A creative mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open. We are always on the lookout for creative ideas for doing standard things. Standard things like annual reports of companies. Enter Warby Parker and its application of visual design content to its most recent annual report.
Ever heard of Parker Warby? As they write in their website, Warby Parker was founded with a rebellious spirit and a lofty objective: to create boutique-quality, classically crafted eyewear at a revolutionary price point.
Eyewear with a purpose
Almost one billion people worldwide lack access to glasses. This means that 15% of the global population cannot effectively learn or work – a problem that Warby Parker is determined to address. They’ve partnered with non-profits like VisionSpring to ensure that for every pair of glasses sold, a pair is distributed to someone in need.
Eyewear startup Warby Parker just released its 2013 Annual Report, a perfect example of how important tone is in creating great visual content. This very different approach to a year-end report uses a calendar format, highlighting company events on each day. Some events are significant company milestones; others are little anecdotes showcasing office life and culture.
Wow … what a change from the typical financial results and strategic initiatives that typically fill the pages of annual reports.
The report is an excellent example of a brand showcasing its ideas, creativity, and culture in a visually engaging way. At its core, the strategy of content marketing is not just about distribution and visibility. It is about telling the world who you are and what you stand for. This design goes a long way in turning customers into brand advocates.
Related post: Continuous Learning Holds the Keys to Your Future Success
The design shows how to empower your content. So many companies just don’t take advantage of their great content or they don’t know how to present their content in a creative way. Often, in the end, they are fighting for survival like we all are.
However, the brands that can express their personality, creativity, and passion, and manage their content in a way that speaks to people will create loyal customers.
Here are 9 important takeaways all brands can learn from Warby Parker’s design approach to creating great content.
Visual design … push the edge to be different
What does the Warby Parker (http://www.warbyparker.com/annual-report-2013/#march-11 class trip have to do with eyeglasses? What does it matter? It is an interesting story and Warby Parker uses the story to illustrate its personality and culture.
Your content should be relatable, valuable, and interesting to your audience. If you capture these qualities, your marketing will create a captive audience with ever-increasing brand loyalty.
Utilize visual design
First and foremost, prioritize visual design in your efforts. Presenting your content in a visual format has a number of benefits. First, humans recognize and process images much faster than text; this is why visual content has much greater appeal. A study by 3M showed that 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.
Second, using a diversity of image types makes your content continuously fresh, which encourages readers to explore more. In the Warby Parker design the combination of photography, illustration, videos, and data visualization keeps the eyes interested and moving around the page. More time on site means more engagement with your brand.
Visual design examples … apply data in comparison
If you are going to visualize data, display a comparison—that is what makes the visualization more meaningful. The infographics revolution has brought with it many missed data visualization opportunities in the form of single-data-point pie charts and big numbers with fancy typographic treatment.
Distilling data into a statistic removes the context and comparison that makes it insightful. Don’t fear complexity; take advantage of the opportunity to add clarity with many visualization design elements.
Business is becoming increasingly personal—not in the waiter remembers my name sort of way, but more in the way that we crave more personal connection in a web-based world.
People want to know that the businesses they support are run in a way they can relate to, that its employees are people they might hang out with, and potentially even someone who could become a good friend.
Marketing content is all about making connections. Your level of success has a lot to do with how your readers react to what you write. People connect with your brand because they relate to what you’re saying to them.
They want to feel that your content is specifically crafted with their interests and needs in mind. In other words, it should feel personal.
Showoff your people
Your customer community wants to know that there are humans behind your brand, and they want to know more about them as people. Don’t make the mistake of hiding your people, relationships, interactions, and office pranks behind a shield of professionalism.
These things are most often as interesting as your products and services … and certainly as how much money you made last year. In today’s marketing landscape, whether you are a product or service-oriented business, you are selling your culture, and your culture is your people.
The growth in content consumption is not just because people are looking for a satisfactory distraction from work. Customers have an appetite for real, interesting information. The vast knowledge-sharing that the web has facilitated has brought with it an increased curiosity and hunger for understanding.
Don’t believe that everything you do at the back end of your business is boring. Turn it into engaging content that will deepen your customers’ understanding of what your world is all about.
