Content Marketing: The Power of Storytelling
No doubt about it, nowadays we live in a digital era where we have a tremendous amount of data, resources, and content online. There is too much noise out there, and it is not simply enough to have your content online (maybe in the early beginning of the web but certainly not now), you can pretty much find the same content recycled or reproduced. We are living in a time of message saturation and information overload. So, how do you stand out from this very much crowded digital world? how do you make your content and overall communication perceived as unique and original?
The key to understanding effective communication and cut through is in the understanding of how the brain works. The brain responds to visuals, we engage with visuals every day as we live in a visual world, we are more likely to engage but most importantly to store visual information, written word and text goes to short term memory whereas visual goes straight to our long term memory, we even tend to remember what we see more than what we hear.
The unique and interesting characteristic of a story is that it’s visual, even without the use of pictures and visual assets. When we hear a story, we imagine how it looks like, we start forming images in our brain, scenes of it as it evolves. Have you ever read a great book and had an image of the main character, and then one day a movie adaptation comes out and the hero is totally different than what you have imagined and stored in your brain? Well, that is how a good story becomes visual.
Storytelling is powerful.
In 2009, 2 journalists by the name of Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, did a really interesting experiment, they wanted to know if storytelling has really the power it possesses. The name of the initiative was “Significant Objects”. So, to find out about that, they purchased about 200 thrift-store objects on eBay with an average cost of $1.25 apiece and then asked 200 contributing writers to write a certain story for each object. After that, they went back on eBay and auctioned off the same objects but with the additional stories, so how do you think they did?
Let me give you a small example of how well they did, the bird figurine that you can see on the picture below was bought for 50 cents and sold for $52, that’s an increase of more than 10 000%, and in case you’re wondering about the total revenue from this fascinating experiment, they sold all the objects for nearly $8000. This shows that stories (when applied right) can be a really powerful technique to increase value.
“Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.” — Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker
For more information about the “Significant Objects” experiment, you can go to their website, where you can find all the objects with their corresponding stories.
How can we leverage the power of storytelling?
It’s about creating alignment between your business and your prospects or customers, you need to be genuine and tell a story that appeals to your audience, your goal is to make a human connection, it’s about resonating with people, people that need your help or guidance.
A story is not just your history, it’s why you’re doing what you’re doing, and telling it in a way that appeals to your audience, Simon Sinek the author of the best selling book “Start With Why” said “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”, and keep in mind that emotion gets remembered and shared, so you should also consider the emotional side of your prospects.
If you’re wondering about how to structure your story, I recommend using Simon Sinek’s concept called “the golden circle”.
It’s all about starting with WHY (most people communicate by starting with “what”), why you are doing what you’re doing, then talk about HOW, how will this help your audience and then you can talk about WHAT, what you are offering.
A technique that most successful businesses use is a persona that attracts clients and customers, Russell Brunson a well-known internet marketer calls it the “attractive character”. For instance, movies use famous actors as their attractive characters to attract more viewers, because they know that people are drawn to them.
If you want to know more about how to apply the attractive character method, I recommend checking this blog article.
In the end, I would like to share with you an interview that I had with Christian Payne, a writer and storyteller:
- According to you what is the power of storytelling?
“At its core, storytelling is just communication that makes people feel something. You can tell people things until you are blue in the face, but they may not necessarily believe you unless they feel something deep inside.”
- How did you leverage that power business & Marketing wise?
“I have often explained to people the process of how I work. I’ve done this in the form of a story, and this has helped people to relate to me and trust in the way I do things.”
- Can you give an example of effective implementation of storytelling in your entrepreneurial journey/Business?
“Over 10 years ago now I crashed the vehicle I was driving and documented the aftermath from the accident. Being open and transparent about my mistakes and how I learn from them opened up many interesting authentic channels of communication for me.”
Writer, technologist, journalist, trainer, podcaster, and storyteller, he is the founder of Documentally, a creative technology, and multimedia training, helping individuals and corporations alike to connect with their customers.
I would love to get your feedback about the article, give it a clap if you liked it, and comment if you have any opinion about the topic 😊
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Business Strategy. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DBS.
