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Storytelling and visuals are two of the most powerful tools content marketers have. Both of these attributes can help get ideas across more effectively and increase engagement. Combining these two elements—well, that’s a recipe for success. How can marketers go about creating a successful visual story? Luckily, there are plenty of tools available to help you take a marketing yarn and weave it into a beautiful visual. Here are 11 of the top software programs, websites, and more for creating your visual content marketing stories....
Do you remember anything at all when you watch ads -- or is the experience a hazy blur? The fact is, consumers rarely remember a product -- they remember stories, which may inspire the use of the product. That element is what online advertising is lacking. Two weeks ago I talked about the value of complementary storytelling vs. disruption. For advertising to be as effective as it can be, ad stories need to align with the content so that it, along with targeting, ensures relevance of the message in a way that elicits a response.
I also want to remind advertisers to spend the extra time to tell a story that inspires consumers, rather than simply telling them about your product. I don’t mean that all ads have to move you to tears. I’m referring to inspiration in the manner of a quiet...
How often does an interaction under the business communications umbrella lend itself to a full-blown story, the type with a beginning, an end and something going amiss in the middle that must be overcome? Maybe 10 percent of the time, and that’s probably high.
That’s why we use the term storytelling techniques in describing how the concepts of storytelling can be applied to business communications. It turns out that within the classic story arc, those who entertain like novelists and movie directors depend on certain techniques to bring their material to life....
The other thing I have to emphasize is that in order for a lot of these ideas to work for you, you need to think of content as something way beyond simply a marketing tactic – you need to embrace it in everything you do on your site and offsite – take for example Ian Lurie’s (from Portent – an organisation whose thoughts on content clearly mirror mine ) post on Content as part of UX over at Moz. And like I point out in the Content is King post, and as Ammon Johns points out in this piece “The Great Content marketing Swindle“, content without a real distribution channel is simply content, not content marketing.
Every single one of these ideas below need a distribution and display strategy for them to work.By no means is this list exhaustive, but it can form a good start to any content plan. Some of the areas may not apply to all businesses, while others will – I have taken the approach of top down- starting with the core corporate communication and then working my way into the more creative areas....
If you want to separate your content from your competitors, storytelling is a great tactic to add to your content marketing strategy. Several interesting case studies have shown how the implementation of storytelling can triple sales within one year. The best part is that any business can use storytelling in their content marketing strategy by following these five best practices....
“Deconstructing the art and science of storytelling, This sentence, the one you're reading right now, is the most important one in this entire feature.”
...But while brand storytelling may be dominating the trade conference stages, it’s not enough on its own for brands aiming to add meaningful value to their customers over the long term.
Strategies for Retention: Own Every Consumer Touch Point
Most content marketers know this particular statistic: 70 percent of consumers prefer getting to know a company via content over ads. To deliver this type of lasting, comprehensive value to their audiences, brands must build their content strategy around three core areas of focus: Foundational content Engagement content Social content...
There are two important parts of delivering a message: the delivery and the message. If one is a dud, it doesn’t matter how good the other one is.
You wouldn’t read a story if it was printed underneath a bus, and the most atrocious film in the world is still a car-crash if played on an IMAX cinema. The same applies to your brand storytelling, you can have the most heartwarming and engaging campaign in the world, but if it’s not delivered effectively your time and money has been wasted.
You wouldn’t want to spend months creating an incredible story only for nobody to hear it, would you? Every day there are brands who do this by not thinking carefully about how to present their message to their audience. An intelligent delivery strategy will make it easier for people to hear the story you want to tell, optimizing your chances of turning them into customers. Here’s how to ensure that the story your brand is telling doesn’t get missed...
Story time isn’t just for kids. In my analysis, top sales reps use stories at almost every stage of a deal -- clarifying the product, overcoming objections, answering questions. No matter what step they’re at or what the issue might be, they have a story on hand.
But the powerful art of sales storytelling is only mastered by a few. One reason is that salespeople aren’t taught how to talk about case studies and other marketing content as stories. It’s great to create written case studies, film an accompanying video or two, and put those resources on the website for potential customers. But the next step should be to provide training that walks salespeople through the talking points in the context of a story.
