

Case studies

While case studies aren’t traditionally written by customers, they do allow you to show potential consumers how other people use your product to build their business and make their life easier. If you’re a B2B brand, try to highlight well-known and trusted brands who use your product or service.

Testimonials

Testimonials are the fancy cousin of customer reviews. Brands usually request written or spoken statements from their happy customers to feature on their websites. While they’re not as candid as a traditional customer review, they do provide customer-centric content.

4. Word-of-mouth marketing still reigns supreme

As mentioned above, only 30% of consumers trust companies. On the other hand, 88% of consumers trust brands when a friend or family member recommends it. This means that if you want your customers to trust you, they need to hear about your brand or product from someone else, preferably a trusted friend or family member.

And the first step to building great word-of-mouth around your brand is to create a great product that people want to tell their friends about. When you provide quality products and good service, your customers will talk about your brand if they have a good experience.

Today, people are all too ready to share their opinions about products and brands. The trick is to provide a good experience to each of your customers, so they’ll want to share all their positive thoughts and feelings about your brand. Inspire rave reviews that can spark your next customer-driven marketing strategy. And the next time you think about creating a marketing campaign around your latest product features, consider focusing on your customers and highlighting their experiences.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs About Customer Storytelling

How can businesses implement customer storytelling if they don’t have a large customer base yet?

Small businesses can start by leveraging testimonials from their earliest customers. They can also engage with their audience on social media, encourage satisfied customers to share their experiences, and use these stories in their marketing materials. Partnering with micro influencers can also be effective.

What is a micro influencer?

A micro-influencer is a social media user who has a smaller, yet highly engaged, following, typically between 1,000 to 100,000 followers. They are often considered experts or enthusiasts in a specific niche, such as beauty, fitness, technology, or travel. Their recommendations are often seen as more credible and authentic, as they usually promote products they genuinely use and like.

What are some effective ways to encourage customers to share their stories?

Businesses can create incentives such as discounts, contests, or loyalty programs for customers who share their stories. Additionally, they can make it easy for customers to leave reviews by providing links and clear instructions. Highlighting customer stories on social media and in newsletters can also encourage others to share their experiences.

What are some common mistakes businesses make when using customer storytelling?

Common mistakes include over-editing customer stories to the point where they lose authenticity, not obtaining proper permissions from customers before using their stories, failing to follow up with customers after they share their stories, and not integrating customer stories across various marketing channels for maximum impact. Businesses should ensure stories remain genuine and respect customers’ contributions and privacy.

For more tips on customer-focused marketing, subscribe to The Content Strategist.

The post 4 Reasons To Add Customer Storytelling to Your Marketing Mix appeared first on Contently.

Spotify’s Wrapped feature, which delivers a personalized breakdown of users’ listening trends from the year, still holds the top spot when it comes to most engaging year-in-review content — so much so that many of us, jokingly or not, are already anticipating what our 2024 Wrapped is going to look like in the middle of the summer. And the format is so successful that even its many imitators have gained traction. Other music streaming platforms like YouTube Music and Tidal eventually released their own versions, and even non-music brands, like the fitness app Peloton, followed suit.

It’s no wonder these year-end user-generated content campaigns have garnered such positive feedback; they are endlessly shareable, and users love personalized experiences. But, of course, creating your own highly individualized wrap-up could be a huge undertaking, depending on both your industry and how much customer data you have access to. Here’s how to implement the spirit of these highly personalized year-in-review reports in your own EOY campaigns.

Plan your year-in-review content now

The earlier you start planning your year-in-review campaign, the more intentional it will feel for your audience. That doesn’t mean you need to get it ready to publish now — after all, there’s still plenty of the year left to go, and you don’t want your review to feel incomplete. But starting now gives you ample time to research what you want to include in your review and create a workable outline to flesh out come late November or early December fully.

Starting as soon as possible is especially important when culling data from different sources. You’ll want to set parameters for all stakeholders to adhere to, such as sticking to data from a set period of time (perhaps January 1 to October 31 of this year). Your proprietary data is a great place to start. For instance, marketing and engineering can give you customer and user insights, and finance can give you detailed spending reports.

Shopify is a great example of a B2B brand breaking down high-level data into a digestible year in review that’s relevant to the goals of its base. And with a combination of written content, video, and data visualizations, Shopify’s Commerce Trends report gives users a choose-your-own-adventure experience — while still remaining aesthetically consistent and without being overwhelming.

Personalize your recap for your audience

A year-in-review report is a great opportunity to encourage prolonged engagement and brand loyalty. It’s a place to share the value you’ve provided for your audience — not brag about your revenue numbers. (Though an internally shared wrap report with company-wide wins isn’t a bad idea, either!)

And even if you’re not putting together an individualized experience, you can still tailor your wrap-up to your target audience. A brand-wide year in review can still feel personal for users by focusing on their favorite, most-purchased, or top-reviewed products, or industry trends and insights that will affect their purchasing decisions in the year ahead.

You could even create a year-end recap that hones in on geographical location, age group, college students, or some other demographic. Google’s Local Year In Search allows users to access the year’s search trends in their hometown, or anywhere they feel like searching. This is a strategic way to provide a personalized customer experience without creating an individual-specific breakdown.

One of my personal favorite examples of year-in-review content (which I look out for every December) is the New York Times’ “Best Books of the Year” hub. Not only does it provide a roundup of its top book reviews from the past year, but it also provides breakdowns by genre. Users can select which sections to read based on their own interests.

Highlight your best work — while boosting traffic

Finally, a year-in-review can be a strategic way to share your brand’s best work from the past year, whether that’s blogs, research, graphics, etc. — and boost traffic to that content while you’re at it. A retrospective can help generate a sense of “playing catchup” among your audience. Below is a great example from New York’s The Cut: by highlighting their “most-read” stories, they can play off of their readers’ sense of FOMO (and deliver them excellent content at the same time).

You can also choose to repurpose existing content in a different format. For instance, if your data security firm has published lots of research this year, you could highlight the top findings in a quick-hit video or infographic for social. Or, if you have been keeping a blog filled with consumer finance content, you could create a landing page hub linking to these blog posts, positioning them resources for anyone looking to improve their finances in 2025 and beyond.

When to avoid a year-in-review campaign

Of course, year-in-review content might not always make sense. Every business owner knows that there are good years and bad years — and if there aren’t enough positives to share, it might not be worth dwelling on the negatives.

Also, if you are considering providing individualized year-end recaps to your audience, be careful about what data to focus on. Facebook ran into hot water when its “On This Day” feature started reminding people of bad memories, like sharing an announcement about the death of a family member. You want your wrap-up to be something customers look forward to, not dread.

Finally, avoid bait-and-switch tactics here. One reason Shopify is such a trusted name in the ecommerce space is because of its credibility as an industry expert. Its Commerce Trends report isn’t peppered with CTAs to get started with the platform — it simply sticks to the facts and what’s actually important to its target audience.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs on year-in-review campaigns

How can smaller businesses with limited data resources create year-in-review content?

Smaller businesses can focus on key metrics and customer feedback they do have, even if it’s less comprehensive. Highlighting a few significant achievements or trends can still engage their audience.

What tools can be used to gather and analyze data for a year-in-review marketing campaign?

There are various tools available, such as Google Analytics for web traffic, CRM software for customer insights, and financial software for revenue tracking. These tools help streamline data collection and analysis.

How can a year-in-review report be promoted to maximize engagement?

Promoting the report through email newsletters, social media, and on the company’s website can increase visibility. Collaborations with influencers or industry partners can also help reach a wider audience.

Feel like you’ve missed a year’s worth of content marketing strategies? Catch up by reading The Content Strategist.

The post Pull Off a Year-in-Review Campaign People Will Actually Share appeared first on Contently.

5 brainy benefits of novelty in marketing

By understanding and leveraging the power of novelty, you can elevate your brand’s storytelling, making narratives more memorable and impactful. It’s also something to keep top of mind when adding contributors to your team — you want skilled writers who excel at being original.

Let’s explore some of the reasons why novelty is essential for content marketers and how it can transform your narratives into unforgettable experiences.

Reason 1: Dopamine delights us

Novelty triggers the release of dopamine, the “happy hormone,” in our brains, creating excitement and anticipation. This neurotransmitter is crucial for pleasure, motivation, and reward. When your audience experiences something new, it stimulates their brain’s reward circuits, making them feel good and encouraging them to seek out more.

Incorporating novel elements into your storytelling harnesses this dopamine-driven response. Your audience will enjoy the story more, remember it better, and keep coming back for more. Novelty keeps your storytelling fresh and exciting, ensuring your audience remains hooked.

Reason 2: Novelty builds stronger brain bridges

Novel storytelling techniques actively engage the brain, prompting the formation and reinforcement of neural pathways. This process, known as neuroplasticity, is essential for learning and memory retention.

When exposed to novel storytelling elements, the brain processes this fresh information more deeply, creating stronger connections between neurons. Techniques like non-linear timelines or multiple perspectives require closer attention, enhancing cognitive engagement and memory retention.

By incorporating novelty, you not only make your narrative more compelling but also ensure your audience remembers and reflects on it long after they’ve finished reading or watching.

Reason 3: Unexpected elements are more memorable

Novelty makes stories more memorable. The brain is naturally drawn to new and unexpected elements, which trigger surprise and intrigue. These elements create mental “hooks” that make stories easier to remember.

Surprise and intrigue evoke strong emotional responses, enhancing memory formation. Emotions act as powerful memory enhancers, making stories that evoke shock, amazement, or delight more memorable.

Incorporating novel elements into storytelling not only captivates your audience but also makes your stories more memorable, ensuring your message stands out.

Reason 4: Mental agility moves your audience

Novelty in marketing storytelling enhances cognitive functions like problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity. Introducing new and unexpected elements engages your audience’s minds, fostering mental agility and making them more receptive to your message.

Novel scenarios require the brain to evaluate different possibilities, sharpening decision-making skills. Presenting unique ideas stimulates creativity, inspiring your audience to explore their own creative thinking.

By engaging cognitive functions through novelty, you make your audience more receptive to your message, leading to a more profound and lasting impact.

Reason 5: New ideas are the opposite of boring

The constant stream of content bombarding audiences can lead to boredom and disengagement. Novelty combats boredom by introducing fresh and engaging experiences that keep audiences coming back for more.

Boredom occurs when the brain is under-stimulated. Novelty actively engages the brain, capturing attention and piquing curiosity. This heightened alertness keeps audiences engaged and eager to see what happens next.

By consistently incorporating new and exciting elements into your messaging, you build anticipation and excitement, fostering loyalty and repeated engagement. Novelty ensures your storytelling remains dynamic and interesting, leading to a more engaged and loyal audience.

Incorporating novelty marketing into your content strategy

Incorporating novelty into your content strategy is integral for maintaining your audience’s interest and engagement. Here are some practical brainstorming techniques to help you infuse novelty into your storytelling.

Brainstorming techniques

• Take a new angle on familiar topics.
  • Reframe common subjects from a different perspective.
  • Introduce contrasting views to stimulate discussion.
  • Discuss current trends by comparing them to historical events or predicting their future impact.
• Experiment with different content formats.
  • Create short, engaging videos or animations.
  • Use infographics to present data visually.
  • Incorporate interactive elements like quizzes or polls.
  • Explore audio content through podcasts or live webinars.
  • Encourage user-generated content to provide fresh perspectives.
• Feature unexpected voices or perspectives.
  • Invite guest writers or experts to contribute.
  • Share stories and testimonials from customers.
  • Offer a behind-the-scenes look at your business.
  • Highlight diverse voices within your industry.

Practical tips for implementing novelty in marketing

• Schedule regular brainstorming sessions.
• Solicit feedback from your audience.
• Plan a diverse content calendar.
• Stay updated on industry trends and popular culture.

By weaving novelty into your content strategy, you can create a dynamic and engaging storytelling experience that captivates your audience. Experiment with different angles, formats, and voices to keep your content fresh and your audience hooked. Novelty not only combats boredom but also enhances the impact and memorability of your stories.

The dangers of going too far with novelty

While novelty is a powerful tool in storytelling, it is important to use it judiciously. Going too far with novelty can have unintended consequences that may harm your overall message and audience engagement. Overloading your content with too many new or unexpected elements can lead to confusion and overwhelm your audience, making it difficult for them to follow the story or grasp the core message.

Excessive novelty can undermine the consistency of your brand identity. If the novel elements are not aligned with your brand’s values and voice, they can create a disjointed experience that may confuse your audience about what your brand stands for. This inconsistency can erode trust and diminish the impact of your messaging. If they come to expect a continuous stream of surprises, the impact of each new element diminishes over time. This can lead to a situation where novelty loses its effectiveness as a tool for engagement and retention.

So, while novelty is essential for keeping your storytelling fresh and engaging, don’t forget to always align it with your brand identity. Moderation and strategic integration of novel elements will ensure that your stories remain impactful and your audience remains connected and loyal to your brand.

Improve your storytelling and marketing by keeping content novel and fresh

Novelty is a powerful tool in storytelling that significantly enhances audience engagement and retention. By incorporating novel elements, you leverage several key benefits, making your storytelling more effective and memorable.

As a content creator, embracing novelty and experimenting with new ideas is essential for keeping your audience engaged. Don’t be afraid to take risks and try different approaches. Whether through unique plot twists, innovative formats, or diverse voices, novelty can transform your content and make it stand out.

The key to successful storytelling lies in your ability to surprise, delight, and engage your audience. By weaving novelty into your content strategy, you enhance your content’s quality and build a loyal, captivated audience. Explore the endless possibilities that novelty offers—your audience will thank you for it.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about novelty in marketing

How can content creators measure the impact of novelty in their storytelling?

Content creators can measure the impact of novelty by tracking engagement metrics such as time spent on page, social shares, and audience feedback through surveys and comments.

What are some examples of successful brands or campaigns that have effectively used novelty in marketing?

Nike’s “Dream Crazy” campaign and Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” are examples of successful use of novelty in storytelling, as they introduced unique, unexpected elements that captivated audiences.

What tools or platforms can help content creators generate and implement novel ideas?

New generative AI tools like Google Gemini and ChatGPT are great for brainstorming ideas. When the time comes for creating content, you can turn to platforms like Canva for creative design and Contently for content planning and collaboration to generate and implement novel ideas.

The Content Strategist has all the resources you need to ensure your content remains novel and engaging. Subscribe today to get the latest insights delivered directly to your inbox!

The post 5 Brainy Reasons Novelty in Marketing Helps Your Message Land appeared first on Contently.

You might know Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer as a stop-motion animated special that streams on various networks around the holidays. Or maybe you know the words to the song that plays on loop in elevators and in retailers from Thanksgiving to New Year’s.

But before Rudolph became famous through television and his theme song and a verified Instagram account (just kidding about that last one)… Rudolph was a viral marketing program for a then-major U.S. retailer. Well, “viral” in 1939 terms.

A Quick Recap of the Rudolph Story

Rudolph is a young reindeer buck born in the North Pole with an unusual superpower: a red nose that glows. It’s bright as a headlamp.

Yet no one celebrates Rudolph or his headlamp of a nose. He is mocked by his peers. His flight coach casts him out of the squad. His parents are embarrassed by him.

