Feel like you're already over the term "storytelling" without ever really having understood how you can successfully apply it to your writing? You aren't alone. Like so much jargon, this amazingly powerful and useful word is in serious danger of being consigned to LinkedIn profiles and marketing parody.
Even storytelling guru Annette Simmons is over the way we're teaching storytelling as a content cure-all.
"We need to stop 'telling stories' that oxytocin or the magic of a 'narrative arc' explain storytelling. It’s much bigger than science can explain. Storytelling is an art – subjective, emotional, and as variable as humanity is diverse." - Annette Simmons
We can do better. Instead of yet another "stories=good" post, today we're going to apply the logic of storytelling to site content. After you've read the last word, you should have the tools you need to draw a concrete map of how to tell your brand "story" with site content.
Note: I'm not knocking storytelling here. I'm a novelist. That's illegal. I am knocking throwing the latest buzzword at our marketing and pretending like using the word makes us better at our jobs.
Why storytelling
I promised not to flog you with the "stories are engaging so be engaging by telling stories" line, but if we dig just a little deeper we can understand one of the concrete arguments for storytelling: persuasion.
In her compelling book, The Story Factor, Annette Simmons reminds us that we can throw facts and figures at people all day long, but stories hold the real power to change someone's mind.
"Your story needs to take [potential customers] on a tour of the aspects that step by step convinced you to believe so they can step by step come to believe the same things" - Annette Simmons
Take a moment to check this against your own experience. When was the last time someone truly shifted your perspective? If they did so using anything other than a story, it's okay to stop reading here and find a tactic that you think will work better. But my guess is that some sort of story was involved.
The six types of story
Simmons outlines six types of stories we can use as humans and marketers to overcome objections:
"Who I am" stories and "why I am here" stories establish the groundwork you need to build trust with your audience. They naturally assume you're in it for yourself and these stories allow you to share your motivations. If you get human enough, your audience might find common ground on which to connect with you.
Vision stories tell how things could be. This type of story shows your audience what's in it for them. If you're holding an all-hands meeting, your vision story might include a tale about how the company has triumphed over obstacles in the past. If you're marketing a product, your vision story might speak to a future state where a problem (that your product solves) no longer has to exist.
Teaching stories give your audience an opportunity to learn from a mistake without ever having to make it. They also help you shape that audience's understanding of the potential solutions available to them. For example, if I were to tell you that a site audit can help you understand all the content resources you have available to you and use Moz Content as my auditing tool, I'd be pointing you in the direction of a solution for you and also making it easy for you to choose our solution.
Values-in-action stories are similar to vision stories and teaching stories, but they focus on the core values you want to reinforce and provide examples. Simmons suggests focusing on positive value stories rather than "war stories." One way to do this would be if a wedding dress company that prided itself on proper etiquette wrote a blog post about a bridal consultant who hand-wrote a thank-you card to every bride who purchased a dress from her.
The final type of story, the "I know what you are thinking" story, allows you to neutralize concern without that concern ever being raised. It's relatively easy to anticipate an objection from your audience and to use this kind of story to get ahead of it.
Applying storytelling to site content
This is where I wish I had a gorgeous illustration of the marketing funnel and that I could neatly fit these six story types in and presto change-o, poof! Your site content is perfectly optimized for storytelling and conversion.
Alas, life is a little harder than that. But we can get a good sense of which types of content are best for telling which types of stories. I'll use Moz as an example because that's close to my heart.
Who we are and why we're here
Moz is about three things: helping people be better marketers, building a strong community, and being TAGFEE. Free educational content has been a huge part of who we are since the very beginning when Rand was blogging about everything from the Google Link Command to Sandbox. That strong community is here because all of you make it happen, and because we work to make TAGFEE happen every day.
You can see our desire to help people be better marketers and to connect with the community right up at the top of our site. Click on "Learn & Connect" to bring down a bucket of resources like our beginner's guides to SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media, as well as our webinars, blog, and Q&A.
We also share who we are on our about, TAGFEE, and team pages.
You'll note that all of this content is front and center because it helps our audience get to know us. Our audience becomes acquainted with our slightly quirky personality through our voice and the style of our imagery. We put our values out in the open for all to see so we can hold ourselves accountable and so our audience can know what to expect. And you can tell a lot about Moz by the fact that everyone who wants to be is listed on our team page (not just a selection of the top execs) and that each individual Mozzer's page has their own voice.
Help your potential customers get to know you by sharing "who you are" and "why you're here" stories in the content and form of your home, about, and team pages.
Our vision
The homepage is a perfect place to introduce an audience to your vision story:
But to really shape their expectations about what life could be like if only they'd use your products, you'll want to flesh out that vision story in content such as product descriptions and white papers.
Notice that all the vision stories, no matter where they are on the site, elaborate on and reinforce the same vision. Some pieces will speak to a greater ecosystem and others will pinpoint how your products bring that vision to life. Which role they play depends largely on where that piece of content sits in your funnel.
