Brand, Meet Story

How to Create Engaging Content to Win Business and Influence Your Audience

Heather Pemberton Levy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351818452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Think of the last great article you read or the last great speech you heard. Chances are, if you remember one key message, you also remember one compelling story. That's because the best content starts with a story. When it comes to marketing, the best business content starts with a story the audience cares about, not the brand's message about what it wants to sell them. In Brand, Meet Story, Heather Pemberton Levy describes the Story Comes First method, a practical approach that combines techniques from journalism and fiction writing to help brands tell stories that put the readers' interests first. Whereas most brand marketers create content to sell their product, service or technology, the Story Comes First method turns this approach on its head to create content with the "human moments" that truly engage an audience. Filled with examples from Levy's experience creating content marketing programs, trade books, and hundreds of articles for a variety of B2B and B2C brands, the book shows readers a step-by-step approach to create content designed to deliver business results. Brand, Meet Story explains the key ways to uncover what your audience cares about and how to turn brand messaging into stories that matter. Levy inspires readers to develop a compelling voice that will carry the brand tone and values across all channels, and helps them turn their ideas into engaging, story-driven content their audiences will read, love, and share.

1
The Storytelling Imperative for Brands

One warm night in April, 2015, I traveled to the Danbury Fair Mall in Connecticut for an appointment at the Apple Store. I had scheduled a “try on” for the new Apple Watch on the first day it became available and long before the product would even ship to customers. Previously, I had never waited in line for an iPhone or any other Apple product. In fact, I’m not a classic early adopter at all. I do not typically run out and buy the coolest new technology gadget. Sure, I’ve been writing about technology for a few decades and get (nearly) as excited about writing how planes will one day drop “smart dust” onto a forest fire to gauge the temperature and wind direction as I do writing about creative ways to serve premium chocolate for Mother’s Day brunch. But this time was different. What compelled me to devote hours of my time visiting a store to see a watch that night in April?

Sunset in Africa.

Let me explain. A few months earlier, when researching an article on smartwatches, I visited each manufacturer’s website. Most of the sites described the features of each smartwatch model. By contrast Apple.com featured a blog campaign by the model Christy Turlington Burns about her marathon training and races around the globe to raise money for her charity, Every Mother Counts. The blog told stories of how Christy used the Apple Watch to track the sunrise and sunset in Africa to determine the best time of day to train or how she measured her distance, heart rate, and speed. I’m no marathon runner, but the stories showed me how the Apple Watch gave Christy an edge in life. What had seemed a tech gadget for early adopters became a practical accessory for a professional, busy woman. In other words, Apple turned me into a customer by telling a story— by showing me a moment (sunset in Africa) when its product was useful.

Brands' Content Opportunity and Challenge

Let’s be clear: Apple sponsored the Christy Turlington Burns Apple Watch campaign to market and sell a new product. However, instead of talking about the Apple Watch from Apple’s point of view (This is how great our product is!), the campaign told the story from the customer’s point of view. When done well, content marketing puts a brand’s product and services into the life of a customer. But this kind of marketing is not so easy to do. In fact, according to the Content Marketing Institute, the number one challenge and priority for business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) marketers is creating engaging content.¹ Why do brands need to create good content? Because social media gave brands their own channels.

With traditional public relations (PR), brands would send press releases about their products to magazine editors and newswires, hoping their stories would be picked up for publication and thus reach a large audience. Publications and their editors owned the audiences and they had a strong incentive to write good articles for their readers in order to sustain and grow subscribership.

Enter social media. When brands began to build their own channels through e-mail lists and social media, they started to publish content themselves. But there was one significant catch. Audiences only read, “like,” and “share” what interests them. They share what they think will interest their friends and social networks, what makes them look smart or trendy, and what helps them build their own audiences. Press release—type messaging, with the exception of perhaps B2B research data, will not sway the social web. People use social media to share stories with their friends— personal stories. In order to engage these people, brands need to tell stories, too.

Most brands have yet to determine how to create the type of engaging content that grows brand awareness and generates leads. Brands are hungry for quality content because content marketing has become the top method in recent years for building brand awareness and generating leads. In the Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 report, 88 percent of B2B companies and 76 percent of B2C companies said they now use content marketing.² NewsCred, a content marketing platform, shared that with its own content marketing programs, leads that engage with content are twice as likely to accept a sales meeting. Additionally, the company’s average prospect engages with twenty pieces of content before becoming a customer. Consider that Coca- Cola spends more on content creation than it does on TV advertising³ and Nestlé’s editorial team of twenty people produces new content every day.⁴

But to generate business benefits, the content has to be good.

Don't Leave Your Stories at Home

I’m a middle child. I grew up in a family of five children, which made for a lively household and plenty of opportunity for me, sandwiched in between an older sister and brother and two younger brothers, to assert my need for some attention. This need took the form of frequent impromptu singing performances, typically when my mother was trying to cook dinner. I also told a lot of stories.