Only a hot young doe named Clarice shows him any kindness.

Then one Christmas Eve, heavy fog threatens to ground Santa and his sleigh full of toys. A skinny, cranky Santa gathers together the community of North Pole elves and reindeer, intending to deliver the bad news: The reindeer can’t fly through the fog! Christmas will be canceled!

Yet as he starts to address the group, Santa is annoyed by a glow… Of what? What is that?

It’s Rudolph’s bright nose, burning Santa’s retinas like a welding torch. Santa lifts his scrawny arm to shield his eyes.

But as he does, he realizes that the nose—Rudolph’s nose!—is bright enough to cut through the fog! Rudolph could lead the reindeer sleigh team! His nose will be the beacon lighting the way!

“You in?” Santa asks.

“Sure,” Rudolph responds.

Rudolph saves Christmas for Santa and for children worldwide.

(Side note: the story of an adolescent deer who is shamed and bullied by his community until he had something everyone wants is problematic, when you think about it. But set that aside while we talk through the structure.)

The Marketing Original Story

Robert L. May was a copywriter working at the Montgomery Ward & Co., a Chicago-based department store. Montgomery Ward exists today only as an online retailer. (It closed its last store in 2001.) But in 1939, it was as nearly as ubiquitous as Target is today; it had 556 locations scattered around the U.S.

One day early in 1939, Robert’s boss beckons him to his office at Montgomery Ward headquarters. Marketing wants an in-store giveaway to boost foot traffic during that year’s Christmas season, he tells Robert.

Families visiting the Montgomery Ward in-store Santas would get a copy for free, the boss explains; Marketing hopes the allure of the story and the free-book promotion would boost holiday sales more than the generic coloring books Montgomery Ward Santas usually passes out to kids.

Robert wrote the story. And that Christmas season, his original story about the underdog (underdeer?) named Rudolph did go viral: 2.4 million copies of the book were distributed for free to 2.4 million shoppers.

Product Storytelling Framework

So why do I say the Rudolph story is a perfect product storytelling framework for all of us today?

Let’s look at Rudolph through a marketing storytelling lens.

The problem. It might seem at first that the “problem” is Rudolph’s bright, cursed headlamp of a nose. Rudolph is bullied, cast out, excommunicated from the community because of it.

But it’s not the red nose that’s the real problem: It’s the fog on Christmas Eve. The fog is the real, immediate problem—and it’s Santa’s problem. Not Rudolph’s.

>> Every story needs conflict. What’s the audience’s problem?

Why now? What’s the incident that brings the conflict to life? Fog any other night isn’t a big deal. But on Christmas Eve…? When North Pole Air Traffic Control grounds all reindeer? It’s a very big problem.

>> What makes your story relevant and in need of a solution right here, right now?

The solution is Rudolph, of course. Yet resolution of the problem is framed not in how perfect the solution is on its own, but in the good it does worldwide.

>> How does a solution help an immediate problem for the benefit of others?

The community. Rudolph is a hero to Santa and the North Pole elves, of course. But also he lifts up a bigger community:

The Island of Misfit Toys is Siberia to all the weird and psychologically broken toys that aren’t perfect enough to be delivered by Santa. Herbie is the Christmas elf who wants to reject his elf toy-maker genetics and become a dentist. The Abominable Snowman isn’t really mean—just misunderstood.

All of those creatures together are a powerful metaphor for community, where like-minded people live and thrive. In the story, Rudolph becomes everyone’s hero, saving Christmas while also bringing acceptance to misunderstood misfits and lovable weirdos. (And aren’t we all weird?)

>> What’s the story you can tell that elevates an entire community? What’s a specific story that chronicles one person or idea, but nonetheless has broader, universal appeal?

Resolution. Rudolph saves Santa. He saves Christmas. He changes people’s minds about scary snowmen and dentists. And Clarice kisses him.

We root for Rudolph the underdog. That’s why we need to see the kiss Clarice gives him.

Celebrate the real hero. The story is about Rudolph, but it’s Santa who is the real hero. Santa gets all the credit for recognizing Rudolph’s special skill and tapping it. Santa makes children worldwide happy when they wake up on Christmas morning to a ridiculous bounty—once again!

The “product” here is Rudolph.

The “customer” is Santa.

The product makes the customer the hero.

* * *

Mapping this story more simply:

Once upon a time, there was Rudolph.

He has the capacity to light up a room.

Some people doubt it because he’s not like the others.

But one day, there’s a terrible fog.

Which means Santa needs him.

To help the kids believe in the magic of Christmas.

And that matters because Christmas would otherwise be canceled.

Which brings together a community of misfits and North Pole elves.

Someone gets a kiss.

* * *

We can apply The Rudolph Framework to our businesses, too.

It can help us tell a product story through a larger lens.

It can help us identify our own “foggy Christmas eve” moment: Why is your product or service so critical now?

And most important, it reminds us of the true hero: Our customer.

How To Apply The Rudolph Framework to Your Product

A fill-in-the-blank template

copyright Ann Handley, Everybody Writes

1. Once upon a time, there was ____________ (your product).

2. It has the capacity to _____________ (your product’s superpower).

3. Some people doubt it because __________ (what the doubters might claim).

4. But one day, _________ (something happens).

5. Which means __________ (your would-be customer now needs this).

6. For _______ (whom does your customer serve?)

7. And that matters because ________________ (how your customer becomes the hero).

8. Someone gets a kiss.

Give it a go!

Want more from Rudolph and Ann? Get your copy of Everybody Writes (the 10% funnier version) to learn more useful frameworks and formulas from content marketing’s favorite pantsuit queen.

The post A Product Storytelling Framework from an Unlikely Seasonal Source appeared first on Contently.

The content you produce can look different in B2B versus B2C. For example, B2B content marketing may require more touch points throughout the buying journey, in part because the sales process can take months (or even years), and multiple leaders are usually involved in the decision.

Regardless, fitting smaller stories into your larger brand narrative and defining where they fall within the funnel will drive a lot of your strategic decisions. But before you start creating content for a campaign, you first need to identify the purpose of each clearly.

Creating Content for Engagement vs. Conversion

Not every piece of content is meant to drive a sale or even generate a lead. Some content may simply aim to increase brand awareness and establish your company as a thought leader in the industry, and these are necessary.

It can take time for people to take the leap and buy a product or even fill out a request for more information.

And before they do, they need to trust your brand as a thought leader in the market.

Once a potential customer is aware of your brand, you want to drive them further down the funnel through engagement and conversion. As a refresher, engagement happens when people interact with your brand in some way but aren’t necessarily interested in making a purchase, like when they share your content on social media. This generally happens at the upper stages of the marketing funnel, where the priority is building your brand’s initial relationship with your audience.

Conversion means different things to different businesses. In today’s digital age, it most often means transitioning somebody from merely trusting your brand to showing some sort of interest in actually making a purchase.

It usually happens in the middle and bottom of the marketing funnel and means a prospect has taken an action, like downloading an eBook or filling out a submission form that allows you to build a deeper relationship with them. Even lower in the funnel, conversion might entail scheduling a demo, attending a webinar or event, or making a repeat purchase.

Optimize Your Storytelling for Engagement and Conversion

Ready to take your content to the next level? These five strategies can help you fine-tune your content to drive more engagement and conversions.

1. Identify key metrics from the get-go.

During the content planning stage, identify a clear list of metrics or KPIs. This list will help you create content that meets your engagement and conversion goals. Metrics to consider include:

• For engagement:
  • Web: Landing page bounce rate, exit rate, time on page, pages visited per session, hyperlink clicks, repeat visitors
  • Social media: Likes, shares, and comments
  • Email: Open rate, click-through rate
• Conversion: Marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, revenue generated, number of sales, long-form content downloads, repeat customers, click-through rate

2. Track and direct readers through the buyer’s journey.

If you don’t direct prospects to the next step, they’re more likely to leave without purchasing or even engaging with more content. Creating a user experience that nudges them through the buyer’s journey is important.

For example, you can direct readers from a blog post to a long-form piece of content (like an eBook), a product landing page, or a submission form (e.g., event registrations or product demo signup). You can also use banners or pop-ups to encourage readers to sign up for an email newsletter or access free resources.

To track how buyers interact with your content, use tracking methods such as adding UTM codes to URLs to understand the buyer’s journey and map their engagement with content.

Gating content for lead generation

Not all your content should be freely available. Consider gating some of your content to gather prospects’ contact information and assess the quality of your leads. Your high-value content pieces, like webinars, educational courses, and exclusive content, are good for this use.

3. Create and optimize content that drives emotion.

Before you start publishing content, make sure it’s a right fit for your audience. This increases the odds that it will engage and convert prospects into buyers. This is particularly important when optimizing content for organic search.

Choose keywords, write headlines, and craft meta descriptions that specifically address your audience’s needs.

Also, keep your readers’ past experience and knowledge level in mind. Know their challenges and offer a unique way to solve them, or answer a question you’re confident they’ve actually asked.

Content created simply to bring in impressions on your website isn’t beneficial in the long run. That just brings you readers with no intention of purchasing. But tailoring content to the right audience makes it more likely they’ll find your content useful and engaging—and ultimately convert.

And if you’re in B2B marketing, don’t forget there are often multiple decision makers involved in a major purchase. Consider creating content that targets each one of those personas with the topics they care about most.

Build an emotional connection through good storytelling

Developing an emotional connection with your audience is the best way to build their trust in your brand. This means knowing your customer and presenting them (not your company) as the “hero” of your narrative. They are the ones who need to solve a specific problem.

To achieve this, thoroughly research your customer and develop personas grounded in quantitative and qualitative research. To turn a prospect into a lead or a sale, you need to know your company inside and out so you can create content that showcases how you can help the “hero” solve their problem. It may benefit you to consult with subject matter experts during this process since they likely know your products or services best.

4. Prioritize content promotion and distribution.

You can’t expect your audience to engage with your content if they can’t find it in the first place. And one of your responsibilities as a content marketer is to make that user experience an easy one. Some common ways to promote and distribute content include:

• Sharing it across your social media channels
• Including recently published content in a regular newsletter sent out to your audience
• Building out a sales email sequence that includes newly published content like an article, product landing page, or eBook
• Linking to long-form content or product landing pages within blog posts where appropriate
• Encouraging your sales team to share new content from their personal LinkedIn accounts

5. Be consistent with content publication.

A consistent publication schedule enhances the customer experience and helps increase brand credibility, reputation, and trust. Publishing on a regular schedule brings potential leads back for more content, which is especially important during a lengthy B2B sales process or high-stakes B2C purchase. For instance, they may need another question answered or have a new challenge to solve before they make a purchase.

Planning out your content with a calendar showing what you plan to publish and when (even if rough) is a good place to start. Ultimately, your cadence will vary depending on your company size, bandwidth, and available resources.

Remember, you don’t need to start from scratch every time. Repurposing existing content is a good way to maintain a consistent message across all your channels while saving time and resources.

If you want to level up customer engagement and conversion, it’s time to tighten up your processes. Start with prioritizing good storytelling, clearly defining your goals, and publishing content that drives a response, whether it’s emotional or digital. You can’t expect the revenue to start pouring in just because somebody read a blog post you published. The buying process often takes time. And establishing that initial trust for your brand is where it begins.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for valuable information straight to your inbox, or explore The Content Strategist blog for more resources and insights.

The post How to Evolve Your Storytelling for Better Engagement and Conversion appeared first on Contently.

Typically, turning a sales prospect into a customer takes much longer in B2B marketing than in B2C. Why? Because there are generally many stakeholders involved in purchases for businesses. Plus, the purchase is usually more costly, requires extensive onboarding and rollout, and involves many end users.

Why Is B2B Storytelling Important—and Challenging?

With so much at stake in a B2B purchase, you can understand the importance of creating content that allows SaaS buyers to connect with your brand personally. In fact, research has shown that in comparison to consumers, B2B customers, on average, feel much more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers.

Despite all the talk about storytelling, many B2B content marketers focus more on promoting the product or service rather than how it can change a potential customer’s life personally or professionally. Many don’t know where to start or don’t have the right tools to execute storytelling properly, said Mark Evans, principal at Marketing Spark.

Evans says storytelling can be challenging to execute in reality. But once you have the right resources to make it happen, it can be a key brand differentiator.

Individual pieces of content—whether blog posts, videos, webinars, infographics, and so on—can be presented as a narrative, but the larger customer journey can also be viewed as such. In other words, each piece of B2B content you create can be viewed as a small piece of a larger story that guides a reader from the brand awareness stage through the sale (and beyond).

So, what does storytelling in SaaS content marketing entail, and how can you integrate it into your strategy?

The Customer as “Hero”

“Great stories are ones where there’s a narrative, there’s a hero, there’s some kind of drama,” Evans said. “The audience can completely relate to them because (they reflect) their interests, their needs, their problems, their challenges.”

The format of a B2B story is similar to what you would read in a work of fiction. The potential customer—not your company—should serve as the “hero” of your story, said Ardath Albee, CEO and B2B marketing strategist for her firm Marketing Interactions. You also have an antagonist, which is the problem they need to solve. Finally, the vendor (your company) is the “mentor” or guide who assists the hero in reaching their ultimate destination—like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings or the fairy godmother in Cinderella.

Take customer success stories as an example. Many B2B content marketers structure these as follows: Company X works with Company Y and sees Z results, said Tommy Walker, founder of The Content Studio and former Global Editor-in-Chief of Quickbooks. But this format is missing the human element of why the problem exists and matters to the audience.

When Walker worked at Shopify Plus as the company’s first marketing hire, they published this case study, which Walker feels is a good example of storytelling in action. You can see how the story begins—not only did the co-founder of an online T-shirt company have to deal with a crashed website at 2 a.m., but this happened on the night of his bachelor party, which he had to put on hold. This added a human element that made for a much more relatable story.

Ultimately, the co-founders chose Shopify Plus as an eCommerce platform that would keep up with the company’s rapid growth. According to the case study, Shopify Plus alleviated the stresses the co-founders encountered with technology and allowed them to focus more on the business.

The Customer Journey as Narrative

In SaaS content marketing, storytelling also means providing a seamless narrative that spans the entire customer journey through multiple pieces of content and easily directs the reader from one point to the next. Think of every piece of content in the customer journey as a chapter in a book, Albee said, all the while remembering that a B2B tech sale can take months or even years.

Albee said that the buyer should be able to access the different pieces of a larger narrative to meet them where they are in their current situation. And they may find these pieces in a variety of places.

Good B2B storytelling means showing you understand the buyer well enough to help them resolve the challenges they face and ultimately get the outcome they want.

“We have to think about how do we let (the buyer) drive but still put those guardrails around that experience, that story, so we get them all the information they need to get from A to Z in whatever manner that looks like,” Albee said.

