I took some time off blogging to do some extensive research into the art of storytelling. The hunt has been fascinating and taken me into unanticipated areas of study that, collectively, confirm just how important storytelling is to us all (including, obviously, organizations). I’ll try to share what I’ve learned in the next few posts and hope you find it worthwhile. Let the story begin….

Why Story is Fundamental to Marketing

It turns out the squishy gray stuff locked inside our skulls is wired for story. The mind positively loves the stuff. The more engaging the story the more the brain comes to life, its synapses humming like power lines in the rain. In fact, a powerful story can open the floodgates to the very same bio-juices that leave us feeling satisfied, goofy, or giddy after a good meal, roller coaster ride, even sex. In a sense, those are stories too, yes?

Not surprisingly, marketers and business managers want to get in on the fun, recognizing (correctly) that a good corporate story may just compel customers to buy, join, subscribe and otherwise act in ways they want them to.

As I recently discovered, however, much of what constitutes corporate storytelling ‘advice’ is a rehash of the same tired bullet lists about injecting stories with authenticity, personality, transparency, etc.

Nothing wrong or incorrect with any of that, mind you, but these pointers don’t really explain why story works or what’s going on behind the scenes. And to my way of thinking, it’s always helpful to understand the why of something if I’m going to have any shot at truly mastering the how of it.

So let’s get started by sniffing into precisely why it is that we humans love our stories and maybe we’ll glean some insights into how that love affair can translate into successful corporate marketing.

Forget Your Thumbs, It’s All About Story

Take away our capacity for story and what, if anything, is left of what makes us human?

Plenty of psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists and others who make a study of human behavior believe that our capacity for story is what makes us human. Take away those opposable thumbs, for example, and you certainly curtail our physical capabilities – but we remain incontestably human. Take away our powers of story, however, and we’re reduced to the lobotomized Jack Nicholson character staggering back to bed at the conclusion of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Ok, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but take a moment and seriously picture your life without story. Which naturally begs the question, what, precisely, is story. We’ll get to that one in a bit. But let’s remain for the moment with the story-human connection.

We humans fundamentally are storytelling creatures, writes Jonathan Gottschall in his aptly-titled book, “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human.” Almost from the get-go we depend on story to make sense of the world around us – its objects and events, its life forms and people. Regardless of whether you have children of your own, each of us has memories of concocting the most outlandish stories to describe the fantastical world burbling in our imaginations. Children cannot resist storytelling – it’s clearly a part of their mental fabric.

As we grow older the storytelling doesn’t stop. Studies indicate that we spend the majority of our waking hours telling stories about ourselves, the workplace, our spouses and children and neighbors. And when we sleep? The storytelling continues. It might be safe to say that story is the first and perhaps most important of human addictions. (Remember, we get a bio-chemical jones out of the really good stuff.)

So what does all of this storytelling portend for corporate marketers? Well, if all the world really is a stage and your customers merely players, doesn’t it make sense to fashion your corporate messaging in ways that play nice with all those story-addicted brains?

Up Next – Fiction vs. Fact

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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When it comes to the content we consume, it’s fairly obvious that we turn to nonfiction for the information from which we want to learn and fiction to escape from life’s realities.

Obvious, perhaps, but untrue.

It turns out that fiction is more adept at changing our thoughts and attitudes than is nonfiction. Why? For the simple reason that fiction is more likely to grab hold of our imaginations and run with them. Conversely, the mind approaches nonfiction with a kind of feral wariness, a green colt suspiciously eyeballing the cowboy hellbent on saddling us with new ways of thinking.

Perhaps just as interesting, psychologists have discovered that those of us fully immersed in fiction are less likely to spot inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and outright falsehoods in those stories. Mind you, I didn’t say we are less likely to disagree with them. We don’t see them at all. Which maybe explain why great masses of humans for so long have been swept up in the most ridiculous tales of great – albeit loathsome – storytellers (think Jim Jones, for example).

I am convinced that the recent brand of wildly successful ‘historical novels’ is proof positive of our love affair with fiction. Adults who approached History 101 classroom lectures with the foot-dragging reluctance of root canal patients eagerly gobble down the likes of Ken Follet and his mammoth “Century” trilogy. The bottom line is we can’t get enough of good stories, yet show signs of allergic reaction to fact-filled lectures and powerpoint presentations.

