Storytellers are the Best Marketers

The attention span of the average person is 8.25 seconds, this is a significant decrease from the year 2000 when it was 12 seconds.

In an ever-changing space, saturated with countless startups and innovative products where every brand is trying to capitalize on the ‘next big thing’, how can you use marketing to stand out and attract consumer attention in the space of a few seconds?

Tell A Story

It sounds simple when taken out of context but storytelling is the most influential aspect of content marketing. Sometimes, it is barely notable that as a marketer you are a storyteller already because as Seth Godin states “All marketers tell stories, and when they do so in a compelling manner, we believe them.”

So, in essence content marketing is implementing a lasting impression, one that yields emotions -it makes people think and feel- in fact marketing is having a conversation and storytelling should be the highlight of that conversation.

The most popular marketing campaigns to exist were those that went beyond the fundamental 4P’s recipe and pursued the secret ingredient of ‘value’ because staying relevant in the digital world is harder than ever.

So how can ‘value’ shape your marketing efforts?…

Through Empathy

It’s about creating a compelling and authentic narrative that underpins the human condition and builds a foundation for connection that enforces the decision-making process of the consumer. It’s not easy as there are a plethora of good stories out there but the storytellers that market well are those that use a range of mediums from ebooks to social media posts to landing pages.

The good storytellers are the ones that are relatable. They are the consumers themselves and blur the line between a hard-selling and a soft-selling approach, personalizing their marketing campaigns to parallel with their brand image with prominent transparency.

For example, one company that continues to lead the movement of ‘Empathy Marketing’ is Dove with their ‘Real Beauty’ campaign in 2013 encouraging self-belief and individualizing standards of beauty. The sentimental response of viewers evoked 20 million shares in the first week of the campaign release. The significant detail of the entire campaign was that Dove’s products were not promoted. The message that was conveyed was that it’s about the audience, not the company itself.

They are the Marketers that know who they are.

In Seth Godin’s Book ‘All Marketers A̶r̶e̶ ̶L̶i̶a̶r̶s̶ Tell Stories’ he delves into the idea that Marketers are ‘special kinds of liars’ because they know that the best kind of marketing is to satisfy a want not a need so what they personally want but do not have is what consumers claim as their own want too. Essentially, the true storytelling marketers are the ones that capitalize on the psychology of satisfaction with conviction. The underlying marketing strategy here is to emphasize a great story but make the selling subtle.

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