Content for Each Stage of the Marketing Funnel

Once you understand the basic framework of a story, you can map the different parts of your content strategy to a character’s journey:

• Top-of-funnel content: Show you understand the various challenges buyers face (and how to solve them) in detailed ways. This can be done through blog posts, social media, podcasts, brand awareness emails, and more.
• Mid-funnel content: Help your character overcome the obstacles that might arise in the decision-making process—for instance, internal politics or budgetary concerns. Possible content formats include eBooks or guides, case studies or testimonials, whitepapers, landing pages, webinars, events, or product-focused blogs.
• Bottom-of-funnel content: If your mid-funnel content is executed well, the sale should happen naturally through the “change” your character experiences rooted in the onboarding, implementation, and customer success of your product. But if you do need more content to drive a sale, this can be done through pitch decks, product demos, competitive analyses, and more.

4 Storytelling Tips for B2B SaaS Content Marketers

1. Know your customer.

Understanding your customer’s current needs is key to bringing your story to life—after all, they are the “hero” of your narrative. Storytelling helps them solve real problems by providing directly applicable solutions.

“You have to commit yourself to knowing your audience, knowing what makes them tick, and really understanding the stories they want to hear,” Evans said.

If you don’t have the budget to develop extensive buyer personas, Albee recommends speaking with customers yourself.

2. Know your company.

Remember that your company, as the mentor, is still an important part of the story, so understand its products, services, or solutions very well before you craft your narrative. This will clarify to readers why your company’s offerings are the best way to resolve their problems.

“Whoever is in charge needs to get as many perspectives as they can from within their company and get an understanding of who they think they are and what they’re about,” Walker said.

And when in doubt, you can always ask an internal subject matter expert to review your content before it goes live.

3. Think of your story from a holistic perspective.

A common problem B2B marketers face, Albee said, is that they publish one-off pieces of content that are repetitive or disconnected from one another. Potential customers may read this content, then move on without thinking about it or taking action.

Don’t assume a potential customer will know where to go on your website after reading a blog post, for example. Direct them to the next part of the story.

“We have to proactively package that up for them in a way that they can access it without our help,” Albee said.

This might entail including a call-to-action at the bottom of a blog post that drives readers to a product landing page, for instance. Or, if you cite a source of information or data, you should hyperlink back to the original source or a related piece of content.

Remember that storytelling extends beyond the sales stage of the customer journey. How your customer uses your product is also important and can be told through post-sale customer success content.

4. Get in the storytelling mindset.

Ultimately, keep in mind that consistent B2B storytelling will require a mindset shift, and it may not be easy—but experts say it’s worth it.

“You really have to buy into the idea that storytelling matters, storytelling works,” Evans said. When your audience relates to what they’re reading on an emotional level, they’re more likely to relate to your brand, make a purchase (ideally more than once), and advocate for your company down the road.

Stay informed! Subscribe to The Content Strategist for more insight on the latest news in digital transformation, content marketing strategy, and rising tech trends.

The post How Storytelling Can Build an Emotional Connection with a B2B Audience appeared first on Contently.

Of course, things aren’t so easy nowadays—the competition is steeper. Audiences are splintered across more channels. And the demands put on content teams are greater than ever.

In episode 2 of our new content strategy advice show, Ask a Content Strategist, content strategy masterminds Deanna Cioppa and Kat Lisciani joined me as we dug into your biggest content marketing questions.

You can watch the full episode here, but since you’re already reading this article, let’s watch a few of my favorite moments.

How to grow your audience with “performing-enhancing content”

If your brand is just starting out with content, what’s the best way to grow your audience? That’s a question that Deanna—Contently’s head of content strategy—has heard a thousand times. And she gives some sage advice: Don’t be afraid to use paid, as long as you optimize for converting those visitors to repeat organic visitors.

Making the case for awareness content—even if there’s no direct link to sales

Some business leaders dismiss pitches for top-of-funnel content programs, acting as if you’re advocating for a SaaS slam poetry night. (Please no one do this.) As a senior content strategist, Kat has seen it a thousand times, and here, she shares the simple argument she uses to win over top-of-funnel content skeptics.

Countering a story-hating boss with SCIENCE

What happens when your boss just doesn’t see the need for stories in your content, and instead just wants straight data? Deanna explains how the science of stories can help you win over even the biggest content skeptic.

Want to dig in more? Then check out episode 2—streaming here now!

The post How to Grow Your Audience, Make the Case for Content, and Counter Your Story-Hating Boss appeared first on Contently.

That’s right. After a decade killing chain restaurants, marriage, and the McDonald’s McWrap, millennials have grown strong and are entering their peak earning years. Simultaneously, Gen Z—which you may know from the popular mobile application, TikTok—is graduating college and taking over the coveted 18-25 consumer segment.

I’m a card-carrying millennial. I’ve survived graduating into a recession and strangled an Applebees with my own two hands. And you know what my generation wants? To buy stuff from companies that reflect our values, so we can feel good about ourselves when we pop a CBD gummy and start clicking on Instagram ads.

The age of conscious consumerism is here, driven by the under 40-set. According to 5Ws 2020 Consumer Culture Report, 83 percent of millennials say that it’s important for the companies they buy from to align with their beliefs and values, and 76 percent of 18-34 year-olds like when the CEOs of companies they buy from speak out on issues they care for.

Edelman’s 2020 Trust Barometer also found that values are driving purchase decisions. The most important attributes to consumers today being able to trust that what the brand does is right, reputation, values, and environmental impact. As climate change worsens, sustainability is only going to become more important; turns out, we really want a planet to live on.

Companies today not only need to do good; they also need to tell stories about the good that they’re doing so consumers know about it. It’s not a nice-to-have anymore; it’s a necessity.

That’s why social impact storytelling was one of the top content trends I presented in our State of Content Marketing 2021 trends webinar (which you can get on-demand here.)

One of the coolest things is that telling these stories will not only help your company’s bottom line—it’ll help the world, too.

That’s because when you tell great stories about the good your company is doing, it creates a positive feedback loop that encourages your company to invest more in CSR efforts.

Skeptical? Then say it to the face of this awesome diagram.

Social impact storytelling needs to be a part of your content strategy in 2021. And in the webinar, I suggested taking three steps:

1. Put on your reporter’s hat to find compelling social impact stories

Companies don’t often do a great job of talking about the good that they’re doing—even to their own employees. That means that you need do the dirty work to find them.

This is something that GE Reports does extremely well. Led by chief storyteller Tomas Kellner—a former editor at Forbes—GE Reports has amassed a loyal audience of over 100,000 subscribers through what Kellner calls “shoe leather reporting“—developing sources inside the company to break stories of the amazing innovations happening inside the company.

While its sustainability storytelling has often gone viral on Reddit, GE Reports shifted focus in the spring to cover how GE Healthcare—and the rest of the world-was fighting back against COVID-19.

GE Reports did a remarkable job telling the stories of employees who were going above-and-beyond in the fight against COVID, and the role GE Healthcare was playing in combatting the pandemic. Just check out this story about GE Healthcare employee who traveled 1,400 miles through an earthquake and blizzard to help step up the production of ventilators at a key plant, or this story about a breakthrough in AI-enhanced ultrasound that was saving lives during the darkest days of the outbreak in Italy.

They also published a weekly roundup of five ways the world fought back, which included non-GE stories, and was my daily dose of optimism as I hunkered down in downtown Manhattan, clutching a bottle of hand sanitizer like it was the last Infinity Stone.

GE Reports’ coverage not only made me feel better—it helped me see GE Healthcare in a new, extremely positive light. If I was in the market for an MRI machine, I would definitely buy it from them!

You can follow Kellner’s lead, especially if you work inside a large corporation. Find out who’s in charge of your social impact and CSR initiatives, and who else is working on them. Bond with them. Interview them. Do the same thing with your product and engineering teams—your company’s product might be doing good and serving people in ways you don’t even know about. Put on your reporter hat, and get to work.

2. Tell narrative stories that communicate your company’s values and how they set you apart from the competition

The morning after the 2016 election, Rose Marcario, the CEO of Patagonia, woke up at 4 AM and decided that it was time to double down on the company’s activism.

As Fast Company reported, by 9:30 AM, she had penned a company-wide call-to-action to “defend wilderness, to defend air, soil, and water.” Facing widespread rollback of environmental regulations, she galvanized the company around its mission to protect the planet—a mission dear to not only employees at the company, but Patagonia’s customers, too.

Ever since Marcario took over as Patagonia’s CEO in 2008 and made a huge bet on sustainable manufacturing and design, the company’s revenue has grown more than 500 percent.

Much of that is its mission-led marketing; the outdoor apparel brand donates 1 percent of all profits to environmental causes, turns its stores into a repair shop for used gear on Black Friday, and tells stories about sustainability in Hollywood-quality films and four-word rallying cries on its clothing. Patagonia’s ethics and values are the competitive differentiator that shines through in every story they tell, and their customers are fiercely loyal to the brand as a result.

A big reason that Patagonia’s approach works so well is the ridiculous quality of their storytelling. One of their latest documentaries, Public Trust, about the battle to save public land from development, won awards at the Big Sky Documentary Festival and Mountainview.

They tailor their content to the channels where their audience spends their time—short films on YouTube, compelling 30-second sizzle trailers on Instagram, climate news and calls-to-action on Twitter—and truly stand apart, growing their business at an exponential rate.

3. When possible, align your social impact storytelling with a product

In recent years, Bank of the West has been doubling down on ethical and sustainable investing through its Impact Solutions investment arm. In 2019, it became the first bank to empower customers to track the CO2 impact of their purchases, and this year, launched its 1% for the Planet account to donate 1 percent of revenues to environmental non-profits.

They tell the story of their sustainability initiatives through Means & Matters, its sustainability-focused content hub. The site covers everything from how the private sector can step in where the public sector has failed to how to work in sustainability. It even puts other banks that invest in arctic drilling on blast.

(Disclosure: Bank of the West is Contently client, and partnered with Contently on Means & Matters.)

This content communicates a clear reason why people like me who care about the planet should invest with Bank of the West over competitors. There’s also an added bonus, as all of this sustainable investing content is an SEO goldmine, helping attract potential buyers who would be extremely interested in investing with Bank of the West—making it much easier to tie the content to business results.

This all, of course, leaves one very important question: What if your company isn’t investing in any initiatives worthy of social impact storytelling?

Well, then hit your leadership team with the stats and examples in this post, and make the case why it’s just good business to stand for something and do good in the world. And once they do, tell the story of how you made it happen. I can’t wait to see it.

The post Why Social Impact Storytelling Will Be 2021’s Hottest Content Trend appeared first on Contently.

That’s a question many people in America are asking right now. We’ve seen calls for an end to discrimination and police brutality everywhere from small town protests to massive marches here in New York to black squares in our social media feeds. We’ve seen people across age brackets, racial identities, and religions ask: How can I get others in my network to understand and care?

For years, I’ve reported on what neuroscience can teach us about messages that break through and inspire action. There are a few proven tips that can help anyone craft a message of change.

Lead with a story

As a species, we’re programmed for stories. Stories are how we pass on knowledge and build connections. Stories—not statistics—are usually what compel us to care about a cause and take action.

That’s because when we hear a compelling story, our brain synthesizes oxytocin—a neurochemical that makes us feel a greater degree of empathy and human connection. In one study, Dr. Paul Zak, a leading neuroscience researcher, found that people who had high oxytocin levels as the result of watching a PSA with a strong narrative chose to donate 261 percent more money than those with baseline oxytocin levels.

When we hear stories of injustice, we’re much more likely to feel a sense of connection and understanding, which can fuel us to help others. If we want to change minds and spread understanding, it’s important to amplify not only the story of George Floyd, but of Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Botham Jean, Michael Brown, and the thousands of others who have been killed by the police.

The below video, for instance, does an admirable job of that, telling the story of Breonna Taylor—who was shot in her own home by police—for those who don’t know about it already.

On a recent Women for Biden call, I spoke about Breonna Taylor.

Breonna should be alive today. And her story happens every day across this country—Black women and girls are brutalized at alarming rates.

This is an epidemic and we must call it out. pic.twitter.com/pKpZSpX0k0

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) June 5, 2020

Optimize for memory encoding

Neuro-Insight, a leading neuromarketing firm, has been tracking consumers’ brains while they watch advertising and other video content, using an advanced technology called Steady State Topography.

The firm developed a brain activity metric called memory encoding that corresponds to both long-term memory and decision-making. When activity in the brain that corresponds with memory encoding is high, we’re more likely to remember a message and take action.

Neuro-Insight has found that one of the most effective advertising strategies is to optimize for “branding moments.” These are the moments on screen you really want people to remember, like the website of the NAACP or a call-to-action.

This past winter, Contently cofounder Shane Snow and I tested political ads by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden using Neuro-Insight’s technology to find out which messaging tactics work best. Elizabeth Warren’s advertising, for instance, did an excellent job of optimizing for peak branding moments. She drew viewers in with a compelling story of her life growing up poor in Oklahoma. At key points in the narrative, on-screen messages she wanted people to remember flashed on screen, like her catchphrase “I’ve got a plan for that.”

As organizers, non-profits, and policy groups create more content to inspire change, this simple tactic can make content more impactful and memorable. Take, this Black Lives Matter video that overlays the photos of victims of police violence with their tragic last words.

It’s extremely moving and prompts us to heed the call-to-action: to keep saying their names.

please keep saying their names:
Christian Taylor, Kimani Gray, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Tamir Rice, George Floyd, Eric Garner, Kenneth Chamberlain, Lavon King, Kendrac McDade, Breonna Taylor…and now James Scurlock joins them#BlackLivesMatter #VoteOutHate pic.twitter.com/ypGMmMldDf

— LG (@EnigmaticGaga) June 1, 2020

Show real people

In a study of in-feed social video content, Neuro-Insight found that the presence of people in the ad increased emotional intensity by 133 percent.

In our study of political ads, we found that images of real people involved in the political process performed much better than stock footage of people. Researchers believe we’ve evolved to adopt the emotions of others, a phenomenon called emotional contagion. This helps us empathize with others, and can make us feel like we’re all a part of a team. In this case, that is Team Humanity.

Right now, spreading that Team Humanity bond is one of the best things we can do.

The post How to Spread Change and Inspire Action, According to Neuroscience appeared first on Contently.

*As awarded by the Joe Lazauskas Academy for movies about very good dogs and cats.

She’s swept up in the rapids. Shadow—the wise, old golden retriever—bolts to rescue her. He races along the riverbank, imploring Sassy to keep her head above water. He finds a log, races into the water, furiously doggy-paddling to save her. But it’s in vain. Sassy tumbles over the waterfall, seemingly lost forever.

When I first saw this movie in theaters with my mom, I really had to pee. (The rushing water didn’t help.) But the tension kept me glued to my seat. For a crisp hour and 24 minutes, the danger facing the animals kept me transfixed. As they wander home, they’re chased by bears and confronted by a mountain lion. A thick interspecies and intergenerational tension hangs over every interaction.

If you’ve been following along with our elements of storytelling series, you’ll see why it was the perfect story for me. It was relatable because my mom was a vet, so I grew up surrounded by cats and dogs. It was novel because I’d never seen a live action movie with talking animals before. And it was fluent; Peter Jackson could learn a thing or two from the pacing of Homeward Bound.

But most crucially, there was tension, which is the fourth foundational element of storytelling. It’s ultimately what makes a story, well… a story.

The Tension Gap

Long before Homeward Bound changed our lives forever, Aristotle said the key to a great story was establishing the gap between what is and what could be, and then closing and opening that gap over and over again.

