Small Business Content Series: Using Your Story In Content
Is the story you are telling memorable?
By now, after reading these posts, you should have understood your story in the Jimmy Valvano framework: where you were, where you are, and where you want to be. You should have fine tuned your story and be able to tell it on demand. You should continue practicing your story because you're always going to find new things to add to it.
Imagine This…
I want you now to imagine that you're at an event, a party, a trade show, networking event, and you're meeting people for the first time. Of course, one of the questions that people are going to ask is “What do you do?” Are you going to be the person that they forget? When you say, I sell insurance, I have a floral business, I'm a handyman, are they going to care or are you going to tell them a story that helps them to remember you?
This is now where we want to take that. Instead of being live at an event and talking to people, what you're doing is having that conversation through the means of social media, through YouTube, through your blog posts, through email marketing campaigns, through text message campaigns and so on. What you're doing is evoking your story every time you're posting. That doesn't mean you need to tell people, “Hey, here's where I started. Here's where I am, and now I'm putting up this post because I want you to buy from me.” That's not what we're looking for. Instead, I want you to be able to go back to your story.
Going Back To Your Story
If I'm a handyman and I'm posting about water heaters, I may have an experience with a customer where people had their water heater on their last legs. It lived beyond its 10 to 15 year lifespan. They kept pushing it and pushing it. Finally, the thing exploded. It flooded everywhere. “And for that reason, you guys should be keeping track of the age of your water heater. If you need help taking a look, let me know. I'm happy to help.” We just took pieces of our story and we made it into a post where we're selling our services and expertise.
How can we take stories from our beginning, from our existence right now and from where we want to be and get people to listen to us, to consider our thought leadership, to consider our advice and see if they can if they can actually benefit from our products or services?
Telling Your Story On Different Mediums
What we also have to do is figure out is how to use that story on different channels in different mediums. We'll use the water heater example. We're going to have a different approach to telling that story depending on the channel or the medium.
We're going to get more into channels and a little bit but when we're talking about channels that could be social media, like a Facebook post and Instagram post Snapchat, TikTok or LinkedIn. It could be a YouTube video. That video could be a 30 second video, it could be three minutes, it could be 30 minutes depending on what you're trying to do.
The game here is to have the idea and then start thinking about how you can translate it into content for each type of channel. So for a blog post, I'm going to write a 300 to 500 word post, all about why you should be watching your water heater, knowing the age of it and checking it periodically, or have an expert come in and check it for you to tell you if you're on the verge of needing a new one. In that story I will tell people to call someone in like me, I can take a look and help you out. So we're being true to our story and we’re being true to the experiences we've had, but because of the experiences we've had, people are going to listen to us and that's the difference.
Final Thoughts
I want you to think about a story that you've had that relates to your product or service. Just start with one. One story that relates to your product or service, someone that benefited from working with you, someone that had a life changing moment because they bought your product or service, someone that learned something new because of your thought leadership and your expertise.
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