In his book, Contagious, Wharton professor Jonah Berger showed that one of the key reasons people share creative content is because it arouses a person’s emotion.
His point … content has to go beyond just being useful; it has to be unforgettable. Rather than trying to churn out quantity, take the time to figure out what kind of emotions move your audience.
In doing so, it’s important to remember that not all emotion is created equal. In his research, Berger identifies certain kinds of emotions – those that get people “aroused” like awe, passion, and anger.
They are much more likely to drive shares than those that make people feel toned down – like sadness, relaxation, or contentment.
Don’t be afraid to shake things up.
Integrate products/services naturally
Your products and services don’t have to be ignored. In the midst of all the other ways to add to your design, you often can overlook them. Feature your product or service naturally within content, but don’t make it an abrupt deviation from the other fun stuff.
This means that you will want to tone down your calls to action and any other hard-sell tactics. Use them as an opportunity to remind viewers what you do, without killing all those good vibes you have been building.
Share how you are awesome
One important element of marketing is about bringing attention to how awesome you are. However, this doesn’t mean your awesomeness-recognition abilities should be limited to your own pursuits.
Calling out the big (and little) wins of others—vendors, customers, ex-employees, maybe even competitors—shows that you are not afraid to give credit where it is due. This fresh perspective will add authenticity to your content.
Amplify who you are
Your content is a perfect place to let your audience know why you do what you do. Clearly articulating the values that give your company meaning helps you connect with people on a level beyond the business transaction, and it attracts people that share those same ideas.
This powerful means of communication helps truly differentiate your brand—more than low prices and fancy features could ever do.
Do you have a lesson about making your content creation more creative you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your ability to learning to learn. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning from all around in your environment.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s teamwork, collaboration, and learning? Creative ideas in running or facilitating teamwork or continuous learning workshop?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The Nine Most Valuable Secrets of Writing Effective Copy
How Good Is your Learning from Failure?
10 Extraordinary Ways for Learning to Learn
Continuous Learning Holds the Keys to Your Future Success
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Winston Churchill once said: Excellence is … Caring more than others think is wise Risking more than others think is safe Dreaming more than others think is practical Expecting more than others think is possible. Do you like to hear a great story? How about telling stories? Are you using your best storytelling delivery? A great way to spread ideas.
Marketing used to be pretty simple. You developed a compelling message, used mass media to broadcast that message to large audiences, and grew market share. Mostly, you aimed for the meaty part of the curve, where the law of averages conspired in your favor.
Then came the cable TV era. Audiences fragmented and targeting became the order of the day. Instead of starting with the message, marketers thrived on consumer insight and tried to identify a specific emotional trigger that would win them loyal customers.
Now mass marketing has shifted to mass personalization and messaging and targeting have given way to activation. It is no longer enough to simply grab attention, we have to hold attention. Today’s marketers need to inspire movements in which their customers become their best salespeople. We need to make a fundamental shift in mental models.
Using facts are meaningless without a contextual story. Don’t tell facts to influence, tell stories. The more you improve storytelling, the more your influence … it is as simple as that.
American Express’s Open Forum, for example, succeeded because it created stories that supported the narrative of the company’s commitment to small businesses. Pepsi Refresh, on the other hand, failed, in part, because it was unable to connect stories of social responsibility with what had always been a carefree lifestyle brand.
Great storytelling is infinitely more than simply producing content. It is, in fact, no less than helping customers connect with the soul of your enterprise.
Stories make it easier for people to understand. They are the best way, by far, to spread your ideas.
I have been writing, creating ideas, and telling stories to spread ideas for many years.
Here is a checklist we use with our clients to help them continually improve on this important skill:
Storytelling … show energy and emotion
Make it clear to your audience why what we were seeing and hearing matters. Even if it is not always explicitly stated, the message should be clear. Use all of your energy on why your topic matters.
It is hard to choose just one element that a successful story must-have, but if I had to choose just one, I’d say it is this: Show clearly why your topic — or result, cause, mission, etc. — matters. What are the big picture and our place in that picture?