Think about your favorite rom-coms. They center on the gap between what is (a lonely, single life) and what could be (true love). Most rom-coms are two hours spent watching that gap almost close before something goes wrong and the gap widens again—the guy says something dumb, the jerk ex-boyfriend comes into the picture, ulterior motives are revealed.

The force that widens this gap over and over—and keeping us on the edge of our seats—is conflict. And neuroscience research has found that this dynamic is what makes us immersed and emotionally engaged in stories.

Unfortunately, many brands believe they’re allergic to a tension story. They want to tell a story in which things are always good. But that’s not only inaccurate—it makes for a terrible story.

Tension thought leadership, case studies, and more

A few years ago, we wanted to impress upon marketers the importance and power of a great story. So we gave five filmmakers in Contently’s network a challenge: a film tension story. Tell a story that communicates the power of storytelling in less than two minutes. (Very meta.) Our favorite submission didn’t mention content marketing at all. Instead, it told the story of a man trapped in an elevator.

Another example I love came from Adobe a few years ago. A desperate marketer needs some clicks to get through Q4, so he hits up a hardcore clicks dealer on the wrong side of town. Naturally, things go desperately wrong.

These are stories with real tension—and takeaways—that people remember.

Thought leadership is a beaten-to-death term used by hyperactive speakers in freshly-pressed blazers who believe they’re one keynote away from messianic status. (Like me!) But the best thought leadership is like Adobe’s video. It makes you think about a concept like content measurement in a few way. It addresses what’s wrong in your industry and shows you what the promise land looks like.

This applies to written thought leadership content too. Over the years, I’ve realized that the most impactful posts I’ve written for The Content Strategist address what we’re doing wrong in content marketing and how to do better. They often detail how we’ve messed up in the past and learned from our mistakes, like this piece on how gated content can sabotage your marketing program.

Don’t be afraid to talk about how you—and your industry—have come up short and where you need to go. Talk about what you’re currently working on. Use personal anecdotes to keep people hooked. That’s the key to a story that sticks in your audience’s minds.

The same basis applies to case studies. Tell the story of where your customer started and depict the gap between the current situation and ideal state. Tell the story of the challenges they overcame, and don’t just default to a PDF.

The importance of great stories today

Tension is a funny thing. It seems like with all the coronavirus-related horrors and anxiety happening around us right now, we’d want less tension in our content. But in fact, the opposite is true.

Tension is the key to great storytelling, and more than ever, we need stories that transport us to another world. Stories provide relief from the frenetic anxiety of our day-to-day. Stories make us feel hopeful and connected, and when we reach that blissful end, they reinforce that we can overcome tension and conflict, and hope for a happy ending. (Which is why I highly recommend watching Homeward Bound right now.)

The world needs stories more than ever, and I hope this post helps you tell yours.

Catch up on the previous three elements of storytelling below:

Content Fluency: Why You Should Write For 4th Graders

Novelty: The Storytelling Element Your Brain Craves

Relatability: The First Step to Great Storytelling

The post Why Tension Is the Most Important Element of Any Story appeared first on Contently.

In the face of that uncertainty, companies are tightening their belts. A number of people have reached out to me asking for advice on how to protect their budget and make the case for content.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Like many other marketing leaders, I’ve mapped out potential budget cuts in case the economic fallout from COVID-19 is worse than expected. But we’re not cutting content; we’re doubling down on it. Given how the coronavirus has changed our jobs as marketers, there’s a good chance you should too.

The compounding returns of content

The biggest mistake people make with content marketing ROI is taking a short-term view. The vast majority of advertising and marketing is fleeting. Say you spend $500 on paid search ads today. You’ll get 25 clicks, but tomorrow, you’ll have to spend that money all over again to see any additional value.

Spend $500 on a helpful blog post optimized for search, and it’ll drive continuous traffic and leads while building trust with your audience. You’ll spend that $500 up front, but afterwards, high-quality content will continue to deliver results for free.

This is what Tomasz Tunguz calls the compounding returns of content marketing. When you create a high-quality piece of content, it delivers results not only on the first day it’s distributed via an email newsletter or social media, but also gradually over time as the results build on each other.

Take, for instance, this piece on how to write a white paper. We published it back in 2012, when Contently was five people hiding out in the corner of Google’s Chelsea Market office. It’s consistently generated 3,000 pageviews per month for the past 8 years and driven thousands of newsletter subscribers and leads. To get the equivalent results from a search ad for that topic, we’d have to spend millions of dollars.

This dynamic holds true for temporal/timely content as well. While the long-term returns fizzle out faster than with evergreen content, the initial traffic spike is often larger, and you still see compounding returns over time. We’ve seen this with a lot of our coverage of Facebook’s algorithm over the years—a big initial spike, and then a smaller long-term tail as it’s still shared over social and ranks for longer-tail search terms.

Why content marketing is the smartest investment you can make right now

There are a few reasons for this:

1. The demand for high-quality, helpful content has never been greater

I’ve never felt more urgency to create helpful content for our audience. Our customers and readers are facing new challenges—working remotely, adapting their content strategy, spinning up virtual events, communicating thoughtfully and sensitively with their audience.

Your audience is almost certainly looking for new answers too. As a marketer, think of yourself as in the business of public service. In financial services, your audience is urgently looking to you for financial advice. In telemedicine, there are critical questions you can answer for healthcare providers across the country. In B2B tech and services, you can help your audience figure out how to work in a whole new way.

We’re not cutting content; we’re doubling down on it.

There’s also a good chance they’re looking for content that has nothing to do with COVID-19. They’re simply spending a lot of time online right now and want to use it productively. Your content can simply entertain them, teach them a new skill, or help them stay mentally and physically fit.

Nudge, an analytics platform that tracks branded content performance around the web, found that attention time on content is up a whopping 39 percent over the past four weeks, compared with the same time period a year ago. Traffic to business, finance, and education sub-reddits is surging. Comscore has also seen a huge increase in usage across devices.

This is an incredibly important time for marketers to step up to the challenge. As you do, remember this mantra: Always be helpful, always be honest, never be opportunistic.

2. Content is the most logical place to reallocate event marketing and paid media budgets

The top two line items in most marketing budgets—events and paid media—are on hold for the foreseeable future. And since people are taking a wait-and-see approach on purchases across many sectors, advertisers are pulling back on media spend.

The logical move? Play the long game and reallocate those funds towards content, which is designed to build relationships and nurture leads. Once the economic landscape shifts in a couple of months, you’ll be set to hit the ground running and accelerate your business thanks to the connections and trust you’ve built.

The compounding returns of content means the investment you make now will keep delivering for you over time.

3. Content fuels virtual events

With in-person events suddenly canceled, brands are quickly shifting to virtual events. When the focus turns to the screen, strong content becomes more important than ever. Mediocre presentations can’t be propped up by great food, booze, and networking opportunities.

High-performing content published on your blog and social channels can easily be translated into virtual events. It’s a tactic that’s been extremely successful for us. We turned my LinkedIn series on the four elements of great storytelling into a webinar that got over 1,000 sign-ups almost immediately.

If you plan on pulling off successful virtual events in the coming months, it’ll be a lot easier if you can pull from a reservoir of timely content. Having a strong foundation of written, research, and video content allows us to create virtual events much faster. Heck, if this post does well, there’s a good chance we’ll turn it into a webinar too.

Content and connection

One of the best pieces I read recently was from Henk Campher of Hootsuite, who wrote that the best thing brands can do right now is “do good or make people feel good.”

As many of us sit in isolation, our need for connection has never been greater. And nothing makes humans feel more connected than a great story.

Those stories can be about the good you’re doing. GE Report’s breaking news coverage of how it’s helping the fight against COVID-19 has been astounding. Or they simply can make people feel good, and nothing makes people feel good like a heartwarming story. (Which is why I’m currently binge-watching Homeward Bound.)

We all need a sense of duty and purpose right now. And the best thing we can do for ourselves, our companies, and each other is to tell great stories.

The post How to Make the Case for Content Marketing in Uncertain Times appeared first on Contently.

It should have been the most fun class ever—and in some ways, it definitely was. But there was one big problem: The readings were unreadable.

Week after week, we’d be assigned papers by anthropologists who wrote in a rambling, convoluted code. After a few more anthropology and psych classes, I realized all of academia was in a giant contest to see who could write the most confusing sentence possible.

One of the most dangerous lessons academia teaches us is that complexity equals authority. If we use long, dependent clauses, big words, and generally confuse the hell out of everyone, people will think that we’re smart. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Over the past few weeks, I covered the first two elements of great storytelling: relatability and novelty. Now, it’s time to explore the element of storytelling that separates the content you hate from the content you love: fluency.

Why you should write at an elementary school level

If you grew up writing papers in Microsoft Word, you’re probably familiar with the Flesch-Kincaid Grade level index, which measures how much education you need to understand a text. Clippy was obsessed with it, which turned Microsoft Word into a game of getting the highest reading level possible.

A few years ago, Shane Snow—who wrote The Storytelling Edge with me—ran the work of best-selling authors through a reading level analysis. Turns out, the most beloved storytellers on the list—Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, J.K. Rowling, Hunter S. Thompson, etc.—wrote for elementary school students.

The people who wrote at a high school or college level? Crappy business authors who had bought their way onto the bestseller list.

This tells us something important: We love writers who make it as easy as possible to get lost in their stories. They break down the barrier between us and them. They write with as much fluency as possible.

Unfortunately, marketers struggle to do this.

The digital age has broken down the barriers between brands and consumers. But with bad content, brands often put that barrier right back up—through bad white papers, boring talking head videos, and jargon that just doesn’t make any sense.

That’s because many of the bad habits we develop in academia carry over into the business world. Over the past decade, I’ve had to read hundreds of corporate white papers and e-books for work—let me tell you, they could be used as a mild form of torture.

The best content marketers do something different. They explain difficult to grasp concepts in a simple, colloquial way.

GE Reports does a fantastic job of demystifying science and engineering, regularly going viral on Reddit.

Mint built its business by making complex finance topics easy enough for a 4th grader to understand.

Cardinal Health does a fantastic job of demystifying healthcare technology, and has seen a huge audience boost as a result.

But fluency isn’t just about the written word.

Fluency matters for video too

For whatever reason, way too many brands waste their time filming 20-minute clips of their boring CEOs talking in front of a camera. Not surprisingly, those videos get almost no engagement.

In an age in which we consume most brand video in-feed, fluency means capturing and holding someone’s attention in just a few seconds.

A few years ago, a neuromarketing firm called Neuro-Insight studied social video, and found a few keys to capturing attention: an early story arc, the presence of people, topical content, and text or subtitles.

You don’t need to make Uncle Drew commercials to put these principles into play. For instance, GE uses these keys to create social video around topics you’d normally find in a tedious whitepaper, like the impact of globalization.

These videos actually don’t have to cost half your budget. Andrew Davis creates entertaining, story-driven marketing videos for his Loyalty Loop series out of his own garage.

This type of fluency applies to business presentations too. Open with a story, don’t use jargon, and keep it simple. Whether it’s an article, video script, or presentation talk track, check your copy’s reading level, and run it through this awesome jargon tool.

Every time you tell a story, you’re competing for attention with the millions of other stories buzzing in your audience’s pocket. So don’t make your content feel like homework.

The post Content Fluency: Why You Should Write For 4th Graders appeared first on Contently.

I’d imagine my ascent as a rockstar after starting a speakeasy club in my basement. Or my Super Bowl-winning touchdown as an undersized rookie running back on the New York Giants. (Even as a 10 year-old, I suspected I’d always be short). The clock ticking down, the defenders rushing after me, the ball grazing the left corner pylon as a sea of blue chanted my name.

Like billions of others, I lived in a world of story.

As Jonathan Gottschall writes in The Storytelling Animal, human beings are built for stories. We spend our lives telling ourselves tales. As children, we live more of our life in Neverland than reality. Even when we go to sleep at night, the mind stays awake, lighting itself up with stories.

We all have storytelling superpowers inside us, but as the pressures of life builds—tests, grades, jobs, mortgages, performance reviews—we lose sight of this instinctual skill. This is why business presentations bore us to sleep and marketing fails to break through.

Many of us have learned to suppress our storytelling instincts, thinking of it as a squishy skill that has no real place in the business world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In my role at Contently and my research with neuroscientists, I’ve found that storytelling is almost always the variable that separates great brands and great leaders from the pack. As Shane Snow and I wrote in The Storytelling Edge, storytelling isn’t some magical skill only gifted to the poets and JK Rowling and that guy from product with a theatre background who tells the craziest stories at happy hour. It’s something we all can tap into.

Over the next four weeks, I’m going to go in-depth on the four elements of great storytelling: relatability, novelty, fluency, and tension.

First up, relatability.

The Power of Relatability

Think of your favorite movie. Chances are, one of the main characters reminds you of yourself.

We’re instinctively drawn to characters and worlds that we can relate to. This is why we love teen movies when we’re in high school. It’s why my mom’s favorite movie of the last 20 years is Something’s Gotta Give. If we can see ourselves in a character, we’re much more likely to pay attention. Basically, we’re a planet of narcissists.

This dynamic is extremely powerful in digital media. BuzzFeed became one of the fastest growing media companies in history by capitalizing on our love of relatability.

In its early days, BuzzFeed flooded the web with stories like 21 Things That Could Only Happen At Stanford, filled with inside jokes. At first, this post seems like it would have a narrow audience, which wouldn’t make much sense for a viral media company. But BuzzFeed knows that Stanford students and alums can’t help but click on a relatable post like that. Once they do, they can’t help but share it with their social network full of other Stanford students and alums. Before long, that the network effect reaches hundreds of thousands of people.

Naming your audience in a headline is an easy way to send a clear ‘relatability signal,” and even the most niche B2B companies can get in on the fun. Texas Instruments, for example, got thousands of shares on a post titled “Seven Things Only An Analog Engineer Can Understand,” which is incredible for such niche content. (I barely understand it, but you can tell in the comments that engineers really related to it.)

If you want more inspiration, look to GE. The company was losing the engineer recruiting war to Silicon Valley tech startups when it launched “What’s the Matter With Owen?” a self-deprecating video series in 2015. In the clips, a young engineer struggles to explain to his friends and family that he’s going to GE to work on innovation initiatives, not the railroad.

Engineers related to it. Not only did engineering applications to GE shoot up by 800 percent, but Owen also became a minor celebrity along the way.

“People inside the company are just in love with the campaign,” GE CMO Linda Boff told me. “We have brought the actor who plays Owen to some of our internal events, and really you’d think we were bringing the Beatles back together. People are so excited that here’s a story about the company, but it’s really a story about them. They’re our Owens.”

I’ve even seen this firsthand in neuroscience research on political campaign ads. Recently, I tested ads from the main democratic primary candidates. When ads showed footage of real people, respondents related to them much better than ads with stock footage. Memory encoding an emotional engagement shot up, which is what politicians ultimately want.

Any time you green light a story for your company’s blog or tell a story in a meeting, ask yourself: Can my audience see themselves in this story? Can they relate to it? If you’re not sure how to relate to your audience, conduct empathy interviews (guide here) until you fully understand their challenges and aspirations.

