Creative Content & Storytelling Techniques

Do you ask yourself how you can standout in a marketplace that is flooded with emails, pop-up ads, enews blasts and notifications from every social media medium from Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and Snapchat? Well, you are not alone! Even the most experienced marketers are constantly seeking new ideas to market their products in ways that help them stand out amongst the clutter.

The first step to increasing community engagement is in understanding your audiences (from prospects to customers) by identifying their key characteristics and the persona they exemplify. The best way to do this is to listen to them as they discuss what they care about and share on social media. This will help you understand your audiences on a deeper level by identifying their values, beliefs, wants and needs (psychographics) as well as their basic demographics (age, location, financial standing, education, etc.). It will also help you examine what stage of the lifecycle they are in and what they care about at each stage.

Marketo, an Adobe Company, recommends developing personas to represent the different people within your audience. In The Definitive Guide to Social Media Marketing, Marketo (2019) claims that personas help you determine what kind of content you need, topics you should be writing about, the best tone and style of delivery to use, as well as where they go to get their information and how they want to consume it.

To understand this better, I’ll use an example from my PR writing class. Imagine you are compelled to market a portable, electric grill. Think about this product in terms of who would use it. Looking at the same problem from different perspectives provides different lenses from which to view it to obtain a solution. For instance, if you are targeting families who go camping, the tone you would use to promote this product to this audience (primarily moms) would be very different than if you were marketing to men to use it for tailgating. This will then help guide both the messaging and channels to market on. For example, moms would probably want more details about its use indoors and out (flexibility in use) as well as safety issues related to using it around little kids. Whereas men using it for tailgating will want to know how long it will last if it’s plugged into the car and how many extra burgers it can cook if your run out of room on the grill. Using storytelling techniques, you can craft stories customized for each channel… and common sense tells us, you’d have more freedom to use humor with the tailgating audience.

But how do you find the humor if you do not fully understand the intricacies of a tailgaters’ experience? Asking the right questions can help you paint different pictures. Doing interviews, surveys or focus groups are all great ways to gather second-hand information, but to put yourself in your publics’ shoes you must find ways to understand the intricacies of their experiences first-hand. For example, when IDEO, a product design firm located in Palo Alto, Calif., was charged with the task of redesigning a hospital emergency room (ER), the company found a patient who was willing to wear a camera on his head throughout his entire ER experience. The result: 10 full hours of film of the ER ceiling. This sensemaking provoked by this perspective led to a redesign of the hospital ER ceiling that included an aesthetically pleasing mix of blue skies and important information for patients. These observations can help you tell real stories. At IDEO, team members act as anthropologists studying an alien culture to understand potential products from all points of view. When brainstorming a new design, teams consider multiple perspectives. A perfect example of this approach can be seen in this video showing how IDEO employees came up with an entirely new concept for an age-old item: the shopping cart, in only five days: www.youtube.com/watch?v=M66ZU2PCIcM.

As you can see form this case study, videos are a great means to tell a story. And if humor is added, it can increase engagement and sharing. Using video, storytelling techniques and humor can help create a persona that an audience can relate to, which helps foster the relationship with the audience. I have a great example of this when a continuing education student in my Social Media class was charged with finding a way to connect with audiences who may be considering adopting a pet. This student related to this project first-hand because she adopted a shelter dog for her family some time ago. This insider perspective equipped with an understanding and a picture to use for her project. She used a photo of her daughter with her own shelter dog and accessed the free My Talking Pet App to create a video. She used humor to tell a personal story as a means to connect, engage and increase shares for the non-profit organization we were looking to help.

Your Instructor: Kirsten Whitten, Ph.D.
@kirsten.whitten1; kwhittenblog.wordpress.com

Professor Whitten is on the front lines of educating PR, Social Media and Integrated Marketing Communication professionals as a professor at Stonehill College, Regis College, Curry College and Northeastern University.