So what’s this got to do with marketing? Well, by definition marketing is a nonfiction/truthful promotion of a product, service or brand. Meaning that, at a minimum, the customer subjected to your marketing enters that relationship less than eager to believe. Meaning, you’ve got your work cut out for you. As if you needed me to remind you of that, right?

The good news, of course, is that a ripping good yarn can convince folks of just about anything. So am I recommending you lie in your marketing? Am I suggesting that marketers who stretch the truth (yes, there are a *few* of them out there) are more likely to succeed than their truth-telling counterparts?

No and no.

What I am suggesting, however, is for organizations to work mightily to make their marketing more engaging. Pull in the reader, viewer or listener. Use conversational language that is easy – even, dare I say it, enjoyable – to consume. For goodness sake, dump the insider jargon, the overwrought hyperbole, the self-serving ‘me’ promotions. Find the common ground with your customers and talk to them in a way that says, “We understand the world you inhabit, it’s kind of a goofy and unpredictable world, it also can be a place of great substance and beauty, let’s agree not to take it too seriously, and oh by the way this thing that we do is pretty darned cool and has improved the lives of quite a few of our friends who use it.”

Or take the leap and leave out that last part. If your story is really good the consumer of that story will want to know more about who created it. Like a good white paper, the company authoring it doesn’t brag about itself – the value of the content speaks for itself and by extension elevates its producer in the eyes of those who read it.

In his terrific book, “Tell It To Win,” billionaire businessman and storytelling advocate Peter Gruber uses the Trojan Horse metaphor to explain how a good story can insinuate itself into customers’ brains without them even knowing it. Unable to break through the walls of Troy, the Greeks leave behind a massive wooden horse as a ‘gift’ to the Greeks. After dragging the thing inside the city and returning to their beds, the Greek soldiers inside pour out into the streets, open the gates and allow in the invading army. Troy is sacked. Story, as Gruber points out, works pretty much the same way in burrowing into our imaginations and changing the way we see the world.

Next Up – Neural Coupling

Previous Post – The Story on Story

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I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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When you sleep, do you dream of dragons or dolphins, of mortgage anxieties or brownie recipes? When you were choosing a college elective, were you more likely to pick “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire” or “Statistical Anomalies in Market Forecasting Models”? When you are watching a film about a man-eating shark, are you more apt to pay attention when the boat is gently chugging across the harbor or rapidly sinking?

If your answers suggest that our minds tend toward darker subjects, you are correct. You’d also be touching on one of the principal reasons we love a good story: the conflicts that inevitably lie within. But more on that in a moment.

Studies do indeed confirm that our dreams are far more likely to be filled with conflict and difficulty than their sunnier opposites. In fact, day or night, our minds quite naturally gravitate toward life’s challenges. Even when ‘life is good,’ when there is money in the bank, a happy mate at our side, food in the belly, our minds usually are ruing what was or worrying about what is to come.

“The human brain runs on conflict,” writes neuroscientist David Eagleman. “When someone offers you chocolate cake, you are presented with a dilemma: some parts of your brain have evolved to crave sugar, while others care about potential consequences, such as a bulging belly.” Only in humans does the mind find itself in an incessant conflict over even the most innocuous of activities.

Across cultures, empires, eras and geographies, the stories of human existence are always rife with conflict. And when they’re not they’re soon forgotten. Whether we’re talking about Homer and Shakespeare or Lucas and Spielberg, we humans love our stories of heroes in conflict. But why?

The Brain’s Addiction to Story

If you want to understand humankind’s addiction to story, look no farther than the mind itself. Paul Zak and his team at the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies have demonstrated that when it comes to brain chemistry, it is only stories steeped in conflict that truly grab our attention.

Our brain’s neurochemical response to story offers a powerful lesson to marketers looking for a way to reach audiences.

When conflict arises – in story and in real life – the brain releases the stress hormone cortisol, which helps the mind focus intensely on the source of that stress. Cortisol is old-brain, fight or flight stuff – think of a hiker stumbling upon a mother bear and her cubs. The brain gets a blast of cortisol that helps us zero in on the danger.

Conflict also results in the release of oxytocin, a chemical that generates strong feelings of caring, connection and empathy. The greater the volume of oxytocin, the more apt we are to relate to the story’s conflicted hero.