Pixar’s Andrew Stanton said something very similar when he identified the most important element of storytelling as ‘make me care’. You must make the audience care. And you must let them know clearly why they should care.
Observe and use feedback
“Show the readers everything, tell them nothing.” – Ernest Hemingway
Here visual does not mean only the use of graphics such as photography, video, animations, visualizations of data, and so on. Visual also means helping the audience to clearly “see” your ideas through your use of descriptive language, through the use of concrete examples, and by the power and simplicity of metaphor.
Watch your audience carefully and put what you learn to work in the delivery.
In a great story, the audience wants to know what happens next and most of all how it all concludes. In an explanatory narrative, a series of actions can establish a narrative flow and the sense of journey that is created is one form of anticipation of what comes next.
A good story has a beginning where a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation, a middle where the character confronts and attempts to resolve the situation, and an end where the outcome is revealed. It does not interpret or explain the action in the story for the audience.
Instead, a good story allows each member of the audience to interpret the story as he or she understands the action. This is why people find good stories so appealing and why they find advertising that simply conveys facts and information boring.
This story was created to market and build the brand. It is a very simple story. It advocates learning to read no matter your age or status in society. To us, it creates pure magic with the story, the visuals, the music, and the emotion.
Create emotion
Whenever I am fortunate enough to see and listen to remarkable stories being told ‘live’ in action, I am struck by their power to pull listeners in, much like a gravitational force that’s impossible to resist.
The best way to pull your audience in is to make them care … emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically. But how do you make the audience care? This is the most fundamental question of all. There is no single answer.
One important answer is having empathy for your audience and trying to craft your story and design your content always with the audience in mind.
Stories in all their many forms are never just about transferring information alone. We are emotional beings, like it or not, and to make the audience care enough to listen to you, you have to evoke in them some kind of emotion.
Your eyes speak more than you can imagine. Use them to help your delivery. Spend short bursts looking at individuals in your audience.
Smile
Build rapport and reduce stress. Use stories, analogies, visuals, humor, and metaphors to add color. Maybe not all in one speech, but select and employ to round out the speech.
Mimic
Mimic who you are talking about.
Use your body to show and tell
Inflections up and down add intrigue. Liven things up with hand gestures. Passion beats all … people feel what you feel. Help them feel it. Don’t rush it.
Build-in peaks and valleys with defined points of suspense to create curiosity. Use body language that shows you are comfortable and composed.
Learn to absorb the energy of the audience for your enjoyment. Pay attention to excellent speakers … there are many out there and many on video.
What will have to change is the marketing mindset. The fundamental questions in the coming years will not be how to deploy this or that new technology, but how to can solve fundamental marketing problems, such as how to earn consumers’ trust and how to create experiences that are more impactful, useful, productive, and beneficial.
Take these tips and watch how the experts apply them. They will not all be the same, so pick things you like and apply them to your style. Continuous learning is the key to enjoyment.
What do you think? Have some of your own ideas to improve storytelling to place in the comments section below? We would love to hear your ideas.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. Excellent thought from Edwin Schlosberg. I have seen statistics on the amount of information available today … doubling every 18 to 24 months. Amazing isn’t it? It is not surprising then that the best solution for the content plan is getting more difficult every day.
According to Nielsen, there are 27,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day. We check our phones 150 times per day.
We check our email up to 30 times an hour. And Statistic Brain says that our average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds – one second less than a goldfish!
So we all need to pay attention to the Edwin Schlosberg quote about creating the ability to stimulate thinking in our readers.
All this available information and data is creating a battle for customer attention between brands, publishers, and each one of us who creates content.
But more importantly, it’s forcing businesses to think and act much more competitively.
Content can be confusing. It’s tough to get people to agree exactly what it is and isn’t. Much like an eminent jurist once said about pornography, you know it when you see it, but that is hardly a working definition.
To make things even more difficult, content requires intense integration of diverse capabilities. Creativity, storytelling, information technology, user experience, and other skills all must come together to build an effective product that touches hearts and minds.
The core challenge for any organization which seeks to build great content is that the capabilities and skills that need to be integrated come with people attached.
