How storytelling helps you sell more, scientifically

If you keep track of the various videos going viral on social networking websites like Facebook you must have come across this heart-warming video of a small puppy becoming friends with a horse. It is a Budweiser ad video.

The video has a typical storytelling format. There is this cute puppy that lives near a stable. It often sneaks out to meet a horse and they are shown interacting and playing together. Then one day the puppy is adopted and while it is being taken in a car it starts crying. The horse, along with other horses in the stable, manages to stop the car of the person who has adopted the puppy and then gets the puppy released. The stable owner adopts the puppy and then the puppy and the horse get to live together happily ever after, or at least this is what the video shows.

This Budweiser ad has scored top honours in the USA Today’s Ad Meter and Hulu’s Ad Zone for being the most popular ad among viewers. It uses the “buddy” concept that resides within the brand Budweiser to touch people emotionally. Nowhere you see people guzzling down the beer or scantily clad women drenching themselves with the foamy liquid. The ad is full of furry cuteness.

Research has shown that it’s not the content of the ad that predicts its success, but the story contained within the content. Storytelling evokes different neurological responses. According to Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist (yes, we have those), says that a stress hormone called coristol is released when we are experiencing tense moments in a story. This hormone helps us focus. When we are experiencing or reading about something cute, like furry animals (for instance the story above) a feel-good chemical called oxytocin is released that promotes connection and empathy. Happy endings in stories trigger the limbic system, that is also called our brain’s reward center, to release dopamine, which makes us feel more hopeful and optimistic.

To prove his point Zak conducted an experiment. A sentimental and emotionally charged movie about a father and a son was shown to a group of participants. After the movie the participants were asked to donate money to a stranger. Those with higher amounts of oxytocin more readily gave money to a stranger than those who had lower levels of oxytocin (those who hadn’t seen the father-son movie).

How can you sell more with effective storytelling?

When people are on your website they are full of doubts. These doubts may originate from lack of information, lack of familiarity and a general sense of suspicion which is natural. They don’t know you. They don’t know about your product or service. They haven’t interacted with people who have used your product or service. So naturally they are not able to make up their minds.

This is where storytelling can help you.

You need to list the benefits of your product or service. You have to explain various features. But along with these, you also need to tell stories of people who have already used your product or service to enrich their lives. Create passionate stories involving your product or service. Show through what difficulties people were going before they purchased your product or service, through what sort of doubts they went before purchasing your product or service, how they ended up purchasing it and through what transformation their lives went after they have purchased your product or service.

More than believing you, your visitors would like to believe people who have been in a similar situation. People like to relate to people because for thousands of years we have been living as a social species. We need validation. We need reassuring information to give us confidence and trust. Effective storytelling can do that.

This blog post takes reference from a Harvard Business Review article on using storytelling as a strategic business tool.

When everybody is a content publisher, how do you stand out?

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This is one of the biggest challenges for people looking at content as their main marketing tool. Content is everywhere. While the traditional newspapers and magazines are disappearing left right and center, the new-age publishers are storming the Internet with great force.

According to a Content Marketing Institute report almost 95% B2B enterprise marketers one way or another use content to promote their products and services. 78% of smaller business (100 or less employees) are working with dedicated professional content writers.

Throw a stone and there is a great possibility it will hit a content publisher

(No, I don’t intend to suggest that you start throwing stones at people) On the Internet, everybody is a publisher. I’m not saying this in the bad sense, because if everybody can be a publisher, what stops you from becoming one?

Being a publisher in the context of the Internet doesn’t mean publishing a magazine or a newspaper. You are a publisher if you publish a blog. You are a publisher if you broadcast a newsletter, upload podcasts and videos, or put out a series of ebooks. If people consume the content you publish regularly (with a strictly followed routine) you’re a publisher.

Conventional publishers publish for the sake of publishing. But as a business person, as an entrepreneur, as a content marketer, you publish to build a platform for your business. Building a platform means providing people a place where they can come and access your content at their own discretion.