Taken together, then, cortisol and oxytocin create a potent neuro-chemical cocktail that not only focuses our attention on the plight of the story’s protagonist caught up in conflict but also creates a powerful empathetic connection with that individual. In “Jaws,” for example, the aquaphobic Chief Brody isn’t alone on that sinking boat as a killer shark moves in – we the audience are out there with him, anxiously scanning the screen for any signs of the shark, desperate for Brody/us to survive.

In essence, we become one and the same with the story’s protagonist or, in storytelling lexicon, its ‘hero.’

In a series of groundbreaking studies, Princeton neuroscientists used fMRI machines to monitor the brains of storytellers and their audiences and discovered that in the midst of a great story all of those brains more or less mimic each other. The more engaging the story, the more the brains looked the same. When our Chief Brody gets his first real glimpse of the shark and announces to his fellow crew mates, ”We’re going to need a bigger boat,” we are literally thinking the same thing. In fact, Princeton researchers found that in some instances of ‘neural coupling’ the audience actually races ahead in the story and arrives at the conclusion even before the storyteller takes them there. Which might help explain the many instances when a reader or moviegoer is thinking, “What the hell is wrong with these people – why don’t they SEE what is happening?”

What all of this mental chemistry means, says Zak, is that story effectively alters our perceptions because it quite literally alters our brains.

And as I noted in a previous post, really good stories do this even when we are guarding against it. Writes Jonathan Gotschall in his marvelous book, The Storytelling Animal, the human mind “yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.”

So if the mind is a junkie for conflict-ridden stories, how do marketers create the good stuff – the stories that will hook their prospects and customers?

Story as Mind-Melder

Over the years the likes of Joseph Campbell and a raft of neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, and other scientists have discovered that the most effective stories follow a kind of  linguistic trajectory. George Lucas borrowed from Campbell’s ‘monomyth’ architecture, for example, to create the massively popular Star Wars film series. But it was the 19th century German novelist, Gustav Freytag, who first tried to codify the storytelling process, which he labeled the “Dramatic Arc.”

According to Freytag, there are five key components to this arc:

• Exposition – The story’s situation, setting and characters.
• Rising Action – The conflict makes itself known and our hero engages it.
• Climax – The turning point in the story where, for good or bad, an end to the conflict can be seen.
• Falling Action – Resolution of the conflict, perhaps with one final period of drama before it is completed.
• Denouement – The story closes out with a sense of completion, even relief or peace.

Without this narrative path, says Zak, your audience is likely to tune out. By way of example he uses the story of ‘Ben,’ a fictitious two-year-old boy dying of cancer. The story revolves around the attempts of Ben’s dad to fully engage with his joyfully alive son all the while knowing the boy soon will die. In a sense, it is a story of Everyman since, ostensibly, each of us faces the ultimate biological clock and is keenly aware of his/her mortality.

In Zak’s laboratory setting, the brains of audience members exposed to this story not surprisingly released plenty of cortisol and oxytocin, indicating both that they were intently focused on the story and relating to the conflict within Ben’s dad. A control group exposed to a different version of the story – one in which a healthy Ben and his dad simply spend a day at the zoo – generated no chemical response and very quickly the audience tuned out.

So what does all this mean to corporate marketers? To me, it’s rather simple. If we humans are hardwired for stories with conflict; if our brains instinctively focus on stories and form empathetic connections to those engaged in internal or external conflict; then it behooves marketers to borrow from Freytag’s Dramatic Arc to create stories that have, as their centerpiece, a conflict their brand can solve.

Pepsico’s director of market insights, Brett Townsend, goes so far as to urge marketers to think like Hollywood scriptwriters. Conflict, he says, is indeed the fuel to a good story, so use it and see if your customers and prospects don’t respond.

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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Spend enough years in marketing and you’re bound to stumble across the CEO or business founder who genuinely struggles with the process of articulating the story behind his or her business. They know their stuff, have great passion for it, and for obvious reasons are hungry to share the love with others – preferably customers. Why the difficulty?

I think this figurative separation has its physical counterpart in the brain’s corpus callosum, that neural valley that connects – and attempts to translate – signals between the brain’s two hemispheres.

The ‘product’ of right-brained storytellers is every bit as valuable as that of left-brain executives – just not as easily codified, quantified, and calculated.