Zen teaches that the potential to achieve enlightenment is inherent in everyone but lies dormant because of ignorance. It is best awakened not by the study of scripture or the practice of good deeds, but by breaking through the boundaries of mundane logical thought.
To be successful in the battle of content marketing you certainly break through these boundaries.
That is why “Content Marketing” is one of the biggest buzzwords in marketing. It requires businesses to create content that their customers actually want. Content that helps them.
And it is such a hot term right now because it is one of the biggest gaps between the content marketers create and the information our customers are looking for.
That is also why more than 90% of marketers are using content marketing, but only 42% rated their content marketing efforts as effective, according to a recent study.
If everyone is creating content, how does a business break through the boundaries of mundane logical thought? How do we reach our customers in a way that engages them?
Our objective of this blog topic is to address these questions.
Content plan … what is content marketing?
Content marketing involves using writing to make customers and potential customers more aware of a customer’s brand. This text can be web articles, blog posts, eBooks, or white papers.
Unlike newspaper and traditional magazine articles, good content marketing does more than just report. Good content marketing connects with readers and makes them want to use your client’s product or service.
Traditional marketing was all about print advertising, branded magazines, catalogs and directly promoting sales – until the digital age took over.
Today’s marketing has adopted a completely digital look and feel; from eBooks to white papers, blog posts to webinars, the Internet is considered the primary conduit for modern content distribution.
Within this transition to digital marketing, social media and online engagement have quickly taken on major roles, and are now viewed as fundamental tools in present-day B2B marketing.
Marketing content is all about making connections. Your level of success has a lot to do with how your readers react to what you write.
People connect with the product or service that your clients sell because they relate to what you’re saying to them. They want to feel that your copy is specifically crafted with their interests and needs in mind.
In other words, it should feel personal.
The integration of ‘social’ into the digital marketing space has fostered content marketing. In this respect, any message, comment, question, image, video, or presentation posted on a social media network constitutes content, in and of itself.
In this new world of marketing, content is no longer itemized in terms of a case study, blog post, or webinar, and doesn’t necessarily adhere to a certain length.
The paradigm has shifted to accommodate a broad definition of content, regardless of whether it’s a 140 character Tweet or a 25-page white paper.
Your internet marketing plan
What is the most important element of an internet marketing plan? That is an easy answer. It’s your content marketing.
If your business is a hotel, a tourist attraction, or the like, that depends more on attracting new customers, this is particularly true.
Many times the word ‘content’ translates to blog and Facebook posts when up for discussion. It’s actually much more than that.
The point of content is to get people to understand you have something that might just make sense for them, that you know what you’re talking about and that your approach can be trusted above all others.
Have you been frustrated with your social media interaction recently?
Even if you’ve had the cleverest posts, you can’t seem to generate the social chatter that you deserve.
You may be discouraged due to the fact that your Facebook posts are getting buried within the newsfeed. Or it may be that your Tweets aren’t getting the coveted RT.
Maybe it’s because your YouTube videos, which you’ve spent a lot of time creating, are getting very little views.
Here are some tips to help spice up your content and solidify your connections and engagement with customers:
Content plan example … create emotion
In his book Contagious, Wharton professor Jonah Berger showed that one of the key reasons people share content online is because it arouses a person’s emotion.
His point … content has to go beyond just being useful; it has to be unforgettable. Rather than trying to churn out quantity, take the time to figure out what kind of emotions move your audience.
In doing so, it’s important to remember that not all emotion is created equal.
In his research, Berger identifies that certain kinds of emotions – those that get people “aroused” like awe, passion, and anger – are much more likely to drive shares than those that make people feel toned down – like sadness, relaxation, or contentment.
Don’t be afraid to rock the boat.
Content plan for social media … personalization
Content must be personalized to increase its consumption and, more importantly, its influence. It must inspire the actions you desire.
Your goal? Get the right information detail to the right decision-maker on a just-in-time basis.
Be fast and simple
Long lead times for content development and publication across limited channels can lead to a slow and cumbersome creation process. That is the exact opposite of what content marketing is all about.
The best content marketing needs to be as near real-time as you can make it.
Real-time marketing requires the urgency of broadcast news.