Teaching
You're reading teaching story content right now. I'm not trying to sell you anything at all, but I am trying to give you a new way of thinking about the work you do — to help you make better marketing. I'm also, on a meta level, teaching you about how Moz thinks about marketing, including how we see value in going beyond superficial monikers like "storytelling" and "keywords" to provide actual applied insight.
Although I mentioned our beginner's guides as "who we are"-type stories, they are also teaching stories. You may have noticed that we don't have a beginner's guide to pay-per-click advertising. That's not because PPC isn't important, but it is because our story is about the difference you can make with SEO, content marketing, and influencer marketing.
Big content can also be part of your teaching story. We use our Search Ranking Factors and Local Search Ranking Factors surveys to explore and share the changing nature of search, which helps focus our potential customers on asking the right questions about ranking better (instead of "where can I buy links?").
Mozcast plays a similar role by pointing people's attention to potential signs of shifts in Google's search algorithm. It is a useful tool, yes, for monitoring and predicting the search climate. It's also a story that teaches how much the algorithm changes and that SEO is not a one-and-done project.
Depending on who you are, your teaching stories might help your audience see fashion from the lens of accessories, understand that the value of your products is in sending matching items to the developing world, or see how essential connection speed is to saving money. Shape that conversation on your blog and in your big content.
Values in action
Our blog also tells values in action stories. We do this both through the teaching that is so core to who we are but also through the tone of content on the blog. This goes back to TAGFEE. Rarely (if ever) will you see a brand or competitor called to the carpet on our site. And our product and company updates are just as likely to tell you the ugly side of why we made the improvement as they are to celebrate the update, like this announcement of Keyword Explorer:
You'll also find values in action stories in our help documentation as we try to provide straightforward but fun information to help you be the best marketer you can be.
Demonstrate your values in action by telling the story of efficient project management with a datasheet that doubles as a purchasing checklist to help your buyer overcome internal objections. Or teach your customers how to use the spices you sell by turning help documentation into recipes.
We know what you are thinking
Wow, that's a lot of talk about us. Most of our audience would be wondering right now if we can really live up to that hype. That makes this the perfect moment to share a "we know what you are thinking" story. Some of the best site content forms for putting the proof in your pudding are social proof (in the form of testimonials) and case studies.
Your turn
Ready to put storytelling into your site content? The framework is universal, but the application of it will be very individual to your experience. I'd love to hear how you've incorporated these six types of stories into your site, along with what's working for you and what isn't.
Hi Isla!!
we are very clearly emotional beings and as such as online and offline marketers that we must offer the consumer actions that cause you that feeling that we cause.
Really someone calls attention to enter a web "soulless" where everything seems robotized? Is not it better a website where a humanized actions (a language, a why, what a ...) to attract customers?
Great Post !!
Thanks, Luis! You'll get no argument from me on the nature of us as emotional beings. Now if only I could get the data to prove that to the people whose brains work in terms of data. But I know in my heart that if we connect to those human emotions of our readers and customers, we're making a difference, even if we can't prove it. Cheers!
Sometime people talk with passion about the data they Study
A great post about Dtructure articles telling a story. Most of our desition are influenced by people and their stories, opinions and tastes
Just an opinion, but I think you can breakdown any website the way you did with moz and make it look like they're doing it right. https://i.imgur.com/1AK3fBA.jpg
Storytelling is about the last thing one should worry about when making a website, just make it good and that's it. I don't expect an online store to tell me a story, I want to buy stuff.
Igor, this post isn't about how cool Moz is with our neato storytelling, it's about how to rethink your site content in terms of the story you're telling. That story doesn't have to be obvious to customers (and should never impede conversions), but it is a tool to help them through their purchase journey.
Yes, lots of people do this already, but some don't. I hope this post can give a framework to people who might be struggling to turn traffic into conversions. Thanks for reading deeply!
Without intending to do so, you told a story.
It's true that the purpose of an ecommerce is selling, not tell stories. However, when we tell stories and they reach the consumer heart, what we are doing is loyalty: Much more important than selling, I think.
I am partly with you. It depend of the website. I don't see Alibaba to telling Stories to sell more
Alibaba doesn't have to because they already have the user base. The same is true of Amazon. I'm addicted to Prime and it's easier to go pull that lever and get my monthly ration of diapers than it is to think about where to go.
But for new sites or smaller sites who don't have that market share already, this type of storytelling can be a huge boon to building a relationship with a customer. For example, I decided to test my Amazon addiction this week by shopping for my son's first birthday at other places on the web. I found the Tegu Blocks website and fell in love. In a few simple pages I know who they are, what they are doing and why. I know that they have a quality product and I want to buy from them rather than just get the cheapest price and free shipping from some soulless company that I don't feel connected to.
I did get the blocks from them (don't tell my son) and I feel better about myself and the purchase. Because I feel better about the purchase, I'm more likely to share that experience with you and anyone else who will listen than any number of the other random toy purchases I've made on Amazon. You can't buy word of mouth like that, but you can earn it and storytelling is one way to get there :)
I think it really depends on the e-commerce site you are running. If you are selling a product in its traditional sense and your business is focused on fast turnaround, etc. There might be no need to tell a story, but when it comes to services and experiences, its a different story. You have to explain people what is that they are buying. And when they can't see it, you have to use some magic e.g. storytelling to help them make that buying decision.