Also, too many sales reps use case studies as a way to puff out their chests. But they’re much more effectively put to use as a way to talk through challenges from the buyer’s perspective. Less “look how great my company is” and more “here’s how our client’s life got better thanks to our help.”
Here are the elements that should be in every sales story, to help both sales and marketing determine how to structure these valuable tales....
Why did people donate to help a kid who made a cardboard game arcade? How did a game show boost the sales of IBM? Andrew Davis explains how great storytelling boosts ROI.
Content marketing is all about storytelling. Without a story, it's a lot harder to create content (and it's a lot harder to have a reason to create that content). In this post, I want to help you think more clearly about the story behind your business so you can do a better job building more impactful messages and a better content marketing campaign. Let's dive in...
Why You Need A Story First, you might be wondering what storytelling has to do with business and marketing in the first place. Every business needs a good story. The story is what connects your customers to your product or service, and it's what helps explain what the French would call your "raison d'être" (your "reason for existence"). Without a story, you're simply another business simply trying to peddle your products....
You can measure the storytelling lift in media relations activities.
As the Internet commoditizes news announcements, journalists increasingly look for fodder that allows them to write unique stories as opposed to those already in the public domain....
Find out how telling visual stories with images or video on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and YouTube will help you reach connect with your audience.
Are you sharing your stories with your fans?
Do you use pictures in your social marketing?
People want pictures in their social channels.
When done right, these pictures become visual stories.
In this article, I’ll show you how five brands are using pictures to share their stories and why that’s important....
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Breaking the Top 10 storytelling posts for 2016 into two parts, I published the first part last week.
Here’s the second part, again reflecting the varied facets that make up today’s communications in the business world.
In spite of the massive changes in our industry, media relations and PR storytelling still matter, an apt way to kick off the rest of the list....
Not only is visual content integral to how we process information, but it also drives increased engagement from our audience.
What does this mean for brand storytellers? We should be investing just as much time and creativity into our visual content as we do for our written content. And yet, visuals are often treated as an afterthought rather than one half of the storytelling duo.
Visual storytelling doesn’t come naturally to many of us design-impaired marketers (myself included). Luckily, there are some established dos and don’ts we can follow to ensure that our visuals are relevant and effective. Here are four best practices for visual storytelling....
It is no secret that storytelling has become the pinnacle practice of 2015. So what can content marketers learn from some of the best stories going right now? Looking ahead to Friday and a new “House of Cards“ release on Netflix, I began to think about the parallels between content marketing and traditional media (in this case television).
In Kevin Spacey’s keynote from Content Marketing World 2014, he told a half hour story about the importance of storytelling using his own career as a vehicle and the stories of the actors he’s played along the way as the gasoline. I distinctly remember this being one of the most #meta speeches I’ve ever heard.
So what advice does Francis Underwood have to dish on storytelling? Spacey recommends that before you even begin, it’s important to ask yourself, “What story do you want to tell?” He suggests that everything will fall in line “if you start with what the result is going to be.” Once you get over the initial hurdle of determining what story you want to tell, you have to examine what elements will make this story truly engaging. Spacey goes on to propose three pillars that must be present in every good story....
“Storytelling.” It’s the flavor of the day, whether you’re talking about content marketing, visual communications or public relations, and for good reason. Stories are how humans communicate – with each other individually, across populations and over centuries.
In fact, many organizations are pretty good at identifying and defining their key story lines. The key to success in brand storytelling is in the next step – the strategic deployment of the story. Telling the brand story effectively requires a plan.
And to be clear, we’re not talking about hanging a touchy-feely post up on the blog and then calling it a day. No. Brand storytelling, in this context, means developing a sustained plan to create and execute a strategic approach to telling the brand story, in a way that supports company’s objectives. Personally, I don’t give a hoot about impressions. Let’s gun for something a bit more meaningful....
