Why Every Great Brand Needs An Even Better Story
You’ve heard it before: great content is a smart way to market your brand. Why? In today's digital age, consumers have access to a vast amount of information and have more options than ever before. To stand out in this crowded marketplace, businesses need to create content that not only informs but also engages and resonates with their target audience.
One of the key benefits of creating content is that it helps businesses establish their brand as an authority in their industry. By providing valuable information and insights, businesses can position themselves as experts in their field and gain the trust of their customers. This, in turn, can lead to increased brand loyalty and repeat business.
How? Content marketing, when executed with intention, does a lot of the heavy lifting for your growth efforts. Freeing up resources to focus on delighting customers in other parts of the customer journey.
While you’re focusing on optimizing for conversion and customer retention, content drives thousands of visitors to your site daily. But why is that? Well, when done correctly content can not only provide value (answer a customer’s needs), but also satisfy the very human need for connection in a world that’s increasingly fragmented. By embracing this you can create tremendous value around your brand.
“Our brains create stories to make sense of complexity, and we are bombarded daily with data and personal experiences of escalating complexity. Our stories help us weight data as important (or not) as well as judge the data as a good or bad according to our point of view "- Anne E. Simmons "Whoever Tells The Best Story Wins"
What’s most exciting about content marketing is when executed with real conviction it becomes more than a cheap and fast way to acquire customers- it humanizes your digital presence. Content helps businesses connect with their target audience on a deeper level. By understanding the needs and interests of their customers, businesses can create content that addresses those needs and resonates with their audience. This leads to stronger relationships and more engaged customers.
At its core content marketing is all about effective communication and storytelling which are both fundamental parts of who we are as humans. We love stories- it’s ingrained in our DNA.
Without stories we wouldn’t be able to function as a modern society. We’d find it impossible to communicate complex ideas that continue to push us forward.
In that sense, for an innovative company to not have a serious content initiative is the greatest form of self-sabotage. How will anyone begin to understand the problems your company solves? How will they begin to understand the technology behind it? Why should they even care?
In order for thousands, or millions, of people to connect with your idea, they need to begin to understand your company first and the story behind it. The need to follow a narrative, and that narrative should involve them, the target customer as the main character. Generally the more groundbreaking a company the harder it has to work to create the kind of messaging that generates massive awareness and growth.
What everyone seems to gloss over when reciting the gospel of the great Hotmail, Dropbox, and Air BnB growth hacks is that they solved incredibly easy-to-understand problems- email, unlimited storage, and trustworthy vacation rentals/couch surfing. Simply put, everyone of their respective early users had already experienced the fairly common problem the companies solved.
If your company solves more complicated problems, then your biggest challenge is an educational one. In this case no amount of clever tricks, or growth tactics will help customers to understand what their problems are, and how your company solves them.
In the book "Thinking Fast & Slow" Nobel Prize-winning author Daniel Kahneman does a fantastic job of explaining the complex processes underlying human decision making, and information processing. Kahneman cites many studies that illustrate how the human mind is more intricate, but at the same time, simpler, than we think.
He splits the mind into two parts- system 1 which focuses on automatic operations (your inner caveman), and system 2 which focuses on controlled operations (your sophisticated inner voice that speaks with a British accent).
Essentially "Thinking Fast & Slow" explains how system 1 impacts the controlled decisions made by system 2. In short, your inner caveman has a lot more say over how you communicate with others, and what you buy than you think. It also explains why things like poor UX design, outdated urban planning, and traditional advertising are so painful.
In theory, if we were as super smart as we all like to think we are, we’d be able to understand anything thrown our way. Instantly. Every single time. But that’s not how our brains work.
Kahneman's summarizes it this way:
"System 1 continually constructs a coherent interpretation of what’s going in our world at any instant. I attempt to give a sense of the complexity and richness of automatic and often unconscious processes that underlie intuitive thinking, and how these automatic processes explain the heuristics of judgement...Part 2 updates the study of judgment heuristics and explores a major puzzle: why is it difficult for us to think statistically? We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think casually, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is something that system 1 is not designed to do.”
Content marketing assumes that your prospective customers are not always logical- they are not always thinking with their system 2. In fact even the most sophisticated of customers (large B2B SaaS accounts, high-end luxury purchasers etc.) do not operate from a place of pure logic and rational. In fact they may be the least logical, choosing to make their buying decision based on their system 1 thinking: ease. comfort, trust, brand loyalty (intangible feelings that make them feel good), and not purely system 2 deep thinking.
By producing stories around your brand you engage your customers through associative thought first, and then present logical facts later in an article, or further down the marketing funnel. Because stories and narratives never have to be 100% rational, they allow brands to become more playful and human. Therefore they engage the parts of their customer’s brains that think associatively and metaphorically leading to delightful interactions around the brand.
While totally capable of connecting the dots, your customers may need months to reach the “aha moment where they realize your groundbreaking product or service is exactly what they need(ed). In the meantime content helps them connect, and understand the problems present in their own lives, or that your product or service helps them with. Through that association your brand remains top of mind, and when it finally clicks (and there is a real need) they immediately think of your company first.
In that way, content marketing is the ultimate growth hack because content marketing never stops. It allows you to reach potential customers over and over again for a fraction of what it would cost through traditional advertising or digital ads.