Every story you tell—from a case study to a thought leadership post to an explainer video—should make your audience feel seen. Do that, and you’ll become a better marketer. You’ll become a better leader. And you’ll begin to let the storytelling light back into your life.

The post Relatability: The First Step to Great Storytelling appeared first on Contently.

But as marketers, we are good capitalists. And as good capitalists, we must buy things for our teams. I’ve always liked to buy my team books—I buy every direct report a book during the holidays and right before our mid-year review cycle if I need to suck up to them.

My gifts are also self-serving—marketing is all about empathy and storytelling, and great stories are proven to make us more empathetic and creative. Whenever possible, you should trick your team into being better at their jobs with literary bribes.

Here are 7 books for marketers that will do just that.

[Editor’s note: We don’t get any commission if you click on the links. Joe just really likes marketing books.]

1. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human | Jonathan Gottschall

This book changed my life and how I think about stories, sparking an obsession with a topic that eventually led me to write The Storytelling Edge.

In The Storytelling Animal, Gottschall explores how humans are programmed for stories by detailing the incredible role they have on our waking and sub-conscious lives. It’s fun, fast-paced, and filled with memorable stories that take you everywhere—from the world of Sherlock Holmes to the sociological studies of Vivian Paley to virtual realms. Plus, the quotes from this book are incredible:

“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”

“Literature offers feelings for which we don’t have to pay. It allows us to love, condemn, condone, hope, dread, and hate without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily involve.”

“Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems.”

If you want your team to think deeply about storytelling instead of just parroting it back to you as a buzzword, this is the book for you.

Get it from McNally Jackson and support local book stores!

Get it on Amazon.

2. You’ll Grow Out of It | Jessi Klein

One of the most underrated skills in business today is the ability to write in a first-person voice. That voice makes everything more relatable—from your presentations to your blog posts to your explainer videos. And few people can do it well.

Reading non-fiction humor books are a great way to hone your voice. I spent the first two years of college obsessively reading David Sedaris and imitating him in my writing. Eventually, it helped me find a voice of my own.

You’ll Grow Out of It is the best non-fiction humor book I’ve read in years. Klein was the lead writer and EP on Inside Amy Schumer and is now the voice of Jessi Glaser on Big Mouth. She’s definitely one of the funniest writers on earth.

I read this cover to cover on a London-New York flight, and I was laughing so hard the flight attendant definitely thought I was wasted. (Probably because I was flying out of London, and everyone on the plane was wasted.)

Hot tip: Skip ahead and start with “Dale,” which tells the story of when Klein goes to her sister’s wedding in Florida and sets her sights on hooking up with a Disney character. It’s perfect.

Buy local.

Get it on Amazon.

3. Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action | Simon Sinek

I feel like such a basic business bro recommending this book, but it lives up to the hype. Every product, brand story, and blog post needs to tie back to the “why” of your company—that passion and unique perspective that justifies your company’s existence.

Start With Why will help your team find meaning in their work so you can focus on the stories, messages, and activities that really matter. It’s a book you’ll return to again and again.

Buy local.

Get it on Amazon.

4. Three Women | Lisa Taddeo

Three Women is the most beautifully written and engrossing book I read this year. The fact that it only has 3.5 stars on Amazon is a crime and makes me want to have a stern word with Jeff Bezos in which we discuss this atrocity. (In this conversation, we’d also talk about how he should probably pay taxes.)

Taddeo wanted to explore modern relationships, so she spent a decade following three women from vastly different backgrounds, chronicling each of their experiences in a mesmerizing and unique narrative voice. Not only is it a tour de force of empathetic storytelling, but it’s also as addictive as a detective novel you’d read on the beach.

Buy local.

Get it on Amazon.

5. Break the Wheel | Jay Acunzo

Marketing Showrunners founder Jay Acunzo has a simple theory: Marketers are sabotaging themselves by worshipping at the alter of best practices. At best, these copycat tactics get average results. At worst, no one cares.

Break the Wheel is an inspiring book that tells the stories of innovative, creative thinkers who broke the rules to achieve marketing glory. If you want your team to be more creative and innovative in 2020, this book is sure to help.

Buy local.

Get it on Amazon.

6. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life | Samantha Irby

Another highly recommended non-fiction humor book. Irby is a hilarious, self-deprecating essayist who wrote this while working as a receptionist at an animal hospital. She’s candid and open about her personal challenges and introversion. Reading her just won’t make you a more empathetic writer, it’ll make you a more honest writer too.

Buy local.

Get it on Amazon.

7. Dream Teams: Working Together Without Falling Apart | Shane Snow

Time for me to be a total homer and promote the latest work from my co-author/writing partner/bff Shane Snow. I’m biased, but Dream Teams is an incredible book that explores the art and science of working together. The insights are often counterintuitive and might change how you run your next meeting. For instance, Shane presents compelling research that suggests gathering everyone in a conference room to brainstorm on the spot is a waste of time. A more effective approach is to have people come up with ideas on their own and then share them with the group.

It’s not a pure marketing book, but every lesson—from the science of collaboration to intellectual humility—will make you a better marketer.

Buy local.

Get it from Amazon.

The post 7 Books That’ll Turn Your Marketing Team Into Better Storytellers appeared first on Contently.

At the top of my inbox was an invitation from our head of HR to take a WholeBrain assessment—one of those pop-sci frameworks that helps you understand your strengths and how you think. I took the assessment, went back to writing, and forgot about it.

I’d spent the past few years as Contently’s Head of Content Strategy, but when I landed back in New York, our CEO asked me to make a switch and take over as our head of marketing. I accepted.

My first task: take the WholeBrain leadership training.

The Danger Zone

When I stumbled out of the journalism world and into marketing eight years ago, I learned that half the job was creating a flawless perception of yourself. The modern marketer is told they’re supposed to be a data-driven unicorn-octopi hybrid, with eight hands and a natural-born instinct for Instagram stories. We’re told we need to be masters of analytics, incredible writers, top-notch videographers, quirky creatives that can manage a team of 10 and get the board on your side (all others need not apply).

This is obviously an insane expectation, but it’s a prevalent reaction to the massive upheaval in the marketing world. When you’re absorbing data from 20 different platforms and connecting with customers across dozens of platforms, the job requirements never end.

As a marketing leader, it can feel like half the job is making people believe you’re that rare unicorn-octopi. I’d done a decent job of it so far, aided by the fact that I wrote a book about the art and science of storytelling. I felt fairly confident that I could keep it up.

But then the training began.

After some icebreakers, we got our results. Immediately, I knew it was in trouble. My results made me look like a crazy person.

The jig was up.

In WholeBrain, each quadrant represents a different way of thinking. Blue is very factual/analytical/data-driven; green is organized and detail-oriented; yellow is big-picture strategic thinking; red is all about relationships.

As you can see, I was all yellow and red. A head-in-the-clouds thinker obsessed with how everyone is feeling, disorganized with a disregard for data.

The instructor grabbed it from my desk and showed it to the other leaders in the room.

My facade was shattered, but here’s the thing I soon learned: almost no one is whole brain. We all have strengths and deficits—even the most successful entrepreneurs on earth. And as it turns out, this is especially true of those who end up in marketing.

This launched me on an odyssey. If it was damn-near impossible to have all the innate skills that organizations ask of modern marketers, which traits really matter? Over the past decade, I’d worked with some incredible clients that I suspected were just as imbalanced as me. What helped them thrive?

The traits that really matter

The answers to this are what I’m going to cover in my talk at Content Marketing World, so I don’t want to give too much away. But in my interviews and work with the top marketers today, a few traits stand out:

• Unleashing your story-driven brain. As humans, we’re storytelling animals. Embracing this part of ourselves is the key to empathizing with our customers, creating content that drives action, and leading teams.
• Intellectual humility and bridge building. The ability to understand where you’re weak, the willingness to accept where you’re wrong, and the tenacity to build partnerships with those who can do what you cannot.
• Relentless experimentation. A simple mindset shift in which you constantly challenge your assumptions, and view every aspect of your marketing program as a laboratory for innovation.

If you’re one of the thousands of content marketing nerds gathering in Cleveland next month, I hope you can join me at 11:20 on September 4th so that we can find our way forward, together.

The post The Traits You Need to Thrive in the New Era of Marketing appeared first on Contently.

What I do hope to explain, though, is how we need to consider the different types of digital PR when crafting marketing strategies.

“Traditional” public relations deals with crafting press releases and pitching contacts at media outlets about prominent updates with the company, like new products, a significant anniversary, an impressive acquisition, etc.

And there’s nothing wrong with this approach! However, relying solely on this PR strategy means overlooking significant opportunities to get your brand name out there. “Modern” digital PR was developed in order to start a more active, valuable and ongoing conversation between brands and the public, and to do that, you need compelling content.

Cue data storytelling.

The Rise of Data Storytelling

Your customers/clients (and potential customers/clients) care about more than just the inner goings on of your company. If you only dish out content about your organization’s updates, you’re not showing you truly understand what actually matters to your audience. They care about a lot more—and you’ll be able to do that as data supports storytelling by bringing credibility and reliability to the message your PR content is putting out.

All types of storytelling can possibly be extremely effective, but the fun part about data storytelling in particular is that a story based on a new dataset is inherently unique. You can have a ton of internal data that is boring on the surface, but lying underneath are insights that speak to interesting trends, consumer preferences, new societal norms, or perspectives not often considered.

If you’re able to identify the core of what makes that data interesting and present it in a visually compelling way, you can make a huge PR splash with your exclusive analysis.

Big brands can get away with doing it even without the visually compelling components. Take Spotify, for example.

When looking at the most shared content on BuzzSumo that mentions “Spotify” in the headline in the last year, we see that an article about light-hearted Spotify data that earned 110k+ Facebook engagements. This media hit is sandwiched between two more traditional news pieces, but it made the Top 5 because it’s fun, original, and speaks to trends in music, a topic the brand should know plenty about.

More and more brands are tapping into their own data to tell stories about their industries and offer a fresh perspective that no one else can provide.

Note: For those of us who aren’t the Spotifys of the world, we can still participate in this type of content strategy. We just have to put in more legwork (AKA, more thought into design, presentation, pitching, etc.).

Another great strategy is releasing “reports” on a yearly basis that encapsulate any trends or preferences in your vertical.

See how Fandango accomplished this in late 2018 by releasing a graphic of the highest earning actors in 2018 based on a report covered by The Root (which gained significant traction, with 85k+ engagements).

The important thing to note here is that when you review the BuzzSumo results, you see that the rest of their high-performing content featuring their brand name in the title is just showtimes. With this one piece of content, they could reach the same level of visibility as their core offering that they heavily promote, meaning they potentially get significant amounts of untapped brand exposure.

The effect of that one piece of content can even be reflected in Google search.

The week that content went live, there was a significant spike in searches for “Fandango.” Now, I can only point out the correlation, since it’s possible something else caused this increase. At the very least, it’s an interesting coincidence.

The Impact of Data Storytelling

We see how data storytelling can surpass many other types of content in terms of links, social shares, and more. But there are three other significant benefits that we shouldn’t overlooked.

1. Your brand is seen as an authority.

Whenever you release reports, studies, or any data-backed content, you’re positioning your brand as an entity that has proficiency about the topic and has access to pertinent information around that topic.

Stating the message isn’t simply enough. With consumers and audience ceaseless lost of trust in media and businesses, you have to back up your statements and reports with objective facts.

It’s not just a blip on the radar, either. If the study is compelling enough, it can gain a momentum that further propels your brand into a place of authority. The more often it’s cited, the more people associate you as being the expert.

I’ve seen this first hand. Back in 2015, Fractl created a research-focused content campaign for my client, Travelmath.com, in which we had a team test how germy different areas of airplanes were. It exploded in popularity then, so while writing this piece, I decided I’d check up on it to see if it was still receiving any love:

There are multiple examples of how a 2015 study has been cited as recently as March 2019! My guess is that the standard press release can’t maintain this level of interest over time, which is why data-driven content’s benefits can compound in ways we’re not even fully measuring yet.

2. You have much more flexibility in publishing and promoting engaging content.

It’s not often that your company will release a prominent new feature, launch a new product or get a new CEO. When things are standard operating procedure, being able to work on other content initiatives that aren’t tied to the logistics of your organization or new announcements is a huge advantage.

Through data journalism and PR, you can schedule out times to come up with ideation, analyze data sets and produce visual assets all throughout the year. That’ll put you in the press consistently, and you’ll be exposed to a larger audience.

At Fractl, we create and promote campaigns on a regular basis so they benefit from more consistent presence in online conversations while gaining a steady, ongoing stream of backlinks, as well.

3. You learn much more about your target audience in the process.

Press releases tend to come from within. You’re reporting about what you’re up to, and it’s true that this impacts your customers, your potential customers, and sometimes your industry.

But it’s also an important practice to remember that you’re here for your customers/clients. You need to check in about what they care about, what they’re curious about, and what they’re worried about.

To create great data-driven content, you have to investigate these questions. Success only comes if you’re providing value, and it’s through this research and brainstorming that you’re able to better understand your target audience.

I always recommend people use tools like Answer the Public and BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer tool to start their research and get a sense of what their potential clients and customers want to know.

Conclusion

Don’t give up on press releases altogether; they certainly have their place. But don’t rely on them entirely, either.

Creating high-quality, useful, data-driven content can not only supplement your other content marketing efforts—it can strengthen (or even carry) your entire strategy. When you build brand exposure and strong backlinks, you’re strengthening the foundation of your site’s authority and thus heightening all of the other marketing work you’re doing.

And when your content is trustworthy, interesting, and valuable to readers, you really can’t lose.

Contently helps global enterprise brands create engaging and accountable content for their most important audiences. For more information, visit our resource center or contact a content expert.

The post Why Data Storytelling Is Essential for the Modern PR Strategy appeared first on Contently.

As content marketing, product placement, and art blur together, there’s a space opening up for brands to make something unexpected. Provided, of course, it doesn’t come off like “My Journey to Self-Love, Sponsored by the J.M. Smucker Company and its Major Subsidiaries.”

Apple’s shifting relationship with product placement is s a microcosm of what’s happening in the industry. For years, the tech company quietly made deals to seed images of iPhones and Macbooks in popular television, but Fox has been running a message at the end of TV episodes featuring Apple products that cites “promotional consideration sponsored by Apple.” Now that Apple is developing its own TV shows, its executives are reportedly “squeamish” over the ways products will appear in programming.

Now that brands are creating their own content, many don’t need to pay for placement. In 2015, a movie about a toy brand (supported by that toy brand) was nominated for an Academy Award. The Lego Movie did not end up winning Best Original Song, but Lonely Island performed “Everything is Awesome” alongside several dancing, life-size mini figs. There wasn’t a huge to-do about The Lego Movie being an extremely successful bout of content marketing, partially because consumers aren’t always aware of corporate interests, and partially because the movie was just so damn good.

https://vimeo.com/318074749

We’re seeing even greater strides toward brands making content that’s recognized by prestigious, mainstream institutions. This spring, a documentary about a gay choir produced by the home-share platform AirBnB premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. What’s more, an original off-Broadway musical from Skittles was rumored to be in line for a Tony nomination, though it was eventually snubbed.