I can’t speak for others, but in my many years of consulting, sales, marketing and journalism, the lion’s share of business leaders hailed from business backgrounds. Which is to say, they have spent years immersed in the left-brained worlds of statistics and accounting, economics and finance, strategy and management theory and, in our tech-happy world, engineering and technology.

These individuals are most comfortable in the rational, orderly realm of the left brain. They’d be perfectly satisfied if the organization’s ‘story’ could be told in a Power Point presentation or Excel spreadsheet. Alas, that’s not how most of us think and, far more important, it’s not how we make buying decisions (and that goes for left-brainers too).

Bridging the Divide

Business-speak to the typical consumer is dull, eye-glazing stuff, and it rarely if ever makes it across the corpus callosum into the emotionally crazy, colorful, creative, intuitive world of the right brain where we humans ultimately make most of our decisions.

Studies confirm that more often than not we will make a buying decision with the right brain, then retreat into left brain territory to defend and justify the decision. Which means, your story had better ‘speak’ to the right brain of your customers. The problem: Most of us can’t, especially those aforementioned left-brained executive types.

Indeed, when it comes to storytelling our structured, rational Mr. Spock-as-CEO finds himself in unfamiliar territory. He’s schooled himself in MBA land, spent months or years with engineers building the Better Mousetrap, and toiled with lawyers, accountants, financiers, etc., to cross the t’s and dot the i’s. Hardly the realm of juicy storytelling.

Understandably, our CEO sees his story best told through facts and figures. But the storyteller knows different. She knows that the human mind tunes out on this kind of content. The brain wants story, emotion, meaning, context, connection and conflict. The product or service obviously is real, but the audience is more apt to succumb to – and buy into – a more dramatic narrative rendering.

(Recently I stumbled across this short video gem, which does a marvelous job of explaining the difference between typical CEO-style facts and figures presentations and story.)

So what is our CEO/founder to do? Answer: Hire an outstanding storyteller and let go of the reins.

Storytelling is a Skill

You don’t want me representing you in court or doing your corporate books. In fact, if I do the latter you’ll probably end up in the former. Which is to say, it is important to recognize the things one can – and cannot – do. This can be a tough pill for a CEO to swallow. The business is HIS baby, lots of ego is involved. And frankly, who knows the story better than him?

Far too often the CEO/founder mistakenly believes that, because storytelling cannot be easily codified or credentialed, he can easily slide into that role.  After all, how difficult can it be to explain the business into which he has invested so much of his energy and expertise? It’s just a story, right?

But here’s the key to the entire marketing equation: If you can’t sell the story of your product, service, or brand to discriminating buyers, how are you ever going to sell the actual product or service that story is supposed to promote? Storytelling is a talent every bit as important as that of an engineer, chef, pilot, or CEO. And truly great storytellers are a breed apart. Hollywood learned this lesson a long time ago.

So to you frustrated C-suite types and startup founders desperately wanting your Better Mousetrap to catch on, my advice is to get out of the way and find (and trust) someone who knows how to translate your business into a story that resonates. A good marketer is going to look at your business in ways you cannot imagine. Let her. Because she’s going to come up with the story of the Better Mousetrap story that is worthy of the product itself.

And that’s something your left-brain actually can count on.

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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Most children at one time or another have been admonished not to say anything unless it’s really worth saying. It’s a shame more corporate messengers don’t take such advice to heart. Because, really, what is the stuff you say really worth?

Try this exercise by answering three simple questions:

1. Professionally speaking, what do you have to say?
2. Now, what do you have to say that others might find of interest?
3. Once more, but this time, what do you have to say that is sufficiently interesting, informative, or useful to compel others to consider giving you money for it (you know, do business with you)?

This is a remarkably simple narrative path that can do wonders in opening folks’ eyes to what, precisely, they expect to happen when messaging meets prospective customer. It’s crazy that more companies don’t obsess about this. It’s your company’s pickup line. 

When someone asks whether you have anything worth saying, answer that question literally – what is it worth?

We live in a world of noise. Everyone, it seems, has something to say and just about all of them are busy saying it. A lot of it. And across every imaginable form, format, and medium. Mind you, it’s not so much the volume that’s deafening – it’s the quality of the noise itself.