Amazing narrated..It will really help for whose who recently join moz...Thank for Sharing.
Thanks Isla. I fully agree with the idea that a brand should tell a story. Then a website should be an instrument to illustrate what the story is about. What may create a bit of confusion is to think of a story as a "introduction-body-end" type of story. A commercial website cannot tell that sort of story in my view, but it can illustrate what the brand aims at. As an example, let´s think of a brand that aims at the following: "If your feet smell, we solve this problem because we do...." . There is a nice story there for a brand (no need to have a giant whose feet stink and threaten the population of the village to die if they breathe this.... then a hero appears ) There are many angles to look at the story of what this brand does and many ways to illustrate how the problem is solved from a website perspective. So I agree with your overall idea that a brand´s main purpose can and should be illustrated as part of the story of what they do into their website too
Hi Luis,
I partially agree, partially disagree. I think a commercial site very much can tell an "introduction-body-end" type of story. To use the feet example, a customer as hero story along the classic Aristotelian arc would go like this:
To use the framework above, you could tell the smelly feet story this way:
Where I do agree with you, though is in that no villages need be threatened, we don't have to have superheros as characters and other direct narrative traps that would drive most company's copy WAY over the top (although I love that some can actually pull it off).
Thanks for reading!
Thank you.
We really love this blog about storytelling. Storytelling makes sending the message far more personal. Is storytelling endless or is there a moment when there is no interesting story to tell anymore? For example, a lot people are familiar with Arnold Schwarzenegger's '6 Rules of Success'. After telling his story we notices that people look further for other people with interested stories instead of digging for more stories about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or are we wrong about this? Thank you for this blog and sharing your knowledge. :)
Isla, thank you for this piece. I am allergic to buzzwords, and this clearly lays out how best to incorporate storytelling into a site's conversion path.
Thanks Isla McKetta,
Nice Post, Actually your 6 types of story covers major part of what users search for or are looking for i.e.
why, when and how (queries) apart from information
Regards
Pulkit Thakur
I absolutely loved this article, thank you! I am bookmarking it
Hi, Isla!
I think your post is a great way to clarify some of the confusion surrounding this often-spammed term of storytelling. Hailing from a writing background myself, I'm a huge narrative nerd and couldn't be more excited for any post that does storytelling justice.
The web is definitely not soulless, as some say. Better said, it shouldn't be soulless, because good SEO means putting the user first. Therefore, the engaging (and alive) attributes of content, achievable through storytelling, are the main substance required for quality internet. SEO is afterwards required mostly for 'translating' to the search engine what the user is able to understand immediately, and for a little performance monitoring as well.
If all online marketers understood this 'user first' mantra, we'd see a lot less empty jargon and marketing parody, as you've put it. Thanks for the entry!
I love what you said and couldn't be happier if more companies put the user first. When my mom was in business school in the 1980s one of her professors told her that customer-centric everything was the wave of the future. I think we're seeing that some companies get that and are reaping the rewards. Some still aren't and I wonder why we give them our traffic and money. Thanks for working with me to put storytelling into action rather than pinning it in the jargon board.
Thank you.
Great post. All the 6 types of stories you mentioned has a great power of persuasion to the customers. A very fine narrated about storytelling. Storytelling makes exchanging the message more personal. You also mentioned the three aspects or thing about Moz and Rand blogging, yes you all did it perfectly. The teaching section is neato, obviously. Its gonna help to everyone, a newbie and even to an expert.
Thanks
Hi Isla!
We have not yet incorporated storytelling on our site, but we left as pending to apply soon. It has great power of persuasion to the customer, we need only look at the big ones as TED that captivates us with storytelling of people.
Great post! Thank you!
Thanks, Sandra! To Igor's point, you might have incorporated more storytelling than you know. I hope this post gives you a framework to look at what you do have and then decide what you might want to add.
In our great aim to capture wider range of audience and make our content stand out, we often go out of the line that sometimes lead us to some consequences. That is way careful planning and thinking must be done before making any content o tell your story in a subtle way. To help us more, there are guidelines and rules that need to be followed and this article suggests a great example.
Storytelling is the best way to get the reader involved with the content you're trying to share. My web is about investing and I find very difficult to use storytelling but, when I achive it, the results are better than in normal posts.
Regards,
Czd
Thanks for this amazing post Isla!
I totally get your feelings about every good piece of storytelling we find wherever we find it. Carefully crafted storyline leaves only few of us untouched. It's "cognitive" to the point that it would be short-sighted not to use this form of persuasion for your product.
Thanks again!
Storytelling is the most ancient literary art, and it is just as relevant today as it was thousands of years ago.
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A helpful explanation of storytelling and how to make it work in creating Content.
Amazing post ;)! Thanks a lot. All the best from Germany, Michael
Thanks for sharing valuable information from this blog .