What’s In a Story?
In the crowded sphere of digital marketing, the answer to that question is “everything.”
Humans are drawn to stories like bears to honey. What makes a story great—heroes, adversity, action, triumph, lessons—all of those things play on our hearts and minds.
Stories have the power to:
- Help us come to know their subjects (i.e., your company or organization) in ways that facts and figures can’t do alone (but, research shows that stories combined with statistics pack an emotional and intellectual punch)
- Make us feel emotions, such as empathy, compassion, and hope
- Allow us to identify with the characters and the situations they encounter and overcome—making us one of the tribe and potentially evangelists (think Apple users, Coke versus Pepsi, Harley-Davidson, and other ardent communities that grow up around certain brands)
- Shape how we perceive a brand or organization
- Differentiate companies and organizations from one another
- Teach us new things by framing learning in a way that we relate to and are naturally more likely to remember
- Persuade us to take an action that favors your business or organization
To boil it down even further, stories reliably and efficiently deliver the one thing that successful content marketing depends on: information that your audience values and trusts.
Besides extensive content research and a rock solid strategy, connecting education and storytelling is the Electric Lemonade secret to achieving content marketing goals, whether it is to expand your audience or increase revenue.
Build Your Audience by Telling Your Story—and Theirs
The goal of your content is to guide your website’s users toward desired actions (conversions) and to keep them coming back. That means building a relationship with them.
To do that, you have to know who they are and what they need. That’s exactly where we start for all of our Electric Lemonade clients.
Then, we can create your content based on thorough research that does more than meet your clients’ needs. It illuminates who you are and how that matters to them. It’s your story, but they are part of it.
How Does Storytelling Work in Practice?
Effective storytelling takes many forms. It can be split up into segments or topics and can—and should—be used across different platforms, including social media. It’s more than an “about” page chronicling your company’s history, although that’s an OK place to start.
And it’s not always about you, at least not directly. Let your customers’ or clients’ stories speak for you, too. Maybe your vendors have stories that reinforce yours. Use them.
Need some examples? Check out our case studies.
Let’s look at one in particular, Fife Therapy.
Here, we explain (valuable information) how Electric Lemonade (the hero) rescued (action) a highly successful physical therapy clinic in Savannah (the main protagonist) from Google search obscurity and an underperforming website (the adversity).
The result of our work? A 40% increase in patient intakes (triumph).
See how we threw in an eye-popping number, too?
We can follow the same thread for a different example: How does Fife Therapy tell its story? It does so in several ways, but if we focus on a video series explaining how the clinic uses technology to find the source of patients’ pain, a few things are immediately clear:
- The clinic is educating clients on the mechanics of pain, while allowing viewers to see how the technology could help them.
- The technology differentiates the clinic from its competition.
- It builds credibility and trust in the clinic’s expertise—saying a lot about Fife Therapy’s brand in return for a relatively small investment of time and resources.
Let Us Do the Work
Every business or organization has stories to tell that strike at heart of who they are and why they exist. Are you telling yours? Are you still telling stories that no longer reflect who you truly are?
Electric Lemonade can help you:
- Identify and create a portfolio of stories that define and amplify your organization, pull your audience in, and influence their decisions as customers or clients
- Determine the best media and platform(s) to publish each story
- Establish timelines for publication
- Measure your success
For more information, please fill out our secure online form below.