So, when will the first piece of content from a brand win mainstream accolades from a prestigious institution?

Who decides which content is prestigious?

It’s conceivable for a brand to produce a popular piece of art, and it’s possible for a brand to create good quality art. Consumers decide if something is popular. As long as the content is entertaining, the source isn’t as important.

Unfortunately for brands, defining prestige is up to the artists, critics, and influencers in the creative industry—you know, the folks who cringe when they hear the word “brand.” However, as that old guard tries to protect an outdated definition of prestige—being resistant to streaming networks and web series, for example—modern audiences are showing more flexibility.

Most modern audiences understand that entertainment is a business. Look no furhter than the widespread discussion on social media that erupted when Disney bought Fox. Any big Star Wars or Marvel fan knows their favorite characters are as much data points on a Disney spreadsheet as they are beloved heroes. You could argue that concepts like The Avengers or the Jedi, proliferated as they are across TV, social media, merchandising, comics, amusement parks, and video games, are just brands.

But that still leaves the lingering question: When will the first piece of prestigious branded content hit the scene? Using film as an example, I’ve mocked up a Venn diagram to explain where popularity, quality, and prestige intersect. Notice there’s nothing in the center—my best guess was Black Panther, but I welcome suggestions. Singin’ in the Rain is another possibility.

If a movie is popular with the masses and of pretty good quality, it’s usually not considered high art. See action comedies, superhero movies, and Star Wars. Meanwhile, if a movie is of good quality and considered prestigious, it probably didn’t blow the doors off the box office or earn mainstream appeal. See quiet indies, experimental art films, and period dramas. Finally, if a movie is popular with the masses and the Academy without actually being good quality, it is what one might call “Oscar bait.” Examples include The King’s Speech, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book, Argo, The Blind Side, and the definitive installment, Crash.

A brand could aim to make Oscar or Emmy bait content, but they could also try and create an irreverent, cult-beloved piece of art—the Skittles musical was an earnest attempt at that.

Rethinking the ROI of prestige

Charming the critics and art snobs of the world with content marketing isn’t an impossible feat; it’s just unprecedented. For marketers, achieving prestige isn’t a necessary objective, given that everything in their industry needs to hinge on measurable ROI. There is no measurable ROI for prestige or cultural impact or artistic clout—that’s kind of the point.

But what if a content marketing team hit the zeitgeist with a great piece of art at exactly the right time? It would have to exist purely for brand awareness, and the art itself couldn’t have any messaging about the brand—all the promotion and brand association would have to be implied. And it’s alright to imagine a marketing team developing a great film or TV pilot or novel—so many popular pieces of media are the product of fifteen songwriters or eight screenwriters, a gang of producers, and a director.

We may very well see a truly prestigious piece of content marketing in the next decade, whether that means it’s accepted into a film festival or wins a highbrow creative award. If a brand has any shot at creating art (as opposed to just marketing), it’ll be an argument for the melding of those two ideas. We know that popular franchises, characters, and creative projects can turn into brands, so why not the other way around?

The post When Will Content Marketing Count as Prestige Art? appeared first on Contently.

“People will say, ‘we need branding work,’ and then they begin the conversation talking about color schemes. That’s a mistake,” he said. “Your logo, your slug-line, your color scheme, your graphic standards, those are vestiges of your brand. They’re outward facing articulations of your brand, but they’re far from brand architecture.”

You’re not going to pick out drapes and cutlery before you build the foundation of your house. As for what makes up a brand’s basic architecture, that must come directly from leadership. “A brand is how a company protects its pillars,” Jones said. In other words, it’s what they stand for. Finding and confirming the right pillars is not something that should just be delegated solely to marketers. It requires input from senior leadership.

In 2017, Jones helped Contently with its own rebrand. He worked closely with Kelly Wenzel, our former CMO who is now the director of global marketing at Amazon Pay. (I joined Contently shortly after she left.) Wenzel told me the effects of Contently’s brand clarification were obvious within a quarter of her start date. “Contently already had high brand awareness within its target demographic,” she said, “but what it hadn’t decided on yet was a consistent voice and story. Brand is about defining your purpose and aligning your distinct competencies around it.”

Contently’s rebrand wasn’t a complete overhaul, but the changes made an immediate impact in the market. “Our work didn’t have anything to do with the product, and we weren’t rolling out any updates,” Wenzel said. “The important part was clarifying our purpose and aligning all our messaging around it.”

After a few months of research and brainstorming, Wenzel, Jones, executives, and the marketing team decided on six thematic “pillars” to rally around”

1. Tell Great Stories

2. Accountable Content

3. Fusion of Art & Science

4. Smart Content Strategy

5. Engagement Fuels Growth

6. Choice of Marketing Leaders

More than a year later, company leaders still check presentation decks, articles, demos, and more against these ideas.

All of this is to say that setting the right company pillars is complicated. Here’s what Jones had to say about finding the right brand story that will impact your bottom line.

Embrace uncertainty

Entrepeneur estimates that the average startup can expect to wait at least three years before reaching profitability. Wil Schroter, the CEO of Startups.co, agrees. “By year three,” Schroter writes on his blog, “the pixie dust has worn off. The excitement you once felt for starting something has transformed into anxiety about whether or not you have made the right career decision.”

Of course, anxiety over making a tough choice always makes for great rising action in a story. A period of uncertainty might sound like an unpleasant time to be an entrepreneur, but it’s an extremely valuable plot point for the marketers trying to tell those entrepreneurs’ stories, years later.

You should begin with the events and values that led your company’s founders to start the business. Interview your C-suite one by one and find the narrative through-line when they explain why they came to the company. Ask about the first decisions they made as a team, and follow up on those—talk to the company’s first few employees, even if they’ve since moved on. Ask your company leaders where they hoped the company would go in those early days. Ask them how things have changed.

A well-crafted story will inspire employees to join your team as effectively as it inspires customers to sign contracts or make purchases.

“Leaders need compelling visions worth following, and they need to align their teams around that vision,” Jones said. “Have your leaders all thought about why you’re here, doing what you do? One baby step toward finding your brand’s story is working to ensure your most senior team feels purposeful in their work.”

Start with the basics

So, what happens if your C-suite doesn’t feel purposeful about their work? What if their purpose is just…profit? “What is our brand’s purpose?” can sometimes frighten or paralyze professionals because many of us simply put in work without asking ourselves why we’re doing it. To avoid tripping people up, Jones advises marketers to start with simpler questions.

“I’ll often say, tell me your favorite customer stories instead,” he said. “Give me maybe six to ten examples from your leaders’ experience that showcase the company at its best. When have you acted heroic for a customer? When did you feel best about your job? When did you delight people, and how can we unpack those moments for the right ingredients?” Once a leadership team has compiled a collection these memorable, impassioned stories, they can hand the materials over to marketing for brainstorming.

SoulCycle, one of Jones’ clients, is the perfect example of a brand whose identity hinges on going above-and-beyond for customers. When the indoor cycling studio went public in 2015, a baffled reporter from The New York Times interviewed brand evangelists about SoulCycle. It was clear from their quotes that SoulCycle’s brand messaging and services were about more than just exercise classes.

“It’s the surest, and sometimes only, way to clear my mind after a long day spent in front of a computer,” one woman said. “It’s sold convincingly and addictively as personal growth and therapeutic progress through fitness,” another man said.

A well-crafted story will inspire employees to join your team as effectively as it inspires customers to sign contracts or make purchases.

By centering your brand on the moments in which you’ve connect deeply with your customer base, you’re nudging your experts and leaders into giving you the pieces you need to finish the branding puzzle. They probably have all the pieces on hand, but no one’s asked for them yet.

“I’ve done a major rebrand at every software company I’ve worked at,” Wenzel said, “and sometimes it was just a matter of refreshing our image. Often, though, the branding process took us down to the studs to truly build out a new foundation for ourselves. Having done it so many times, I know it can sound like common sense, but there’s an alchemy to branding that’s hard to explain. It’s very challenging to get this formula right.”

Learn from predecessors

Jones’s most successful clients “aren’t trying to boil the ocean.” They’re not, in other words, attempting to appeal to every single potential consumer by pitching themselves as universal. Clients like Sweetgreen, SoulCycle, and WeWork approached his firm hoping to design their branding around “the things that light them up” personally, and it just so happened that their customers felt equally as excited about salads, spin class, and cold brew on tap, respectively.

Clarifying your brand messaging can pay off almost immediately, especially if your competitors have similar business plans. If you can’t set yourself apart through products and services alone, you can use messaging to get ahead.

“Why the hell, for example, are there always thirty people in line for Sweetgreen?” Jones asked. “Surely, they walked past four other salad places on their way to Sweetgreen. They’re there because they feel something for the brand. It’s because these customers can say, ‘This is so me. I’m a part of this tribe and engaging with this specific brand makes me feel like the person I want to be.'”

In Soho alone, salad fiends can pick up their lunch at the nearby Just Salad, Chopt, Whole Foods, Hale and Hearty, or Fresh&Co, but Sweetgreen is the only brand run like a technology startup. From experiential marketing to the brand’s Tumblr blog, Sweetgreen’s focus on a youthful, hip audience is obvious.

In 2014, Sweetgreen raised $18.5 million in venture capital financing and the year after, it raised $35 million more. The brand is noticeably health-conscious, sure, but also edgier and more youthful—all the result of purposeful, smart branding. Sweetgreen, in addition to being one of the highest earning fast casual salad chains in the U.S., is also the only conceivable salad brand that could convince Kendrick Lamar at the height of his career to headline a salad-branded music festival and collaborate on a recipe called “Beets Don’t Kale My Vibe.” That’s power.

Gather evidence to prove ROI

Proving a marketing ROI to people in other departments has been the subject of many, many conversations It has layers to it. Evidence supporting the success of a brand story has to convince customers, investors, employees simultaneously, and those audiences will have definitions of success.

Too many people believe the strength of a brand is measured in its social engagement. When discussing companies on social media, for instance, marketers and consumers alike often say, “Well, the Wendy’s account is really funny,” as if that were enough. To Jones, it’s more complicated than that.

“A brand is so often confused with marketing communications that face outward,” he said. “How we communicate to the world about who we are is certainly a piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the whole thing. A brand is ultimately the experience you deliver to customers, not the beautiful articulation of an idea.”

Take Wendy’s, which isn’t solely renown for its Twitter feed. It’s also the fast food chain that hands out Frosty “Boo Book” passes and pokes fun at other chains for thawing out frozen burgers for sale. The perception of the product matches the sass they dole out online.

So a brand’s story does have to refer back to the company’s bottom line in the end, but there’s a lot of connective tissue in between. And according to Jones, crafting a corporate brand is not unlike the process of clarifying one’s personal life.

“It’s so easy to become distracted and reactive,” he said. “If you don’t articulate where you’re aiming with your brand and then proactively drive toward that goal, then the market will pull you off-course like you’re a boat at sea. If you keep your hand on the rudder, then even in a stormy sea, you’re still in control of where your brand shows up in the market.”

The post How to Find Your Brand’s Story appeared first on Contently.

I was running an upstart news site, and a company asked us to write a series of articles to promote the launch of their new platform for crowd-sourced inventions. We were broke—like “eating at the $5 Chinese buffet once every two days” broke—so we said yes.

We decided to get weird. Instead of writing boilerplate blog posts about tips for inventors, we came up with the most ridiculous invention ideas possible and created gonzo stories about our experience pitching them. I suggested an edible frisbee for inebriated college students. Spoiler alert: The inventor community hated our invention ideas. But they loved our stories.

As I prepare for Content Marketing World 2018, I can’t help but reflect on how much has changed since then. Over the past decade, it’s become not only a booming, respected industry but also the core of all marketing functions. Gartner has even predicted that in a few years, content marketing won’t be a term anymore because all marketing will be driven by content.

Naturally, the conversation about content marketing has evolved rapidly as well. We just don’t talk about creating content anymore—we talk about personalization, artificial intelligence, automation, voice search, and every other big opportunity. Largely, this is a good thing. As marketers, we need to get better at serving the right content to the right people. But I’m also worried. Because when we talk about tactics like personalization, we often make a huge assumption that the content we’re personalizing is actually good.

Why content marketing works

Content marketing works because our brains are programmed for stories. When we hear a great story, the neural activity in our brain increases five-fold. Since neurons that “wire together, fire together,” as neuroscientists like to say, we retain much more information when we get them through stories.

The key here is that our brains only respond to really great stories. They don’t care about mediocre ones. The best personalization, sales enablement, or email automation strategy won’t save your business if the content isn’t really good in the first place—because people just won’t care.

When you look at all the truly successful content marketing programs—GE, Red Bull, Dollar Shave Club, Dove, Hubspot, GE, Adidas, Marriott, Chase, Nike, Monster—they all have one thing in common: a commitment to telling great stories. They give their content teams the freedom to take risks, and they hire brilliant creative people who will create content capable of competing with everything else screaming for their audience’s attention. Only a small percentage of companies have gotten to this level.

“Great content” may sound subjective, but it’s not. Over the past decade, neuroscientists have made incredible strides in understanding and measuring how different stories affect our brains. They’ve almost managed to pinpoint the elements of storytelling that have the biggest impact.

Studies show that if your content isn’t great—or at least very good—nothing else you do really matters. That’s why I wrote a book on the art and science of storytelling, and why (shameless plug) I’m excited to reveal some of the latest groundbreaking research on the neuroscience of storytelling at Content Marketing World this week. As part of my presentation, there’s also going to be a live experiment using a newly-invented neurosensor that could change how we measure content success.

If you’re like 95 percent of the brands out there, your content could be a lot better. So whether you’re writing about personal finance or edible frisbees, I hope you take the leap with me.

If you’re at CMW, come to Atrium Ballroom A at 1:30 on Thursday, September 6, to see my session: Stories for the Win: The Hidden Neuroscience of Content Marketing, and Why Great Stories Make Our Brains Want to Buy.

The post Why Content Marketing Works: The One Skill You Need to Master appeared first on Contently.

It means using your own product. Why is it dog food and not—you know—pizza? I have no idea. But I recently decided to dogfood Contently for a personal project—the launch of my upcoming book Dream Teams. Along the way, I realized this could be instructive to a lot of marketers out there, whether you use a content platform or not.

A book launch is a near-perfect example of the kind of marketing campaign that requires accountable content. Content is the key to optimizing conversion rates across the marketing funnel—from raising awareness about the book, to gathering supporters and subscribers, to driving conversions, and finally to getting buyers to write reviews and spread the word.

As an author, you have anywhere from 6–12 months from the time you finalize your manuscript to when people can buy it. However, the most effective marketing happens within a couple months of the publish date. This means you have a lot of time to create content to support it. Enough time, in fact, to use my favorite content strategy framework:

Here’s a peek behind the scenes of how I’m using content strategy and technology to get the most out of this book launch, along with some lessons for marketers of all stripes:

Content Strategy

Content strategy starts with the audience. For Dream Teams, I broke my audience into three groups. The core audience consists of leaders, coaches, and HR professionals. The secondary audience is made up of entrepreneurs and ambitious people who work and play on teams. Lastly, there’s an aspirational audience of general nonfiction book buyers, history buffs, and pop-sci nerds.

