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Campfire Content: Crafting Stories to Your Audience's Unique Content
- 1. CAMPFIRE CONTENT Crafting Stories to Your Audience’s Unique Context Ryan Brock – Founder & CEO, Metonymy Media
- 3. YOUR AUDIENCE 1. Investors 2. Community Partners 3. Talent 4. Customers
- 4. THREE STEPS TO EFFECTIVE STORYTELLING 1. Identify your reader’s immediate context. 2. Confirm that context through SEO research. 3. Use rhetorical language effectively.
- 5. 1. IDENTIFY YOUR READER’S IMMEDIATE CONTEXT Imagine a real person when developing your story.
- 6. 1. IDENTIFY YOUR READER’S IMMEDIATE CONTEXT 63% of people say that they are tired of the “shock and awe” approach brands take in blasting out generic advertising messages online, which means many brands are still doing this regularly. AUDIENCES ARE TIRED OF BLANKET MESSAGING
- 7. 1. IDENTIFY YOUR READER’S IMMEDIATE CONTEXT What kind of information do you capture in personas? AUDIENCE PERSONAS
- 8. 1. IDENTIFY YOUR READER’S IMMEDIATE CONTEXT 1. What is Mary’s primary challenge? 2. What is Mary’s emotional state? 3. What does Mary value most of all? THE MARY APPROACH
- 9. 2. CONFIRM READER CONTEXT THROUGH SEO RESEARCH Meet your audiences where they are.
- 10. 2. CONFIRM READER CONTEXT THROUGH SEO RESEARCH Using SEO tools can help us see what our audiences are doing—and extend organic reach. SEO RESEARCH TOOLS
- 11. 2. CONFIRM READER CONTEXT THROUGH SEO RESEARCH 1. Keyword Planners SEO RESEARCH TOOLS
- 12. 2. CONFIRM READER CONTEXT THROUGH SEO RESEARCH 1. Keyword Planners 2. Google Trends SEO RESEARCH TOOLS
- 13. 2. CONFIRM READER CONTEXT THROUGH SEO RESEARCH 1. Keyword Planners 2. Google Trends 3. Popular Content SEO RESEARCH TOOLS
- 14. 2. CONFIRM READER CONTEXT THROUGH SEO RESEARCH Recreate this process with multiple phrases for the audience you’re trying to reach then compare what you find with what you’ve already documented about that audience’s needs, feelings, and values. SEO RESEARCH TOOLS
- 15. 3. USE RHETORICAL LANGUAGE EFFECTIVELY Illuminate your readers with emotional writing.
- 16. 3. USE RHETORICAL LANGUAGE EFFECTIVELY 1. Show, don’t tell. AVOID PITFALLS
- 17. 3. USE RHETORICAL LANGUAGE EFFECTIVELY 1. Show, don’t tell. 2. Resonate, don’t exploit. AVOID PITFALLS
- 18. 3. USE RHETORICAL LANGUAGE EFFECTIVELY 1. Show, don’t tell. 2. Resonate, don’t exploit. 3. Reader’s perspective, not yours. AVOID PITFALLS
- 19. CAMPFIRE CONTENT Crafting Stories to Your Audience’s Unique Context Ryan Brock – Founder & CEO, Metonymy Media
Editor's Notes
- SLIDE: Consider the campfire ghost story. When you tell a scary story to friends around the fire, you don’t have to worry about facts and figures. The only impact you want to make is scaring your audience in a dark, mysterious forest.
- SLIDE: Now, your audience might be anyone. Could be: Investors Community partners Talent Customers Here’s the thing a lot of brands struggle with: These audiences need different things from you. What works for one audience won’t work for the others. To that end, even if you’re not presently speaking to customers, you have to put on your best marketing hat and learn how to get into the headspace of the exact person you want to reach with a given piece of content, whether that’s a pitch or a blog post.
- SLIDE: To be a successful storyteller, you have to have a proper grasp of your audience’s immediate context, and you need to be able to use language effectively in order to tap into what’s already going on in their hearts and minds. Three steps to successful storytelling in content: 1. Identifying your target reader’s immediate context. 2. Confirming your assumptions about context with research. 3. Using rhetorical language effectively. Today, we’re going to walk through each of these steps. We’re going to use an example from the audience here to show what this approach to storytelling looks like in practice. And, in the end, you’re going to walk away with a methodology you can use whenever the burden falls on you to tell a compelling story that will actually make an impact.
- SLIDE: 1. Identify your target reader’s immediate context
- SLIDE: I’m asking you to put on your marketer hat, but let’s be honest from the start: understanding and speaking to a specific audience is something even the best marketers struggle with immensely. Many brands still shout the same internal-focused messaging everywhere they go. 63% of people say that they are tired of the “shock and awe” approach brands take in blasting out generic advertising messages online, which means many brands are still doing this regularly. Customers are weary, which may be why 81% of people want brands to personalize content and 87% of people think more favorably of brands that personalize content successfully.
- SLIDE: So, let’s start where marketers start: Personas Who here has developed personas for your marketing? BOARD EXERCISE: What kind of information do these personas generally capture? Personas can be helpful, but they often speak in generalities about the people we are trying to reach. Rarely do they get so focused as to paint a picture as clear as a group of five friends sitting around the campfire. Rarely do they speak to what’s going on in this audience’s head the exact moment you’re speaking to them.