Far too few organizations and the people who run them are taking the time to think through these three questions. Most never seem to get past question 1. “What do I have to say?” PLENTY! And off they go.

A small percentage are sufficiently concerned to actually care that what they say gets read, heard, seen, or shared. They try. Some of them try really hard. But it’s still just noise.

And then we arrive at that tiny little cohort that has done the work to determine not merely what it is they’ve got to say and the best way(s) to make it palatable, they’ve actually dug into what it is that resonates with prospective customers. The stuff that convinces someone not merely to, say, read, but to click that contact form, to subscribe, to call – someone who says, “These folks know what they’re doing and I want to be a part of it.”

I urge you to test-drive this easy-peasy formula. Ask – and answer – those three questions and see what comes out of it.

And the best thing to come out of this? Sweet, sweet silence punctuated by thoughtful, compelling, useful messaging. Imagine it.

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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If current trends continue, the Internet will reach a major milestone this year: one billion websites. Incredibly, by 2015 that number is expected to double. If you’re a website owner looking for eyeballs and online customer engagement these figures might best be summed up as, “Needle, meet haystack.”

But there is good news to all this. In fact, I think it’s really good news.

Meet the typical online customer trying to find your organization.

You see (and I’m sure you do), the online world is awash in crap. Enormous quantities of it. Which means virtually any organization has a real chance of standing out, of being that diamond in the rough, of getting – and keeping – the attention of customers who are looking for the good stuff.

And make no mistake, customers will flock to the good guys, to the sites that consistently deliver useful, helpful, compelling, informative, well-crafted content.

And there’s more good news. Anyone can do this. It just takes commitment, concerted effort, and a fundamental understanding of the three key ingredients to online success. And they are?

• Story/Content – It all starts with content. Content is a product every bit as important as the products or services you sell. Meaning, if you can’t sell the description of what you do, how do you expect to sell the real stuff?
• Website – Yes, yes, we’re all flocking to social media channels and using mobile devices and so on. But more than ever the corporate website is the public face of an organization, the Mothership, if you will, from which all of your content is pushed out to the masses.
• SEO – Google, Bing, and the other big search engines represent the critical handshake between your website content and the people who want to find it. Meaning, you’d better have a pretty good idea of precisely how they do that particular meet and greet.

Now, this is Simple-Simon sounding, right? I mean, who in 2013 doesn’t grasp these three principles?

Answer: Everyone knows it. Yet very, very few put the aforementioned commitment, effort, and understanding to work making them a reality. Or, more precisely, they half-ass it (sorry, but it’s true). They go in fits and starts, building a site, then largely abandoning it; making a big commitment to blog, then abandoning it; doing some rudimentary SEO, then abandoning it. Sense a trend?

Better still, they catch Shiny Object Syndrome and flit from one phenomenon to the next. “We need to be on Facebook! No, wait, everyone is moving to Instagram! We need video! No, wait, mobile is key. Er, I just heard mobile apps – no, wait, HTML 5 is going to kill apps….”

Modern marketing is akin to exercise and diet regimens, with a growing population of overweight people ignoring the fundamentals (eat in moderation, exercise regularly) for the latest crazes ‘proven’ to shed pounds and have you hitting the beach looking hot.

But I digress.

In the next few posts I’ll keep it simple and focus on these three ingredients and how any small to medium sized business can master them.

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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Everyone in marketing these days is talking about content. Or storytelling. Or corporate narratives. You get the idea.

So let’s cut through the hype and examine what, exactly, content marketing actually means. First, this is NOT rocket science, though you wouldn’t know it with all the case studies and thought pieces on the subject. It’s as if prior to “content marketing” being coined companies were busy marketing, well, what, exactly?

Content, of course, they just hadn’t branded it as such. And that’s kind of the point. Content is the product of marketing.

If you don’t want to consume your content, what makes you think your prospective customers will?

Now, you may think your content is promoting a product, service, brand, membership, etc., but in truth it’s sole purpose in life is to promote itself. You mentally buy the content and only then do you go about considering the product it promotes.

Simple example: The other day a friend posts to Facebook a little video describing the redesigned Google Hangout. I watch the little 70-second gem and am sufficiently impressed to forward it to others in my network. Just as important, I make a mental note to check out the new Hangout the next time I need said services (rather than, say, Skype).