Understanding how to craft value in an interactive and always-on environment is critical to success.
It’s a difficult thing to translate brand values, promise, and efficacy across the terrain of modern channels of communication.
In order to turn real-time moments into long-term success, brands need to be able to consistently translate their ideas into consumer value.
Create awareness
Often a reader’s first exposure to a business comes not from a slick: 60-second ad but from an obscure blog post on a very specific topic of interest turned up in a series of search engine inquiries.
A major objective of your content marketing is to build a library that reaches into these corners of search.
Content in this form starts the potential customer on their journey of discovery.
Tool for customer service
We are firm believers that word of mouth marketing is the best form of marketing and one of the best sources for memorable topics is customer service.
Twitter has become a public-facing customer service tool for good or bad and with it comes an entirely new level of service based content.
Content that teaches customers how to get more, how you really care for your customers, how to fix problems and how to find the answers to common challenges and functions has become an essential customer service utility.
Build trust
In the world of creating customers and advocates, trust is everything.
Obviously, the end game is that they ultimately trust the product, service, organization, or solution they seek will address their needs, but the first line of trust is often formed based on the content they find or don’t find.
Content marketing faces the same reader skepticism as traditional advertising.
Therefore, being as helpful as possible is the only way to engage prospects to gain their trust and build meaningful relationships with them.
Always provide proof.
Provide proof
Ever since prospects learned that just about any claim an organization makes can be supported or contested with a simple search, the need to build content that offers proof of results has risen in importance.
Getting at customer success stories in ways that describe the heart of what really matters is an essential form of necessary content.
Provide needed information
Both B2C and B2B customers do their homework online before purchasing. Therefore, you must provide the information they seek to enter the consideration set.
This means product content, answers to customer questions, how-to’s, and ratings and reviews. If you don’t supply this content, someone else will and you lose.
Product use support
Many marketers underestimate the value of information that supports customers with their products once they have it at home.
If your customer can’t use your product, they’ll either return it or not buy from you again.
Neither is what you want, so be there whenever customers need your support.
Search optimization
Content is essential to a strong search optimization strategy to help your business get found online.
Remember this: as a business owner, it is extremely important to consider the logical and emotional aspects of your target audience.
It is also critical that you speak to both of those aspects. You must respect your target audience enough to understand that they are capable of making sound, rational decisions.
Often, if content marketing materials cause a business to fail, it is because one or the other is lacking.
Hard work and dedication are certainly part of the mix but your thinking must include logic and emotion as well.
For the best content marketing, make your thinking vivid by including what comes naturally to you. For example, you may not be able to imagine sequences of images very well, but you may excel in imagining other modalities such as smell, touch, and sound.
You may be excellent in infusing your visualization with emotional charge and great feelings. DO not feel compelled to stay within any single modality but make your visualizations and imagination vivid and rich by including numerous modalities.
Your senses are wonderful tools for you to engage while unleashing the power of the imaginative mind. Make it colorful and exciting.
Make your imagination your ally and your best friend.
Look for ways to optimize.
Lots of ideas here that can be easily replicated … which ones do you feel could benefit your business? Please post your comments below, offering questions or your own great examples of content marketing tips.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your social media better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Sometimes reality is too complex for us. The art of storytelling does a great job of giving a meaning that can be remembered. Let me ask you a simple question. How do you make your ideas more compelling?
Even if your message is true and important, it’s hard to reach a general audience with facts alone. Improve with better storytelling stories. Make them memorable – stories have the remarkable power to captivate and inspire people.
Do you like to hear a great story? How about telling stories? Great storytelling. They can be a fantastic way to spread ideas. Facts are meaningless without a contextual story.
Don’t tell facts to influence, tell stories. The more you improve storytelling, the more your influence … it is as simple as that.
American Express’s Open Forum, for example, succeeded because it created stories that supported the narrative of the company’s commitment to small businesses. Pepsi Refresh, on the other hand, failed, in part, because it was unable to connect stories of social responsibility with what had always been a carefree lifestyle brand.
Great storytelling is infinitely more than simply producing content. It is, in fact, no less than helping customers connect with the soul of your enterprise.