Business Objective

For each audience, I have a primary business objective:

• Leaders: Buy books to help/develop their organization.
• Achievers: Buy a book for one’s own development.
• Pop-Sci Readers: Buy a book for curiosity and entertainment.

Key Metrics

With those specific objectives, it behooves me to keep track of the following metrics:

• Reach
• Subscribers / followers (and reach-to-subscription rate)
• Clicks to product page (and follower-to-click rate)
• Sales (and click-to-sale rate)

Ultimate Business Goal

My goal is to generate 10,000 sales by the end of launch week. (Not including bulk orders for organizations that have me come speak in exchange for buying a lot of books.)

That’s about $200,000 in books sold. (Too bad I will only see a fraction of that!) While riches would be great, my underlying goal is to build influence—to get a message of change out. In the long run, selling books builds my brand and allows me to further my company and ideas.

So how the heck are we going to make 10,000 conversions by June? To get there, we need to estimate the conversion rates of each of the steps in my funnel. With that math, we can ballpark the amount of content and promotion I’ll need. These rates will depend on the channels we use, but based on the averages I saw from my last book launch, I think we can estimate something like this:

Now we need to measure the capacity of all the channels through which I can reach my audiences, then figure out the most cost-effective way to fill these channels with content that converts at these rates or better.

But first, let’s pause for a picture of a dog eyeing a slice of pizza.

Channels

Okay, back to the plan. Where do these potential book buyers hang out, you ask? Here’s some rough analysis:

Leaders: LinkedIn, Twitter, airport bookstores, cable TV (CNN & Bloomberg), and the trusty ol’ email inbox. For the sake of this article, let’s assume that the non-Internet channels won’t contribute much to the 10,000 books I hope to sell (a good assumption).

Achievers: Same as above, also more likely to spend time with podcasts, Instagram, Facebook, and Medium.

Pop-Sci Readers: Same as above, but also: Goodreads, book blogs, science pubs, hometown bookstores, YouTube.

There are three ways to get to people in any of these channels at any stage of the funnel: owned, earned, and paid. Let’s add up the capacity (and cost) of each:

Owned Audience:

I started the campaign with a ton of LinkedIn followers and email subscribers, a large handful of Twitter and Medium followers, plus a Facebook page with a lot of followers and a sad amount of organic reach. Basically nobody follows my Instagram. (But you could!)

Each of my three audiences will convert at different rates, but I have average conversion data from my time writing articles and newsletters, and from the launch of previous books that we can use for estimates.

I don’t have any YouTube subscribers, but I can still create owned content for YouTube. It just needs to be embedded in my other channels or shared by influencers (which would be earned content).

Given that every social post includes a call-to-action to read a post on my blog, each post on my blog has a CTA to subscribe to my email list (or download an e-book in exchange for subscribing), and each email I send has a CTA to buy a book, the path to getting 10,000 conversions will be some version of the following:

• 120 blog posts, each posted in three locations and promoted on three social networks
• 120 native social/visual posts, each promoted on three social networks

This puts my conversion estimate at about 9,400—almost there. This is, of course, assuming that I only do owned content. However, we can juice things through a little earned and paid, and cut the amount of content down by about 50 percent:

Earned Audience:

If I post enough great content, there’s a chance something will catch fire and go viral. I can’t count on this, so I won’t factor it into my content strategy. But I’ll secretly hope it happens a time or two during the course of my campaign. Viral lift is the cherry on top of a good content strategy, not the cake. (Feel free to tweet that.)

Aside from that, I’m simply going to send the content I’m publishing to select influencers and press who might enjoy it. If I’m methodical in my promotion, I can pretty much count on one influencer, leader, or member of the press to share my work an average of once per weekday.

There’s a limit to the amount of content I can post per day before I start to lose the marginal benefit of an organic and earned audience. To prevent that, I’ll top out my audience at a blog post a day, an e-book a week, and four social posts a day. My strategy is to post every blog post in three places—my LinkedIn Influencer blog; Medium; and either Contently, Fast Company, someone else’s blog, or my email list. Then I’ll promote each post one time across social channels for every place it goes.

Paid Audience:

Paid promo is how we fuel our content fire. Any piece of content that performs well will get a little paid boost, via native ads.

When it comes to paid content promo, there are four major players in town: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Outbrain/Taboola. Since I only have time for one or two platforms, I’ll primarily stick with Facebook and LinkedIn.

In terms of content types, I’m mostly going to boost substantial content like e-books that are likely to generate more email subscribers. If paid engagement costs $0.25 per Facebook click, at the standard conversion rate I’m expecting, I should pay $0.71 per subscriber, which should pan out to $3.57 per sale. (Plus, I will build up my subscriber base this way, which gets me better organic results later on.)

That wraps up my content strategy. But as they say, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” so as soon as the campaign starts, I’m going to measure everything and adjust as needed.

Process & Workflow

Now comes the fun part (for me, at least)—creating content. With my strategy in mind, I came up with a giant list of blog posts, videos, and e-books…

… to fill the campaign. To keep a steady drip of top-of-funnel content going, I’ve also decided to tease some of my favorite snippets from the book once per day. So this spreadsheet…

…becomes…

I’ll need help to pull this off. And Dream Teams is about collaboration, after all, so this next part makes me especially happy.

Building The Team

I’m the main guy behind all these posts and ebooks and videos, but I need to make sure I get things done right and on time. So I put together the following gang to run my Contently campaign:

Frank = my Fear and Loathing-style lawyer, but also my editor—to catch mistakes and make all my posts sing.

Hunter = my video guy.

Karina = my production and marketing manager—to handle images, final checks, posting, and generally keeping the trains running on time.

Kieran = my social media manager—to promote all posts appropriately, along with the social content, for which we’re using Buffer.

Building The Workflows

I put together four workflows, one for each content destination. All the workflows start with me writing, then go to Frank for editing, and move to Karina for formatting, posting, and reposting.

Kieran will watch the editorial calendar so he knows when to promote things (and he can have notifications tell him via email or Slack when things are ready to promote, if he wants to be more reactive than proactive).

Speaking of which…

Building The Campaign Calendar

I set up a “Dream Teams Launch” campaign within my dashboard and had Karina load in all of the posts with deadlines for each step. Any of us can log in and add story ideas to the “Pitches” tab, and let the gang weigh in on them.

Also, as a fun aside, once the campaign got going, I logged in to add a timely story to the calendar, and Contently’s recommendation robot (what we call The Content Decision Engine, which pops up in various spots to make suggestions) told me which members of the team would be most likely to pull off this particular topic, based on recent analytics:

(Booyah!)

My workflows are automatically set up to time edits and re-posts at set intervals, but any step can be changed at any point, via drag and drop or manually. (Note how I was already behind on my writing schedule by the time I took this screenshot…)

Now every day when I log into my Contently Dashboard, I see a to-do list of content things that pertain to me (including assignments from my other projects):

Frank, Karina, and Kieran all see their own to-do lists as well. As the admin, I have permission to check on them if I want, but in reality, Karina is the one managing me, so I just granted her the permission to oversee everything.

Creating, Publishing, and Optimizing

Every post gets a little home on Contently where Frank and I hash out the content…

…and where Contently’s “Decision Engine” recommends things to add and/or scolds me when I get off base from my content strategy or good SEO practices:

When it’s time to publish, Karina adds a CTA to the bottom of each post based on where it’s going (each of which has a special tracked link, so we can see which posts and channels perform best). Then she hits a button to publish or download (depending on the platform—so for example we can email completed stories to my editors at places like Fast Company).

For my e-books, slideshows, and other documents, we use Docalytics, which offers version control and advanced metrics for downloadable content. I can track each document’s performance on a page-by-page basis:

This is useful for a couple of reasons. First, I can see what parts of my e-books get particularly high engagement and turn those into blog posts or social posts, knowing that they are likely to resonate.

Second, I can track where people lose interest, and then adjust the content at those points so people see the content through. Here’s a little secret: I actually used this technology to optimize several chapters of Dream Teams itself. When I was working on the manuscript, I sent early draft chapters to readers, asking them to tell me what they thought. After they gave feedback, I looked at the chapter analytics to see what pages they paid most attention to and what bored them, which made the book better.

Next Steps

My book launch is now in full swing. In fact, this post is part of it!

I’m going to put together a full report of what happens, what I adjust and optimize, and what I learn when the campaign ends. I’m also going to put together a big behind-the-scenes report of all the tools and process I used to put the book together in the first place. If you want to get these, sign up for my mailing list. It’s all part of the plan.

I hope this look behind the curtain of a big marketing campaign like this is useful. The moral of the story is if you want to set yourself up for a shot at success, you can’t just expect to throw content at the wall and get results. You have to start with the end in mind, figure out the capacity of your channels, and then make content to make the math work out.

And after all that, it’s about telling some great stories—which is by far my favorite part. Why do you think I write books, after all?

***

P.S. If you found this post helpful for thinking about your own content strategy, why not buy a book as a thank you?

The post Tips on How to Plan a Content Marketing Strategy for a Book appeared first on Contently.

-Susan, New York

When you read headlines like “The Washington Post’s Robot Reporter Has Published 850 Articles in the Past Year,” it’s bound to give you nightmares. Hell, I just had a nightmare that Contently fired me and replaced me with robot Will Smith, which is probably a sign I need to stop watching I, Robot every time I fly Delta.

While automation is destined to disrupt our professional lives to an epic degree over the next decade, I don’t think most writers should be worried. They just need to hone their skills to do the things robots cannot.

Algorithms like Heliograph, the Washington Post’s AI technology that spits out short articles, have gotten pretty damn good at relaying objective information backed by data, such as recaps of sporting events and analysis of financial reports. These are boring, formulaic assignments usually given to cub reporters in newsrooms as a form of hazing before they move up the ranks. It’s such a brainless activity that many reporters simply use a Mad Libs-style template to produce them.

What the robots aren’t very good at, however, is telling stories that build an emotional connection with an audience. They can’t connect with a reader by sharing a personal anecdote or describing the protagonist of a story with a vivid description. Robot writers can’t use the first person—at least not until we reach the singularity.

Neuroscience tells us these are the exact stories that build human connection. Our brains are wired to light up when we can relate to a narrative. That’s why a story in a far-out world like Star Wars works; Luke is the archetype of the working-class underdog called to great adventure, riding around in spaceships that look like 1950s hot rods. Even though the Star Wars universe is foreign on the surface, we can still connect to Luke and the world he inhabits.

This dynamic can also apply to B2B blog posts. I was the editor-in-chief of Contently’s blog, The Content Strategist, for years. The worst performing posts were the ones that began with bland stats or facts. The best stories began with a personal anecdote or a vivid scene that marketers could relate to—like this confessional about my biggest shortcomings or this profile of Marriott’s newsroom.

I often speak to college students who want to become professional writers. A lot of professors still preach the old-school route—cutting your teeth as an entry-level reporter writing straightforward news stories. While these assignments can make you a more concise writer, those jobs are going away. If you want to make it in 2018, you need to be able to find unique, human stories, and tell them with an engaging voice. And you need to be able to tell those stories across mediums—text, video, audio, graphics, and everything in between.

Should content strategists make an investment to learn to program Hadoop (on top of other data analysis tools), and would that help make us more marketable to work at Contently?

—Kate, New York, NY

This is a question that Shane Snow and I didn’t get to answer during the Facebook Live Q&A we did to promote our new book. So Kate, sorry for the delay.

The answer to your question: One hundred percent yes! Data skills are at the top of our job requirements for content strategists. It’s incredibly important to be able to analyze first- and third-party data to figure out what your target audience craves. We just hired a new content strategists (sup, Kema!) and she’s in the middle of a month-long crash course on data analysis. But one of the things that impressed us the most was how she used data strategically to optimize content programs at her previous jobs.

As I wrote in this Ask a Content Strategist column about creating data-driven content, data analysis is just the first step in coming up with a breakthrough strategy. It provides the creative constraints to unleash your best ideas. Plus, it ensures that you’re covering topics that interest your audience in the formats and channels they care about.

I have had reasonable success with Twitter about a year in with 1,100 followers. However, I don’t know how to handle my Facebook. I never really paid attention to it, but would like to retool it to be a way to promote content marketing towards a content marketing audience. Is there a way to do this? As it stands I have 240 followers, but they’re mostly unengaged, and I’m lucky to get more than 20 likes for my most popular content.

—Jason, Detroit

At the end of 2017, aspiring Black Mirror villain Mark Zuckerberg made a New Year’s resolution to crush the hopes and dreams of any marketer or media company hoping to generate organic engagement on Facebook. And boy, did he deliver.

The traditional Facebook game plan—posting links to interesting stories and videos with a compelling teaser—just doesn’t work anymore. However, there are a few tactics that still do:

Post from your personal account: Facebook is now prioritizing posts from individuals instead of media and brand pages. So content you post from your personal account will now get a boost.

This only works, of course, if you are friends with a lot of people in your target audience. I don’t know about you, but I’m friends with very few people in the content marketing community on Facebook. I relegate those relationships to Twitter and LinkedIn. I only use Facebook for big work announcements, like when my book came out or when I won the Contently company photo for a third straight year.

Really nailed the @contently company photo this year pic.twitter.com/GE6r3aAe4K

— Joe Lazauskas (@JoeLazauskas) January 18, 2018

Facebook groups: Search out active Facebook groups that align with your target audience. Since you’re a content marketer trying to reach content marketers (so meta!), I’d suggest the Content Strategists group on Facebook. It’s private, but pretty easy to get in.

Then, be a good community member. Don’t just promote your own crap. Like and comment on other people’s posts. Share interesting things you’ve read that aren’t from your own blog. Facebook still promotes content from groups, although that could change at any time.

Facebook Live: Facebook isn’t as hot on Live video as it was two years ago, but it still juices live video much more than any other medium in its feed. You can set up a serviceable Facebook Live studio in your living room for about $60. Just get a $30 iPhone tripod off Amazon, a decent bluetooth lapel mic that connects to your iPhone, and have at it. Just be sure to teach people something interesting, and keep it short.

Facebook ads: Facebook may be a black hole for organic engagement, but it’s still the best paid content distribution platform on earth—even for B2B. We used Facebook ads to triple our email list in a few months, optimizing for posts that led to a higher newsletter conversion rate.

That’s how I’d recommend using Facebook ads—drive folks to blog content that compels them to sign up for your newsletter. Then you can have a direct relationship with them instead of relying on Facebook’s fickle algorithm.

Focus on LinkedIn instead: After substantially improving the way content appears in the feed, LinkedIn is having a moment. Native LinkedIn videos and LinkedIn Pulse articles get incredible reach. Among the four big social networks, LinkedIn was by far the biggest driver of sales for our book. Hundreds of marketers liked every excerpt we published.

I’d still exercise the same caution with LinkedIn as with Facebook: Don’t build your audience on rented land. But it’s a pretty great place to get out your story right now.

If you want a master class in using LinkedIn to reach content marketers with content marketing, just follow Trackmaven CEO Allen Gannett. That man has it figured out. And he’s one hell of a dresser.