One can become a content publisher by spending little money

You can become a publisher almost free of cost. If you have a business website then you already have a domain and I can safely assume your website is hosted somewhere. You can use one of the free source content management systems (WordPress, for instance) and with little bit of tweaking you can even make it look decent.

Then you can either write content for your publishing platform yourself or you can hire a content writer for yourself. It’s this easy.

The problem is, if it is this easy for you, it is also this easy for 100s of 1000s of other entrepreneurs like you who want to promote their business by building such publishing platforms. If you are planning on writing that killer blog post or article, rest assured it has already been written by scores of other people. This is true for almost every business.

So how do you stand out? How do you become a peacock in a flock of swans, or if you want to be a bit rude, how do you become a swan in a flock of crows?

How to make your content stand out

A great thing about everybody writing and publishing content is, very few people actually publish useful, quality content. Most of the entrepreneurs and small business owners have no clue how to implement an effective content marketing strategy. In fact most think content marketing means publishing content to improve their search engine rankings. Whereas it’s important to improve your search engine rankings, if you’re publishing content just for that, you’re using just 10% of its power. More than 90% of content marketers, it means, know how to use just 10% power of content marketing.

A big and massive chunk of the remaining 90% power of content marketing is available to you and this can help you stand out.

Listed below are a few things you can do to make your content stand:

Write in your own voice: This is one of the most difficult things to achieve while writing content for your website or blog, as very few people can do that. Mostly people are taking ideas from other publishers and writing them as they are. Not everybody can be creative and unique. So this is where you can be totally different. Be yourself. Develop your own unique writing style and if you cannot do it yourself, then work with a content writer who can.
Write about the same thing with a different twist: Do you think whatever you want to write about has already been written? That’s all right. But you are in business because you know something that others don’t. Use that unique knowledge to give it a totally different twist to what has already been written.
Don’t worry too much about SEO: Of course SEO is good but it begins to affect your writing if you were too much bothered by it. Focus on quality and write content that is actually helpful to your visitors. It will automatically have better search engine rankings.
Write content regularly: Regularity is very important. If you think content marketing is your thing, then you should publish a new webpage or a new blog post at least once a day and not just for a couple of weeks, but for a few months in order to see tangible results.
Solve people’s problems: They will respect you, trust you and come to your website repeatedly if you solve their real-world problems through your content writing. Give them solutions. Improve their lives in some manner. They should be enriched after going through your content. Provide them something they cannot get elsewhere. Really mean to help.
Promote your content using the right channels: Content in itself doesn’t mean anything unless people know about its existence. Once you have created a presence for yourself this is not a problem but if you are in the process of making a name for yourself then you need to promote your content. You need to be selective about where you promote your content. For example, most of my clients are B2B and for this niche, LinkedIn is the best place and then, Twitter. I don’t bother much with Facebook aside from having a page and posting my content there – but my main energies are focused on LinkedIn and then Twitter.
Curate content: You don’t always have to create original content. There are many content publishers that are creating awesome content and you can simply share it on your blog or website. You can create a repository of great content centered around a particular topic. Become a resource. Suppose you compile a list of 50 great blog posts and articles on creating compelling content – they encompass practically all the knowledge one may need to succeed on the Internet. It will be a ready reference for people. They will not only share your link, they will also save it somewhere so that whenever they need to refer to it, they can come to your website.

Standing out as a content publisher basically means not becoming one of the herd. Be useful to your audience in a sincere manner.

What’s all this fuss about telling stories in content marketing?

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Everybody loves a good story, but what does storytelling have to do with content marketing?

Stories have been told since time immemorial. Even cave dwellers who hadn’t yet learned to use words (who knows? maybe they knew words but just didn’t know how to write them?) told their stories by sketching an drawing on cave walls.

The ancient traditions of storytelling

When there were no TV and Internet people would sit around a fire or near a hearth and tell stories, or listen to them with rapt attention. In India there are whole tribes of story tellers who roam from village to village, town to town, telling ancient stories and getting alms in return. In fact some of these storytellers are so famous that the government assigns a permanent salary for them so that they can keep the tradition alive.