The truth is that every business has a story to tell – even if they don’t know it – and that’s where improving your storytelling becomes very important.
Here are seven ways that will improve telling your stories to make your marketing stand out from the crowd, plus some excellent examples to learn from:
What makes you stand out? What uniqueness can you exploit to make you more visible, get people’s attention and give them something to relate to?
Giving your business that personal story and building in your personal touch will make it truly memorable.
Take the Mast Brothers. Have you ever heard of these guys? You likely will soon. They make chocolate. They craft it and pour themselves into every step of the process. And it shows.
They are quirky with a strong personal style. And, more than any other chocolate manufacturer, they are totally dedicated to producing top quality, luxury, handcrafted chocolate. They made a video to tell the story about themselves, what they do, and how and why they do it.
The video ticks all the boxes: it demonstrates their uniqueness, it’s beautiful to look at, it shows personality, it’s engaging, and it takes the audience on a journey.
And I, for one, couldn’t wait to get hold of one of their chocolate bars after seeing it.
Create a point
Every story should have a point. How often have we been regaled with high drama and intricate detail, only to have no payoff? Most of us have seen The Wizard of Oz and can sing out in unison Dorothy’s final words in the story, “There’s no place like home.”
Without that, and without her realization of what she values, her adventures are all for naught. Make sure you have a payoff in your own stories.
Employ dynamics in storytelling
Be dynamic with your storytelling. Nothing is more important to narrative content than imagination and the ability to create curiosity.
Give vivid descriptions and use emotional hooks and curiosity to get people fully engaged. Be creative, not only with words and images but also with the methods you use to convey them. Don’t be traditional. Be edgy.
Here is an example from “The Waffle Shop” in Pittsburgh, PA. Part of a trend to support performance art within the urban core, it is run by college students. The shop brought together people from all walks of life united by the draw of their live streaming talk shows and their waffles.
The shows were shot in the middle of their busy restaurant and included “Waffle Wopp” for teenagers with live music and fun interviews. Anyone could take part in these shows.
The aim was to produce a creative non-profit and for-profit combination model with social impact to stimulate local public dialogue, while simultaneously generating revenue to sustain itself. They had a runaway success, too, so much so that the experiment became a permanent fixture.
Develop your story in ways and formats that appeal to your target audience and make it easy for them to share. Take advantage of the full range of media with a potentially global reach that the internet has to offer.
Think apps, videos, audio, and images for high-level engagement, and ALWAYS give your audience the opportunity and incentive to share easily.
Whatever techniques you use to tell your story, always factor in the nuances of those particular platforms, as the things an audience expects and how they interact differ vastly depending on the arena.
The first time I saw Apollo 13 I was on the edge of my seat asking the question: “Will they make it back?”
On the edge of my seat, I watched as the characters struggled, toiled, prayed to get the astronauts home.
Then I took a step back…:”Wait. I was there when this really happened. They make it back!” So what compels me to watch the remainder of this film every time it comes on?
Ron Howard has the uncanny ability to make the audience care about what happens to the characters. Whether it is through the riveting soundtrack, poignant conversations between husband and wife, or struggles between colleagues, we care.
Create stories that cause us to feel, to empathize, and to understand are critical. Emotion should be created in every facet of the story: words, images, voice, and music. That should be your objective.
Be engaging
Most of us are blessed with a plethora of creative ways to convey our message and get people involved. Interactive content offers a much more open-ended platform through which to tell stories and get people highly engaged.
Your audience can be involved in the stories you create as part of your narrative. They even can be the central characters.
This can be seen working particularly well across social media where campaigns often seek to involve individuals in this way.
Ask your audience members to tell their own narratives, and then intertwine them with your own. This makes them feel valued and also gives something back by involving them as part of something bigger.
And it gives them a place to return to on your site again and again. Let them share their experiences with your brand through product usage ideas, advice and tips, and, of course, success stories.
A great example of this kind of strategy can be seen on the Google website. Google wields the awesome power of its customer success stories with style.
Their “Google Apps for Business” webpage (below) features a photo collage of happy customers.