I was not the only one to tell stories. My father, Jeff, earned a reputation in the family for telling shaggy dog stories. Dad’s long-winded narrative (usually begun at the dinner table just as we finished eating) often started with his childhood or young adulthood and rambled through myriad details and relationships to an eventual ending. I could dredge up a few of these stories, if pressed, but more importantly, I retain a vivid picture of his youth: the stark contrast between his Depression- era childhood and the colorful life of 1960s Pittsburgh, where he and my mother met and lived when they first married and had children.

My father studied photojournalism at the University of Michigan and moved to Pittsburgh for his first job as a “cub reporter” for the Wall Street Journal. On weekends, he took his camera all over the city to document the steelworkers and their children.

Telling stories with his camera or words is in my father’s bones, so to speak. It’s in mine, too. However, it does not come so naturally in business. Many of us will share vibrant personal stories around the dinner table, on the golf course, or in book club, but when we wake up our computers on Monday morning, we insert distance into our communications. Business leaders and brands, particularly B2B brands, hesitate to infuse their marketing and communications with stories that will reflect the essence of how they want to define themselves in the marketplace. Without this connection, brands waste their content marketing resources on messages that sit on unviewed pages and in articles that lack the ability to inspire a click or share.

Why does this misconnection happen? Often, people close up in the face of exposing themselves to their colleagues, clients, and customers. This exposure is a missed opportunity because stories create the most impact on your audience. They create intimacy and connection. Stories build relationships.

Digital Marketing Requires Humanity

As digital communications have grown, so has the need to use language, tone of voice, and stories to express a brand’s humanity. The power of digital marketing allows brands to touch their audiences with content across channels including social media, websites, and e-mail at specific moments in the sales cycle. Each touch point is a gained or missed opportunity to express brand attributes. Specifically, social marketing requires guts to create the kind of content your audience will want to push to its followers. Think of it this way:

Details + Vulnerability = Connection

Details matter because they create tangible moments that bring your audience into your story. And when you add first person storytelling and reveal yourself, a struggle, and a resolution to that struggle, your audience listens. This connection also occurs when you share moments that your customers have also experienced. Or when you describe moments your customers aspire to, such as Christy Turlington Burns’s training regimen in Africa. Whether it is your story or a character’s story that represents your audience’s challenge or goal, details paint a picture that creates a vivid and lasting impression.

Moments Matter

In 2014, author Elizabeth Gilbert gave her second TED Talk, Success, Failure, and the Drive to Keep Creating. She opened it with a short story about walking through JFK airport when two women approached and asked her if she had something to do with that book Eat, Pray, Love.

“Yes, I did,” she told them.

One of the women turned to her friend and said, “See, I told you, that’s the girl who wrote the book based on that movie.”

In the TED Talk, the audience laughs and Gilbert chuckles at her own fame. Essentially, Gilbert uses the quip as a platform to describe the pressure that followed the success of her first book, to create a second book that was even bigger and better. Near the end of the talk, Gilbert makes a poignant comparison about the struggles of her early days as a writer to her struggle to write a successful follow-up to her breakout “mega hit.”

Moments create tangible hooks to ease your readers into bigger, abstract ideas. People can relate to a moment at the airport— the ordinariness of the scene, the women who approached Gilbert. And when Gilbert laughs at herself, she punctures the haze of her celebrity, making her more ordinary, too.

Think of a moment as a point in time that captures at least two tangible details, including time, place, specific person, action, and need.

Moments share the details of a story. Learning to expose your vulnerability in writing is another matter. Gilbert’s willingness to admit her fear of failure after such grand success took courage. Brands can use this type of courage to create emotional bonds with customers.

In late 2014, Chevrolet regional zone manager Rick Wilde had his big moment: he was tasked to hand World Series MVP Madison Bumgarner the keys to the automaker’s new 2015 Colorado truck. Only Wilde stumbled through his remarks, introducing the truck as featuring “technology and stuff.” That evening, Chevy hit social media and YouTube with a marketing vengeance, adding the term into its campaign and poking fun at its own awkwardness. Traffic to Chevy’s Colorado site jumped sevenfold and the Colorado hogged 70 percent of the “social share of voice,” or the percentage of conversations about trucks that people were having online.⁵ The company estimated its free media exposure at $5 million.

The bigger the brand or the more successful the executive, the greater the impact of sharing vulnerable stories.

A Tale of Two Graduation Speeches

One June afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a girl walked to the podium on a stage, her black robe swinging. Any trepidation she felt was masked by the excitement and honor of giving a speech to her classmates at their high school graduation ceremony. The auditorium was filled with extended family and friends, teachers, and staff of the Cambridge High School Extension Program (HSEP). Only a dozen or so students sat on the stage in caps and gowns: mostly girls, each having survived a journey of troubled youth in one manner or another on her road to graduation. The HSEP is a herculean e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. The Storytelling Imperative for Brands
• 2. Why Story Comes First
• 3. Get to Know Your Audience
• 4. Share Big Ideas Through Small Moments
• 5. Amplify Your Brand Voice
• 6. Create a Content Program That Builds Relationships
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author