The point being, that video sold me on itself. The rest of my little mental journey was just a continuation of the good vibes generated by the video. The stellar marketing content was the starter’s gun that got me off and running in the direction Google wanted.

It’s a subtle but profoundly important distinction, because far too many companies mistakenly believe that their marketing content needs to be very serious or overly cute or choking on industry jargon or stiff and stilted. In other words, that their content needs to be anything but something the rest of us actually would enjoy consuming.

So here’s a really simple question you can ask yourself or anyone else involved in your content marketing decisions. Would you read, watch, or listen to that content if you didn’t have to? Most often, the answer is either ‘no’ or a rationalization along the lines of, “It’s not apples-to-apples because we’re not the customer.”

Yes, you are.

As a high school student I worked in the kitchen of a four-star restaurant. Each afternoon the chefs came up with the recipes for that night’s specials, then cooked and ATE them. If the meal wasn’t up to snuff, it didn’t make it onto the menu. Logical, right? Why serve something unpalatable to paying customers?

So Rule #1 of the Idiot’s Guide to Content Marketing: Don’t serve it unless you’d eat it. Take the time to do it right, to make it compelling, enjoyable. Remember, if they don’t ‘buy’ your content, they sure as hell aren’t going to buy the products or services that content is describing.

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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Is the content you produce a job or a passion of the heart; a labor of love or just plain old labor? Do you approach your messaging with a kind of grim determination or eager to share what you have to say with the world?

How you answer these questions may go a long way in predicting whether consumers of that content will convert to customers. At least that’s the conclusion I’ve reached after studying the content marketing approaches of successful businesspeople. Which is all the more reason I am struck by the omission of such words – love, passion, zeal – from content marketing “must have” lists. After all, how are you going to get prospective customers to feel passion for something you yourself aren’t expressing?

Case-in-point: This week I interviewed Mark Sisson who, for those unfamiliar, has emerged as a leading advocate for the paleo lifestyle regime (which is to say, emulating the evolutionary trajectory of the human body; which is to say, getting back to the eating, rest, play and exercise habits of our millennias-old ancestors).

Regardless of whether you buy into Sisson’s message, the man’s passion for his subject is unmistakable and, frankly, infectious. Over the years I have conducted hundreds of interviews with experts and business owners of every conceivable kind, and Sisson far and away was the easiest. The words that come from his mouth are no different than the ones that flow from his keyboard, and I found myself alternately entertained, informed, curious and occasionally chuckling. What more is needed from a content marketing approach to business?

“It really is a labor of love,” said Sisson, who added that while blogging proved to be “much harder than I ever expected, it also is ten times more rewarding.”

So Idiot Rule #2 is to remember to pour your heart into what you share with others – chances are very good that that passion will translate and make a strong case for your enterprise.

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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Does your marketing content resemble this cartoon? – Courtesy Gary Larson, The Far Side

In this Far Side classic (weren’t they all classics?), the pet owner lectures his dog, Ginger, who of course only recognizes one word: her own name. The rest is ‘blah, blah, blah‘ content which absolutely kills corporate marketing.

How do you get around it? In short, do your research.

As a breed, marketers struggle with research, primarily because it adds still more work to already overburdened schedules. It also means taking risks by venturing into foreign waters, which is to say, moving beyond the comfy, familiar confines of one’s own corporate domain.

After all, it is one thing to write and speak of what you already know, quite another to open yourself up to the competitive and contextual informational rigors of the open marketplace. It is one thing to talk about yourself (e.g. the awesomeness of your products or services), another merely to reference your company as but a part of a much larger picture.

In new research by Jakob Nielsen, content marketers are urged to dispense with the blah, blah and to dive into the facts and figures that give customers the meat that they want and compels them to read. “There’s so much blah, blah, blah on the Web that straight talk stands out,” writes Nielsen.

Nielsen’s eye-tracking studies demonstrated that customers – regardless of their background or area of interest – were likely to scan, skim, or abandon generic marketing drivel and, of equal importance, were likely to actually read weighty content filled with facts and figures.

My advice, then, is to strap on the explorer’s hat and get on with your research because – and trust me on this one – your customer (or your competition, or an industry blogger, etc.) is going to do the work if you don’t.