One of the by products of this research is that we’re learning how much of decision-making is unconscious, and indeed beyond the reach of the conscious mind until the decision is already made. So your traditional means of testing – the focus groups, the in-depth interviews, the surveys, and so on – by their very nature miss out on the interesting parts of consumer choice.
If you’re not tapping into this new kind of data, you’re not only behind the curve, you’re out of the loop, the one that matters, the consumer decision-making loop.Can your story stand up to that kind of pressure? Does your story meet these new kinds of tests?...
...For example, a selfie of a young twenty-something with a snowboard at a ski resort represents both the endorsement of a product, an endorsement of an activity, as well as an identifier of someone saying “I am a snowboarder”.
While its easy to dismiss that this is just a photo, the movement signals a future that we here at Curatti dub The Content of People, or the Internet of People. Note that this sounds a little bit like something similar, The Internet of Things, better known as IoT. That’s because in some sense, people and things are converging as we head towards an even more digital society — as consumers associate themselves with things and items, they become that item, as opposed to that item molding who they are. What you’re now seeing is a world where products no longer define people, but a world where the end user defines the product. Identity ultimately will (and has begun to) shift.
How to Execute in the Content of People (CoP)
Executing in the Content of People is a challenge, but not entirely impossible. As I look to the future of marketing and storytelling, here’s how I see the CoP impacting how marketing is done....
Storytelling can be complex and the information about storytelling, well, overwhelming. The good news, is that you can start either way — from the future (with a vision story) or the past (with an origin story). In this article I want to show you simple ways that you can dive right into telling your story (without fretting or worrying so much if you’re getting it right).
In a recent client workshop in New York City we unpacked this process, sharing some of my favorite ways to lead off any purposeful story. I shared six kick-off phrases that ANYONE can use to start a story in a way that’s compelling, uplifting, and inspiring. I like to think of it as Mad-Libs for transformational storytelling!
The Story Literally Spills Out Of You, When You Use One Of These 6 Kick-Off Phrases.
These 6 strategies are something we cover in great depth in our StoryU Online course Undeniable Story. Today, I want to share with you a few of them that are really important in setting the context and frame for your marketing, storytelling, and leadership efforts....
One of the best parts of my job involves conducting storytelling workshops.It’s both fun and satisfying to help participants connect the dots to a simple premise: Given a choice between “interesting” and “dull,” human beings pick “interesting” virtually every time.
I’m constantly refining the package shared with participants in our workshops for business storytelling.Lately, these are my go-to narratives....
Pixar's 22 Rules to Phenomenal Storytelling, originally tweeted by Emma Coats.
The world complained of infographic fatigue two years ago.
Yet, infographics continue to be a mainstay of visual storytelling. Fresh infographics – when I say “fresh,” I mean a narrative that’s easy on the eyes, entertaining, and delivers a surprise – still generate attention. When we look across our client blogs, the posts with infographics inevitably score well in the popularity index called Google Analytics.
That’s the good news.
On the not-so-good side, the popularity of infographics has resulted in some visuals that can only be described as dreadful (to be kind). The infographic platform by itself doesn’t automatically serve the target audience. You still need to deliver information that has relevance to the reader and offers something that they will care about....
As long as people can see the difference between a brand and a human vision, brand storytelling will always play second fiddle to real human stories. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
There’s a large movement currently for brands to “tell their story”, to enable them to be more approachable to customers. Communications pro Gini Dietrich does a great job of showing the strengths of storytelling for brands on her leading Spin Sucks blog.
There are some great examples of brands that win when they insert a more story-like feel to their ad or marketing campaigns. Take Apple and Google, for instance, as highlighted by the two videos below....
...Although companies understand the part about becoming a media company they missed something very important: media companies don’t create media about themselves. This is why companies have problems with the content they produce, people are immediately skeptical about any media that is about the company that produces it — no matter how high the quality.
Take a look at the Nielsen study released this week, commissioned by InPowered. It found that branded content ranked extremely low among consumers but content written by journalists — independent of any brand — ranked very highly....
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Try your hand at some of these top visual storytelling tools to enhance your content marketing stories.