Lesson 5: Facts Tell, Stories Sell
You may have heard of the old adage that facts tell and stories sell. And this is true. People want to hear the story behind your brand. It’s become even more popular with unique marketing that’s happening online with YouTube and different channels where people are using these fun, exciting ad platforms or ad approaches that are almost satirical, almost a joke in nature they’re so fun and engaging and funny that they draw attention. And so today I want to talk about my fifth video, content marketing, and how to create content. My name’s Ryan Spelts. I’m a small business owner, and I own a publishing company. I have five different magazines. Connection Publishing is the name of the company. My wife and I started it in 2016. The art of telling a story is, is so important. One that we have had to develop since opening a publishing company.
Have you ever known someone who was just an incredible storyteller? They just seem to know how to phrase things and emphasis just the right moments in their stories and they paint a picture with their words. I’ve been a salesman and a marketer for 25 years. Selling is all about storytelling. When I got my initial sales training selling Cutco, they would always teach us to talk about benefits, not features. Features are the knife is sharp. The benefits are, it means quicker, safer cutting when you’re using a sharp knife. The benefits are part of a good story. So your job is to tell stories to get people to be engaged with you and with your products and your brand. In my magazines, I know how important that is. We offer several different storytelling opportunities for our advertisers.
Interesting stories behind businesses and their mission and what makes them unique are crucial to creating content. This will get you started in making content for your business. We give several opportunities to businesses to tell their stories in our magazines. For example, we do women in business features where women in the community who are business leaders can be featured and tell their stories and we do a photo shoot with them it’s really a lot of fun. We also do a home and garden issue, which has stories of home services companies telling some of the unique things that they’re doing and how they solve issues, you know, common issues and even unique issues that homeowners might have. Then we also do a community influencers feature. These are nominated people from the community that get nominated for their excellence in running a business and what they do. It’s pretty cool. We know how valuable storytelling is and so we offer these opportunities to our advertisers.
Now, it’s 2023, so print magazines are considered old fashioned so you may or may not have a print magazine in your community. If you do, ask them if they have any opportunities like this.
Another key way to create content is to document your everyday work. And if you ever watch Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary V, he’s awesome, but he always talks about how to create content in your business by just documenting what you do. So when something unique happens or even something you find mundane, document it. Take your phone out and take a video of it. If you’re a little camera shy, then you can have somebody do that for you. Being able to create content in your business is crucial, but then you also have to get that content out to people. So you have to find avenues to make sure people know about the content that you’re creating and that is being seen. Social media can work great for that.
If you’re a graphic designer and you’re making a new logo, get screen capture software and record yourself making a logo or the several different logos that you’re doing, and record it and talk about why you did what you did. And then put it on your social media. Someone who’s also looking for a logo may see that, and that’s how you could get that business.
Start thinking about it and creating content. I’m also gonna talk about how to come up with ideas in my next video its called brainstorming. But for now, just know that you should be creating some kind of content. Whether it’s video, whether it’s writing, everybody’s got a different skill. I have several clients that use the written word to communicate. Have an attorney who stories about what he’s done in his, legal practice, anonymously but he demonstrates how it could benefit others. I have an insurance agent and they actually get content from one of the insurance companies that they do business with. They produce a lot of content and they allow their brokers to use that content to advertise what they’re doing. He takes one of those articles, for example, in our December issue that’s coming up, he’s gonna have an article about how to safely take care of a live Christmas tree. That’s one they do pretty consistently during this time of year because the fire hazard for Christmas trees is real. Create content, something that people want to read and that’s entertaining and, that’s unique. That’s a great way to stand out in a market. If you’d like to know more or read more, you can get my book Marketing Playbook. Good luck. Go get marketing.
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