What’s so fascinating about stories? We can relate to them. Whenever we’re reading a story, we see ourselves in one of the characters, or we have found ourselves in a similar situation, or we would like to get ourselves in a similar situation, or we strongly subscribe to the values represented by the story.

A story, in a logically arranged sequence, presents us with a problem, the ensuing struggle (or conflict), and then in the end, a resolution. After reading the story (let’s not talk about horror stories of the Stephen King variety) we can peacefully go to bed thinking that yes, it was a good end and no matter how many emotional ups and downs were there, in the end things worked out. A good feeling.

The same can be achieve with storytelling vis-a-vis content marketing. Instead of simply talking about your products and services in an uninspiring manner, tell the stories of people who were going through a problem that was eliminated by your product or service. People will immediately be able to relate to your story.

For example…

Peter always wondered why his website wasn’t converting well. He had purchased a very expensive template from one of the biggest companies that sold predesigned website templates. He had made sure that all the source code was search engine optimized. Since he didn’t find the photographs included in the template good, he spent further money to purchase expensive images from iStock.

After 5 months of relentless promotion and hiring a couple of content writers the results were as dismal as they were in the beginning. The bounce rate was more than 98% and at the most people stayed for 45-70 seconds on his website. He was running out of resources, he had started having constant fights with his wife as she thought he was wasting lots of money in the website, and found himself trapped in a vicious loop that was proving to be very difficult to break.

The story of how my content writing service helped Peter

Then one day Peter came to my content writing website.

He read about the importance of engagement. He read about how it is very important that your customers and clients should be able to relate to what you are conveying to them.

After reading a few blog posts and articles he logged onto his website and tried to look at it from a new angle.

Up till then he was simply interested in having a cool website with lots of content to improve his search engine rankings. Now he understood that it wasn’t just about looks and better rankings, it was about setting up long-term relationships with your prospective customers and clients through informative, helpful and expert content.

He realised that his website was lacking the most important ingredient: content that could convince. There was a sense of detachment. There was no “voice” in whatever was written on his website. The connection was missing. The business didn’t sound trustworthy. The writing didn’t try to solve any problem.

He contacted me.

From the beginning itself I told him I wasn’t interested in creating “tons of content” for his website. I would rather focus on improving the quality and effectiveness of the existing content.

We spent some time trying to understand exactly what he was trying to deliver to his customers? What was he trying to sell? What did his ideal customer want from him?

We shifted the focus from his product to the problem the product solved. Of course we talked about the product, but more than the product, we talked about the benefits, the ways around, and the various problems it could solve once his customers had purchased it.

We shared stories from happy customers. We collected as many testimonials as possible. We updated the content not because we wanted to cover as many keywords as possible, we updated because we wanted to share useful information with the visitors.

Gradually (actually, sooner than we had realistically anticipated) people started interacting with Peter. They would leave comments on his business blog. They responded to email newsletter that he broadcast once a week. He started getting email queries.

Then, two months after hiring me, and 7 months after having launched his online business, he made his first sale. He called me in the middle of the night to tell me that forgetting that I might be sleeping (it was daytime on his side of the globe and night time in my side).

It’s been a year now since I wrote the first web page for him. He has by now launched two more businesses, funded by the profits he made off his first business. 8 employees are working full-time under him and if things continue the way they’re right now, he plans to move to a bigger, upmarket office within the next six months.

Good story?

75% of it is true and the rest are some embellishments. But I’m sure you were able to relate to what Peter had to go through. This is what storytelling in content marketing does, it helps you help your customers and clients relate to you. Fill your website or blog with as many such stories as possible.

Content marketing means always being there

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Continuing with what content marketing means…

Continued visibility can be both positive and negative but of course here we are talking about positive visibility. A great benefit of content marketing is being there when your customers and clients need you. They shouldn’t feel at sea when they need to know something about your product or service before making a purchase, or if they are facing some problem after making a purchase.