Through sharing their stories, Google’s clients actually are doing all the marketing legwork for them, enticing new customers to be part of their exclusive Google business community full of real people who have experienced real success.
Amazing engagement technique, yes?
Make the audience care
Whenever I am fortunate enough to see and listen to remarkable stories being told ‘live’ in action, I am struck by their power to pull listeners in, much like a gravitational force that’s impossible to resist.
The best way to pull your audience in is to make them care … emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically. But how do you make the audience care? This is the most fundamental question of all.
There is no single answer. One important answer is having empathy for your audience and trying to craft your story and design your content always with the audience in mind.
You may be wondering …
Stories in all their many forms are never just about transferring information alone. We are emotional beings, like it or not, and to make the audience care enough to listen to you, you have to evoke in them some kind of emotion.
Cohesion is vital to successful storytelling. Simply collecting a bunch of stories without much consistency is a quick way to lose the interest of your audience.
You must have a strong central narrative theme to tie them all together. The theme should support your core values, goals, and vision.
So what does this mean in practical terms? Well, rather than thinking of each storytelling campaign as an individual tale, think of them as stand-alone elements sheltered beneath a pervasive umbrella theme.
In other words, the umbrella is the core that distinctly unifies all the stories built around the experience you want your audience to have.
Thinking of your story strategy in this way gives you an incredible amount of freedom with your content. As long as your content follows the same theme, storytelling will bind it together.
For example, in the recent “live positively” campaign by Coca-Cola, all of the content is based around the “live positively” theme. The scope for content that fits within that umbrella is endless, which means they are never short of ideas.
Incorporating such a wide range of topics shows their versatility as a brand and gives them a multitude of ways to connect with their audience, thus widening their appeal. In this particular instance, the folks at Coca-Cola also cleverly have positioned themselves as having a very human, caring side.
This draws attention away from any bad publicity over negative health issues regarding their products, and instead, develops their reputation and association with positivity and vitality.
That’s very sharp on their part, isn’t it and you can make the strategy work for you too.
The bottom line
Great storytelling and stories are a very integral part of being engaging with your community. If you want to engage your customers and create a memorable experience at the same time, you must master the psychology of storytelling. Give them a try today.
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All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
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Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your social media better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
A creative mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open. We are always on the lookout for creative ideas for doing standard things. Standard things like annual reports of companies. Enter Warby Parker and its application of visual content design to its most recent annual report.
Never heard of Parker Warby? As they write on their website, Warby Parker was founded with a rebellious spirit and a lofty objective: to create boutique-quality, classically crafted eyewear at a revolutionary price point.
Eyewear with a purpose
Almost one billion people worldwide lack access to glasses. This means that 15% of the global population cannot effectively learn or work – a problem that Warby Parker is determined to address. They’ve partnered with non-profits like VisionSpring to ensure that for every pair of glasses sold, a pair is distributed to someone in need.
Eyewear startup Warby Parker just released its 2013 Annual Report, a perfect example of how important tone is in creating great visual content. This very different approach to a year-end report uses a calendar format, highlighting company events on each day. Some events are significant company milestones; others are little anecdotes showcasing office life and culture.
Wow … what a change from the typical financial results and strategic initiatives that typically fill the pages of annual reports.
The report is an excellent example of a brand showcasing its ideas, creativity, and culture in a visually engaging way. At its core, the strategy of content marketing is not just about distribution and visibility. It is about telling the world who you are and what you stand for. This design goes a long way in turning customers into brand advocates.
The design shows how to empower your content. So many companies just don’t take advantage of their great content, or they don’t know how to present their content in a creative way. Often, in the end, they are fighting for survival as we all are. However, the brands that can express their personality, their creativity, passion, and manage their content in a way that speaks to people will create loyal customers.
Here are nine important takeaways all brands can learn from Warby Parker’s design approach to creating great content.
Visual content design: push the edge to be different
What does the Warby Parker (http://www.warbyparker.com/annual-report-2013/#march-11 class trip have to do with eyeglasses? What does it matter? It is an interesting story, and Warby Parker uses the story to illustrate its personality and culture. Your content should be relatable, valuable and interesting for your audience. If you capture these qualities, your marketing will create a captive audience with ever-increasing brand loyalty.
