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.