Trust cannot be built overnight no matter how hard you try. It’s not something like you hire 10 content writers who write and publish 5 blog posts everyday (giving you 50 blog posts everyday) and suddenly people begin to trust you mainly on the strength of the content you have produced on your blog. Of course if you have the money to hire 10 content writers to create lots of content and if you strategically publish that content not just on your website or blog, but also on other websites, it definitely helps set up a presence for you, but if you’re thinking of building trust among people in a short span, it is not going to happen.

Trust is built over a long period of time when you publish helpful, interactive and engaging content consistently. This is why you cannot have a 2-week content marketing plan no matter how much money you have got. Even the biggest brands talk about strategy spanning multiple years rather than multiple months (although there are seasonal and occasion-based marketing plans, but that’s different).

Would you rather do business with a friend or a total stranger? With a friend of course.

When you strategically create, publish and disseminate content, it helps you strike up conversations with people. They talk about what they like about your content, what they don’t like, what they appreciate and what they object to and what they would like to be covered. You respond accordingly by modifying existing content and creating new content. Your gesture is then appreciated. The mere fact that you have responded to them makes them happy and they talk about your response on their own blogs and social networking timelines. Then more people get to know you.

Content marketing allows you to initiate such a cycle. Once you have established such a cycle people know that whenever they need you, you’re going to be there, and this is one of the greatest assurances on the Internet where physical presence is not possible. People might be doing business with you across oceans. They cannot suddenly reach you in case they are happy or unsatisfied. Your continued visibility is reassuring. Through your content you’re continuously talking to people and telling them that look, you know what you’re doing and if they have a problem, you are always there to provide an answer. People can live with substandard products and services, what bothers them is your absence when they need you.

How better content improves your search engine rankings

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I have many clients who need content to improve their search engine rankings and this is why they hire me. They know that I can write them optimized content without having to resort to keyword stuffing and creating nonsensical content just to fill up blog posts and webpages. But how does it actually happen? How does better content improve your search engine rankings?

Better content and search engine rankings are interconnected

Search engines survive on the strength of the content they can index and rank for the users. Why would you use Google if you don’t find what you’re looking for? When you use a search engine you’re looking for some information that you can trust and rely on. Suppose the search engine is unable to provide you that information? What do you do? Perhaps due to the preconceived reputation you go on using it for some time but eventually you give up and then you try to find another search engine that can give you better results. When you shift your focus to another search engines, the search engine you have abandoned (Google, for instance) loses business because in order to earn money, they need more users.

This is the reason why the quality of your content matters to the search engines. Is this foolproof? No way. Lots of shoddy content shows up, undeservedly, on the first page, even at the first spot at the first page, but with every successive update (Penguin, Panda, etc.) they are weeding out such aberrations.

You will be surprised to know that the search engine algorithms these days also take into factor your bounce rate. If people aren’t spending much time on your blog or website, it means you’re not providing value. If people are going through various links within your website and spending a couple of minutes going through your important pages, the search engines can make out that your content is worth reading, and hence, good. If you don’t have well-written content, if your content doesn’t provide the information people are looking for, they leave your website within a few seconds. How do you keep people on your website longer?

Create compelling headlines.
Deliver on the promise you have made in the headline and in the title
Use shorter sentences because many people access your content via smaller screens, for example mobile phones and tablets
Don’t create very big paragraphs
Don’t clutter your webpage with unnecessary animations, images and links (every distraction can cost you a customer)
Make your content shareable

Social validation these days is as important as creating quality content (but don’t just focus on social validation at the cost of creating quality content). How many people find your content worth sharing? In this Moz Whiteboard Friday presentation Josh Bachynski explains how it matters that authoritative people in your niche talk about your content and share it on their own timelines and blogs. The more such people promote your content, the greater search engine improvements you experience.

Social validation depends a lot on how better you can make your content. It is voluntary action. People will promote your content only if it adds value or at least delivers something they are looking for.

So focus on the quality rather than quantity. Hire a content writer not to produce bulk content for you, but high-quality content.