Utilize visual design
First and foremost, prioritize visual design in your efforts. Presenting your content in a visual format has some benefits. First, humans recognize and process images much faster than text; this is why visual content has much greater appeal. A study by 3M showed that 90% of the information sent to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.
Second, using a diversity of image types makes your content continuously fresh, which encourages readers to explore more. In the Warby Parker design the combination of photography, illustration, videos, and data visualization keeps the eyes interested and moving around the page. More time on site means more engagement with your brand.
If you are going to visualize data, display a comparison—that is what makes the visualization more meaningful. The infographics revolution has brought with it many a missed data visualization opportunities in the form of single-data-point pie charts and big numbers with fancy typographic treatment. Distilling data into a statistic removes the context and comparison that makes it insightful. Don’t fear complexity; take advantage of the opportunity to add clarity with many visualization design elements.
Show your personality
Business is becoming increasingly personal—not in the waiter remembers my name sort of way, but more in the way that we crave more personal connection in a web-based world. People want to know that the businesses they support are run in a way they can relate to, that its employees are people they might hang out with and potentially even someone who could become a good friend.
Marketing content is all about making connections. Your level of success has a lot to do with how your readers react to what you write. People connect with your brand because they relate to what you’re saying to them. They want to feel that your content is specifically crafted to their interests and needs in mind. In other words, it should feel personal.
Your customer community wants to know that there are humans behind your brand, and they want to know more about them as people. Don’t make the mistake of hiding your people, relationships, interactions and office pranks behind a shield of professionalism. These things are most often as interesting as your products and services … and certainly as how much money you made last year. In today’s marketing landscape, whether you are a product or service-oriented business, you are selling your culture, and your culture is your people.
The growth in content consumption is not just because people are looking for a satisfactory distraction from work. Customers have an appetite for real, interesting information. The vast knowledge-sharing that the web has facilitated has brought with it an increased curiosity and hunger for understanding. Don’t believe that everything you do at the back end of your business is boring. Turn it into engaging content that will deepen your customers’ understanding of what your world is all about.
Visual content design: create emotion
In his book, Contagious, Wharton professor Jonah Berger showed that one of the key reasons people share creative content is because it arouses a person’s emotion. His point … content has to go beyond just being useful; it has to be unforgettable. Rather than trying to churn out quantity, take the time to figure out what kind of emotions move your audience.
In doing so, it’s important to remember that not all emotion is created equal. In his research, Berger identifies that certain kinds of emotions – those that get people “aroused” like awe, passion, and anger – are much more likely to drive shares than those that make people feel toned down – like sadness, relaxation, or contentment.
Don’t be afraid to shake things up.
Integrate products/services naturally
Your products and services don’t have to be ignored. In this midst of all the other ways to add to your design, you often can overlook them. Feature your product or service naturally within content, but don’t make it an abrupt deviation from the other fun stuff. This means that you will want to tone down your calls-to-action and any other hard-sell tactics. Use them as an opportunity to remind viewers what you do, without killing all those good vibes you have been building.
Share how you are awesome
One important element of marketing is about bringing attention to how awesome you are. However, this doesn’t mean your awesomeness-recognition abilities should be limited to your pursuits. Calling out the big (and little) wins of others—vendors, customers, ex-employees, maybe even competitors—shows that you are not afraid to give credit where it is due. This fresh perspective will add authenticity to your content.
The bottom line
Your content is a perfect place to let your audience know why you do what you do. Clearly articulating the values that give your company meaning helps you connect with people on a level beyond the business transaction, and it attracts people that share those same ideas. This powerful means of communication helps truly differentiate your brand—more than low prices, and fancy features could ever do.
There is a reason why some change leaders succeed while others fail. At some point everybody needs to decide whether they would rather make a point or make a difference and, in the end, those that prevail choose the latter.
Imagine you could go back in time and give your 20-year-old self a bit of advice on investing in the creative process, coming up with new ideas, and producing good, funwork.
Do you have a lesson about making your content creation more creative you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving your ability to learning to learn. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning from all around in your environment.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on continuous learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