- SLIDE: The best place to start when you need to tell a story is to imagine an actual person reading the story you wish to tell. Cut out all the noise. Think of someone you know—a real person—who represents the audience you want to reach with your content. I call this The Mary Approach Who do you know that is representative of your target audience? Take note of the following three aspects of their context in the moment they need the information you want to convey: 1. Their Challenge 2. Their Emotional State 3. Their Values BOARD EXERCISE: Complete a Mary Approach worksheet for an actual person from the audience. Focus on these three aspects of your reader’s context when envisioning the way you’ll tell your story. Will this person find a joke funny, or annoying? Will they appreciate the value of your offering the way you’re presenting it? What kind of value can you offer them right now?
- SLIDE: 2. Confirm reader context through research I firmly believe in the value of the creative exercise we just did because it’s going to help us think clearly about what really matters in the stories we tell, and what things we tend to say because they’re interesting to us specifically. That said, something I love about being a storyteller in the digital age is that I don’t have to rely solely on my creative instincts to get into my audience’s heads. For that, I also have several powerful digital tools at my disposal, and using them is a key part of this process.
- SLIDE: There’s an added benefit here, too: SEO value. This is hugely important for any brand who wants to be found online, and fortunately for us, Google has been working for decades now to figure out how to evaluate content not on its own merits, but based on how real people value what they read online. So consider this a double dip. The primary goal here is to help you become a better storyteller, but the advice I’m giving here is going to work equally well as you consider your brand’s SEO strategy and your organic reach, because this part of the process is all about making sure that your content is reaching your audiences wherever they are in context, and wherever they are online.
- SLIDE: 1. Keyword Planners Perform searches for new ideas surrounding key words or phrases related to your content in order to understand what has the most traffic. BOARD EXERCISE: For the audience we outlined in the last step, let’s think about some of the basic keywords this person might use to search for this brand. ON SCREEN: Enter those phrases we come up with into Google AdWords Keyword Planner. BOARD EXERCISE: Pick one of these phrases that we didn’t originally think of and write it on the board.
- SLIDE: 2. Google Trends Once you identify a phrase that indicates your audience’s interests, enter that term into Google Trends to learn more about your audiences. ON SCREEN: Show the Google Terms results for that phrase and discuss.
- SLIDE: 3. Popular Content Finally, let’s search that popular phrase to see what ranks highest. What are other storytellers doing to meet your audiences where they are? ON SCREEN: Show the Page 1 and Page 2 Google results for the chosen term.
- SLIDE: By recreating this process with very small set of keyword phrases, you can use what you know about your audience’s challenges, emotional state, and values to guide your writing, from the subjects you choose to touch on to the form your content takes. Here, we’re given a lot of useful information and some choices to make: Do we challenge our assumptions that this is the phrase our Mary would search? Do we find patterns in what others are saying that inspire us to offer our unique spin on popular topics? Do we see a gap in this content for the story we are uniquely prepared to tell?
- SLIDE: 3. Use rhetorical language effectively The final step to truly effective storytelling is to use emotional language effectively to echo your reader’s challenges, to validate their emotions, and to speak to their values. We aren’t here to pretend this is English class, so we aren’t going to be asking you to write content and grade it on its quality. But! Something we can do right now is empower you with some tools to help you make sure you’re choosing language that will connect with your readers. BOARD EXERCISE: So, let’s take a look at our Mary again. We know what her challenge is; that’s the whole reason your company exists! But let’s focus on her emotional state.
- Tips to avoid emotional writing pitfalls while building an emotional connection with your audience SLIDE: Telling vs. Showing Telling the reader how they feel is hollow and could alienate your audiences whose emotions could be nuanced. BOARD EXERCISE: Write something that tells Mary how she feels. Rather, showing your reader that you understand their feelings is a good way to build a strong connection with your reader. BOARD EXERCISE: Write something that shows the reader you understand their feelings.
- SLIDE: Exploiting vs. Resonating It’s easy to amp up emotional writing to the point where you’re forcing your reader to feel things more strongly than necessary. BOARD EXERCISE: Write something that’s emotionally exploitative and a bit icky. Rather, it’s important to resonate. Identify an emotion and carry that tone, without overdoing it, in order to leave room for your reader to bring their own emotion to their experience. BOARD EXERCISE: Write something that resonates with an emotion through tone and lets the readers bring their own emotion to the surface.
- Tips to frame your raw information within your audience’s perspective to effectively convey your value SLIDE: Your Perspective Vs. Theirs It’s not enough to assume that your reader values the information you have to share the same way you do. BOARD EXERCISE: Write a value proposition that is very sterile, jargon-filled, and reads like it came out of a business plan. What does your information really mean to the person you want to reach? Will it empower them in some way? Challenge an assumption they have? Make this plain. BOARD EXERCISE: Write a value proposition that starts with Mary’s perspective: How will my value prop help Mary specifically?
- Conclusion: The major takeaway here is this: There’s so much content being published every day on every topic imaginable. It’s not enough to care about what you have to say. You have to make your reader care.