Storytelling and personalization is the biggest missing piece in content marketing as I see it. People are good at writing about what they know. They aren’t as good about expressing who they are and why they do what they do.
If you’re not writing real stories, your content – on your blog, in your newsletter, on your web pages – runs the risk of being boring. You may be excited about what you do as a professional, but your clients will get bored or overwhelmed if you just throw information at them.
In the Content Marketing Webinar last week, I talked about communicating your back-story… the background about the why and who of your business. It’s especially important in service businesses where people hire you to help them solve a problem.
I once asked a guy who founded an online training service what his back-story was, and he didn’t know what I meant.
He thought I would see the obvious, that there was a gap in what was available online and an opportunity to make money. Okay, that’s exciting… to you and your spouse for sure.
But there’s always more to the story than that: Why did he personally spend considerable time, energy and money creating what he did?
There has to be drive, passion and love. He had to care. That’s the story people need to know.
People pay attention when you tell client stories or share your own personal experiences. We’re hard wired that way.
When you illustrate a concept with a story about real people, our brains light up. We become engaged. We start to care. Our mirror neurons get triggered and we put ourselves into the story. We imagine something happening to us and how we’d feel and act.
To engage the hearts and minds of readers, you need to be real, be human, and surprise them. Storytelling is the best way to do that.
But we don’t see that on many websites, do we? We’re still talking biz jargon and trying to sound like a corporation instead of a real person. Or, as David Meerman Scott writes on his blog, people are still writing gobbledygook.
In the blogs and websites I review, I still see bios written in the third person … what if you told your story and used the personal pronoun “I?” It’s not as scary as you might think.
Webinar Replay: We discussed this on the Time-Saving Tips for Content Marketing Results Webinar last Wednesday. You can get the handouts, listen to the replay, and get a 10% bonus here.
Recent Comments