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The Non-Writer's Guide to Content Marketing:
6 Tips for Telling an Engaging Story
Content marketing is the next big thing. If you learn how to do it now, you will be miles ahead of most every kid on your block, and any other block.
What exactly is content marketing? Basically, it's providing timely and valuable information to turn your prospects into happy customers. It's just creating stuff that attracts the audience you are looking for.
It happens most naturally online: with a blog, on your website, in your e-newsletter and e-mail campaigns, with the articles you submit to the directories and networking sites.
Where does storytelling come in? Well, a good story, whether it's on your website bio page or in a blog post or testimonial, engages your readers. It helps them remember you and your business. It sets you apart, with voice and personality. And who doesn't want to show that they are a real person, especially with all the sterile--or worse yet, "hypey"-stuff out there on the Web?
6 Tips for Content Marketing with Stories
Here are six tips to start you out. I'll be showing you exactly how to use these tips to keep your readers engaged with you and your business when I'm a guest on The Brent & Brandi Radio Show, Friday, May 15, 1pm Pacific Time, 4pm Eastern.
- Show your personality. Don't hide behind a wall when you write. Your readers want the "insider's view." They want to know what makes you tick.
- Have a unique voice. Write with the words that make you you. Write with the goal that, if someone doesn't see you name, they know it is you just by reading the piece.
- Paint a picture. More than 60 percent of us are visual. We need images to understand and remember. Show how one thing is like another. One of my blog posts, "5 Things Middle Schoolers Can Teach us About Authentic Marketing," compared an adolescent's behavior (being "in the moment," saying what they really think, etc.) to the strategies successful marketers use to gain customer trust.
- Appeal to more than one sense. Pull your readers into your story by making them feel, hear, see, smell. If you do, your writing will be truly memorable.
- Reveal a flaw. If you come across as perfect, I can't relate to you. But tell me something you struggle with, or a lesson you learned (marketers and copywriters call this the "Achille's Heel" strategy) and I'm right there with you. Because I have struggled with the same things.
- Use humor. This is just a core part of who we are. One of my heroes, John Cleese, sums it up perfectly: "If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it, you acknowledge its truth."
For more storytelling tips, see my blog post, The Art of Telling Stories: Engage Your Readers.
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