Wool vs polyester @Allen @JoeLazauskas pic.twitter.com/W7rBH9u8W3

— Katrina Neal (@katrina_neal) September 8, 2017

I think my shoes worked better, but it’s up for debate.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s head of content strategy and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: When Will the Robot Writers Take Over? appeared first on Contently.

The Super Bowl is one of the few occasions when TV audiences are actually happy to watch the commercials. Because the ads are so expensive, advertisers put a lot of effort into making them great. So whereas we skip commercials during the rest of the year, we’ll run back from the kitchen with a mouthful of potato chips to catch Super Bowl commercials.

Of course, not all Super Bowl ads are great. The Hopkins researchers wanted to know what made the biggest difference between a Super Bowl ad people loved and one they didn’t. They took several years of commercials and catalogued them by various factors: humor, length, sexiness, subject matter, use of cute animals, and other elements. Then they looked at which ads were most popular to see which of these factors mattered the most.

What they found was surprising. It turns out that neither jokes nor cute animals nor sexy ladies made a Super Bowl ad popular. The best ads were the ones that had strong narrative arcs.

In other words, the best ads were great stories.

But let’s not underestimate the cute animals, since they play a big part in how much storytelling is upending advertising.

It Sounds Like a Revolution

In 2014, BuzzFeed was in the midst of launching a new kind of advertising agency. Two years earlier, the company hired Ze Frank—one of the internet’s most successful early video creators—to launch BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, a studio that would create original video for the digital media startup and its advertisers.

Most advertising videos shops follow an age-old model: They sell a flashy idea for an ad spot to a client, invest a huge budget to produce the spot, and buy media to support it. The entire exercise is an educated act of faith.

BuzzFeed and Frank, however, wanted to do things differently. Since BuzzFeed’s beginnings in November 2006, founder Jonah Peretti had been obsessed with the science of how content spreads online. BuzzFeed constantly tinkered with how they created and distributed content, making slight adjustments to headlines, story structure, and content strategy. This allowed them to skyrocket to more than 150 million readers, surpassing the digital reach of major legacy publishers like the New York Times.

BuzzFeed never ran banner ads. Rather, it created content on behalf of advertisers and doubled down on original videos as its primary advertising offering.

When Purina came to BuzzFeed in 2014 to run an advertising campaign, Frank didn’t pitch them on a big spot. Instead, Frank proposed to create a series of short videos. The two companies agreed to make a set number of videos and test to see which one resonated with BuzzFeed’s audience. The idea was to test a bunch of different storytelling approaches against a broader theme until they found a hit, just like BuzzFeed had always done with its non-advertising stories.

In a Fast Company profile, former BuzzFeed CMO Greg Cooper recalled showing a two-minute comic video they created to a Purina executive. The exec audibly gasped when he saw it, surprised by how different the video was from a traditional ad spot.

The video showed an older cat schooling a new kitten in the ways of the world, explaining the strange behavior of their humans and the best spots in the apartment to hang out. (“On special occasions, they will leave the underwear drawer open to signal their appreciation . . . of me,” the older cat tells the kitten. “To be clear it’s my spot. It’s perfect in there. It’s like sleeping in underwear. Well . . . that’s exactly what it is.”)

The video, entitled Dear Kitten, would become one of the most famous pieces of social advertising to date, generating more than 29 million YouTube views. (Its sequels have racked up more than 40 million additional views.) But the most interesting thing about it is how it was developed: through a rigorous series of trial and error tests. The first four videos BuzzFeed made for Purina flopped. It took a half-dozen videos before they developed a hit.

“It sounds like a revolution,” Cooper said during a SXSW keynote. “Large corporations don’t like revolutions. They like predictability. They like incremental growth.”

But those corporations are quickly changing their tune. They’re realizing that the most effective way to find a hit is to strategically create content, test how it’ll connect with audiences, and then optimize the approach based on what they learned. Because if you’re going to spend millions to put your story in front of people, you better make sure it’s a story they’re going to love.

This is an excerpt from The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming Into the Void, and Make People Love You” by Contently’s Joe Lazauskas and Shane Snow. Get it today.

The post The Big Difference Between the Ads People Love and Ads People Hate appeared first on Contently.

Once you sign up for a few brand newsletters, you get pounded with the same generic how-to articles. How to Use Social Media to Boost Your Small Business. How to Make Your Team More Productive. How to Save Money for Your Kid’s Future. And, most ironically, How to Deal With Email Overload.

The onslaught of the status quo drives us crazy because, deep down, we all know this strategy doesn’t work. The best stories take risks. They suck us in, keep us on the edge of our seats, and illuminate the city of our minds. Need more proof? There’s actually a science to it.

Recently, I sat down with The Big Think to talk about the lessons Contently co-founder Shane Snow and I cover in our new book, The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming into the Void, and Make People Love You. It turns out there are four pillars underlying all great stories: relatability, novelty, tension, and fluency. You can use these pillars to study everything from Star Wars to Ernest Hemingway to Stephen King.

Check out the short video below to learn more about these four pillars and how they can make you a better storyteller.

You can pre-order the book here. And if you’d like to subscribe to our free email course on becoming a better storyteller, sign up here!

The post 4 Elements of Great Storytelling, Backed by Neuroscience appeared first on Contently.

His dying words were, “Trust no one.”

The murdered officer, codenamed “Deep Throat,” was actually a fictional character in the Season 1 finale of the television show The X-Files. (He was based on a real informant with the same codename who helped reporters break the Watergate scandal.) As a 10-year-old when this episode premiered, I was appropriately devastated.

Deep Throat’s fictional assassination by his own government came at a historic time in America. Fox launched The X-Files when faith in the American government had dropped to an all-time low. In fact, it came at a time when American faith in all institutions was at a low after falling steadily since the 1970s.

That trend, which X-Files captured in its decade of paranoid television, has continued until today, save for a brief climb in the late ’90s during the economic boom and a spike after 9/11. Per Pew Research’s annual survey, which asks people about their level of trust in government to do the right thing “most of the time,” here’s a snapshot of public confidence in the U.S. government over the decades:

By another measure, the Edelman Trust Barometer, which measures trust that various organizations and people will do the right thing on a scale of 0–100, three-quarters of governments around the world are distrusted by their citizens:

But it’s not just government. According to Gallup’s survey about public confidence in various institutions, administered every year since 1958, we’re losing trust in just about everything.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy argues that institutions have a social purpose and transcend individuals by creating norms and rules that people can count on. Basically, institutions are the building blocks of society. If we lose trust in an institution, dysfunction will follow until that institution is replaced by something else that can govern our behavior and make life predictable.

As a journalist and the founder of a company that helps businesses publish information, these charts are particularly vexing. (As of 2016, only 20 percent of Americans trust newspapers, per Gallup.) Distrust in the press threatens society. Democracy needs information to expose corruption and keep people informed. And distrust is certainly bad for business, bad for the economy, and so on.

There are surely bad actors in both the business and media worlds who don’t deserve our trust. But there are plenty of good actors, too. Knowing which of these to trust is more difficult than ever. And for those of us with a stake in our own institutions, gaining trust is more paramount than ever.

A Brief History Of (Losing) Trust

In 1977, political scientist Ronald Inglehart proposed that people lose trust in authorities and organizations as they become wealthier and less concerned with basic survival.

This theory may explain some of the general decline, but even the wealthiest people still trust some things—the power grid, capitalism, their therapists. The rest of us probably trust some brands. (I put my faith in Starbucks to not poison me no matter where I am in the world.) In many cases, it’s good to be skeptical. But when we look at the history of our most important institutions, there’s a simpler explanation for why we lose faith, even for institutions that helped us out in the past.

Before the industrial revolution, most societies put their trust in religious institutions. Yet over the years, fewer and fewer people have trusted religion. This resulted in the splintering of religious sects—protesting the religion that betrayed your trust by forming a new religion—which eventually led to more people abandoning religion entirely.

Then we generally believed in democratic governments. But trust in that institution eroded as well. We became more cynical that the democratic process was truly working.

As faith in government rose and fell, we turned to business for a bit until that deteriorated. Certain industries, however, managed to keep our trust even as the general business world lost it. These included banks, healthcare, education, charities, and the mass media. They were seen as more noble, more “in it” for the good of society. We now distrust all of those too; it just took a while longer. (See the charts above!)

Losing trust in an institution (or an individual) stems from betrayal: When we feel lied to, taken advantage of. In the case of all the institutions I mentioned above, the loss of trust boils down to one thing: greed.

The pattern here is pretty simple. Religious leaders broke laws, misused funds, and showed that what a church said didn’t square with reality. Political leaders made decisions based on money rather than the good of the people. Financial companies got rich at the expense of poorer people and the economy at large. Media companies tricked people with misinformation or sketchy information meant to increase attention and revenue. I could go on a lot longer.

Fortunately, both science and history show us how we can get trust back once more.

How We Can Build Trust Again

This year, eight professors from U.S. universities published a study in the journal PLOSone that offers some instructive insights on institutional trust. The professors decided to send 185 college students updates about a couple of government agencies they knew very little about: Nebraska state water regulators.

Every three months for a year and a half, students received news about the regulators. Compared to a control group, respondents who got the updates reported having more trust in the water agencies even though their overall trust of the government didn’t improve.

The conclusion from the study is simple yet important: Information and transparency build trust. The more we learn about what’s really going on inside an organization, the more favorably we judge it compared to whatever category it fits in.

However, the study also found that people who were pretty skeptical about everything in life didn’t report a big boost in trust in the water agencies just from learning more about them. Overcoming this general mistrust takes a little more.

According to Paul Zak, Claremont University neuroscientist and author of Trust Factor, we need to develop an emotional connection to regain trust or form a trusting connection with a person or institution. We can do this by engaging in activities that release the chemical Oxytocin in our brains—the neuro-mechanism by which ancient humans decided that other humans were safe enough to work with and trust. The behaviors that induce Oxytocin production include hugs, acts of kindness, and—get ready for it—telling emotional stories. (See Dr. Zak’s TED talk about Oxytocin here; it’s great!)

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer study, three-quarters of people believe that “a company can take specific actions that both increase profits and improve the economic and social conditions in the community where it operates.” We think companies are capable of doing business without betraying people.

What all this research tells us is if organizations are not just transparent about what they do, but forthcoming about how and why they are doing it, they’ll build trust—even in industries that have lost credibility.

We built our trust in all of our institutions, from religion to banks to newspapers, based on the stories they told us. Now let’s start telling more of them. Let’s start telling true ones.

The post Why Major Institutions Lost Public Trust, and How They Can Gain It Back appeared first on Contently.

The New Yorker: #Vanlife, the Bohemian Social-Media Movement

Selected by Erin Nelson, marketing editor

In “#VanLife, The Bohemian Social Movement,” Rachel Monroe chronicles the rise of #VanLife, the millennial phenomenon whereby twenty and thirtysomethings quit their jobs and make a living by curating sponsored social media images of their experience on the road. In the story, Monroe becomes a character in one #VanLife journey, traveling with a young couple and their dog through Southern California.

As I read Monroe’s opening passages about Emily King and Corey Smith, the central couple in the story, I felt a strong sense of envy. #VanLife—traveling to beautiful locations with my partner and dog in the comfort of a VW home—sounded like a pretty good gig. Yet as Monroe paints a picture of living in a cramped space that takes on the smells of the humans, animals, and trash it hosts, I started to feel the claustrophobia of that lifestyle choice.

What’s more, Monroe details the way “lifestyle” images are a carefully contrived representative of the type of bohemian life many millennials and middle-aged hippies lust after. In reality, King and Smith spend hours curating images and analyzing engagement analytics to appease the very sponsors that support their journey. It’s capitalism through the lens of those who reject it, told from a gilded cage on wheels.

The New York Times: How YouTube’s Shifting Algorithms Hurt Independent Media

Selected by Dillon Baker, technology editor

As advertisers use Google’s recent controversies to leverage better prices and better placements, YouTubers are suffering. Many—some with controversial content, some without—have taken major hits to their revenue as advertisers pull out and YouTube’s algorithm demonetizes videos with little explanation.

I have no doubt that many of those hurt by this produce content I don’t agree with or would support. But it’s one more step towards an internet controlled by the whims of sensitive brands and detached algorithms, rather than people. Some will survive thanks to services like Patreon, but as Amanda Hess writes, “it puts the wild, independent internet in danger of becoming more boring than TV.”

BuzzFeed: Mark Zuckerberg’s Makeover Is a Political Campaign Without the Politics

Selected by Brian Maehl, talent development manager

Photographed in a hard hat next to factory workers. Sitting at a table surrounded by police officers to discuss how to better connect with a community. In 2017, the parallels between running for office and running a tech company are awfully blurry.

Much has been said about the political undertones of Mark Zuckerberg’s public appearances of late but, in the words of Nitasha Tiku at Buzzfeed, “Zuckerberg’s listening tour is less a presidential gambit than a focus group with Facebook users.”

While there’s clearly a motive to project Facebook in a more positive light, Tiku suggests that Zuckerberg’s own curiosity is the fuel for this campaigning. He’s simply looking to better understand the world, and informing Facebook’s direction is one of the many bonuses.

While skepticism will likely follow the head of such a dominant company, much worse has been written about the executive’s intentions. Public perception of him seems to be coming a long way since The Social Network days—calculated or not.

The Ringer: Are Chat-Fiction Apps the New YA Novels?

Selected by Jordan Teicher, managing editor

Print is supposed to be dying. Novels are supposed to be on the decline. Hyperbole aside, both of those statements are probably true to an extent. But as anyone from Contently will tell you, storytelling is on the rise. The only difference seems to be how we’re telling the stories.

Last month, Alyssa Bereznak took a look at an unusual (and successful) type of content: chat fiction. Think of it as the millennial version of an epistolary novel—the narrative slowly unwinding through text conversations. Since 2014, Hooked, a chat-fiction app, has been downloaded more than 10 million times. Last month, the app generated more than $500,000 in subscription revenue. It may not be for everyone, but as book sales decline and kids spend more time reading online, this model could become the future of fiction.

In other words, we can keep lamenting the death of the way things used to be, or we can be proactive and find innovative ways to carry along the history of storytelling.

Business Insider: The evidence is piling up — Silicon Valley is being destroyed

Selected by Joe Lazauskas, editor-in-chief

I remember when I was 23 and went to my first New York tech Meetup. The year was 2010. Taio Cruz topped the Billboard charts. And everyone still thought of the New York tech scene as this scrappy, tight-knit community of underdogs fighting for a new, exciting world—as opposed to: Kind of like the finance industry, but with jeans!

Now, innovation is stagnating. Not inside the world’s biggest tech companies, but in the tech industry at large. You see this in obvious places—like social networking, where we’ve permanently settled into an era where the big six of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest dominate, and a serious new player hasn’t entered the market in years. But it’s also affecting other areas. Martech startups have little chance in a battle against established giants like Adobe and Oracle. Mobile advertising startups haven’t chipped away at the 85 percent of the industry Facebook and Google control.

In this piece, Matt Stoller does his best Bernie Sanders impression and makes his case for a bold move: Break them up.

The post The Destruction of Silicon Valley, and 4 Other Stories We Loved in April appeared first on Contently.