And therein lies the hidden benefit to research: It informs and educates you prior to those future customers, making it easier to create marketing content that speaks to the Big Picture that those customers are going to see anyway. It’s a kind of home field advantage.

It also prepares you for any questions that may come out of left field, and if the Internet is good for anything it’s enabling customers to come up with those doozies.

Research takes time. It takes a modicum of intelligence. It takes an open and inquisitive mind, one able (and willing) to walk through the doors that that same research inevitably will open. And to some degree research takes courage because you don’t always know where it’s going to lead you.

Research isn’t a one-time, kick-off type of activity. Research means getting on top of and then staying abreast of your topic(s). If you’re writing about the organic blueberries your company sells, do the research into what organic means not just to your company but to the customer. Monitor industry, blogger, mainstream and social media chatter. Our world is more dynamic and nimble than ever, which means your content marketing needs not merely to keep up but to lead the charge.

Again, if you don’t do it your customer – or competitor – will.  

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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The post The Idiot’s Guide to Content Marketing Rule #3: Do Your Research appeared first on Beware of the Doug.

Mark Sisson and the paleo lifestyle have become household names, and blogging has a lot to do with it.

Is your corporate messaging created with the zeal of an evangelist eager to share your story with the world, or does it drag out with the grim-faced determination of a reluctant laborer? Are you struggling to find readers/consumers for your content, or is your audience growing by orders of magnitude?

After many years as a journalist, sales and marketing exec, and consultant (not to mention husband, father, friend and all-around human being), it’s become pretty clear to me that the folks who find a love of purpose also are the happiest and most successful.

So wouldn’t that passion quite naturally translate into one’s own corporate marketing/storytelling?

Why Passion is Key to Content Marketing

Recently I was able to grab some time with Mark Sisson who, for those unfamiliar, has emerged as a leading advocate for the paleo lifestyle regime (metaphorical shorthand for resynchronizing our diet, rest, play and exercise habits with those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors).

What immediately stands out when you speak with Sisson isn’t just the topic itself, fascinating as it may be, but also the man’s intense passion. And by passion I am speaking not just of enthusiasm but also substance, thoughtfulness, humor, style.

It was much harder than I expected. But it also was ten times more rewarding than I expected.

To read Sisson’s blog, for example, is really no different than any other form of contact with the man. The content is informative, occasionally humorous, delivered in a conversational style, and is suffused with an earnest intent that at the very least forces the reader to sit up and take notice.

Sisson leaves it up to the reader to accept/reject his thesis, but the approach, quality, style and consistency of his message effectively force those same readers to at least consider it. And ultimately isn’t that what any marketer wants – consideration of the message?

Blogging, Ironman Style

After discovering his passion for paleo, so to speak, Sisson initially gravitated toward television and, specifically, sponsored messages on local cable programs. But as television morphed into the pricey, low-return multiverse that it is today, he transitioned to the Web and, specifically, blogging, reasoning that content publishing has less to do with the medium than the message (with apologies to Marshall McLuhan).

The process, says Sisson, was eye-opening. “It was much harder than I expected” (remember, it’s Mark Sisson’s Daily Apple – that’s a lot of blogging over seven years). “But it also was ten times more rewarding than I expected.”

Sisson lives and breathes his work and that passion carries over into his blogging and other content marketing efforts.

Initially Sisson figured he’d blog for a year, “run out of things to say,” and simply repurpose all that archival content into different products. But in an awakening shared by many ardent bloggers, he found that “the more I researched and learned, the more doors that opened and the more I had to write and share with others.”

After a year of daily blogging Sisson had roughly 1,000 online visitors per day and wasn’t sure he’d ever reach the tipping point to success. Like the ironman competitor he once was, however, Sisson persevered (fueled, again, by his passion for his message) and today his blog has 350,000 ardent subscribes and generates roughly 150,000 – 200,000 unique visitors per day.

“We have voracious readers of our content,” he said. And producers.

Indeed, customer-generated content has been an enormously important part of Sisson’s success, with countless disciples of his ‘Primal Blueprint’ sending in their success stories about how they shed pounds, overcame illness, and learned to rest, play, and enjoy life.

To date his blogging has led to the publication of 10 books (with at least that many more titles in the works), a series of in-person events around the country, and a growing publishing business that he is careful to infuse with the same brand approach and passion with which he started the business.

In fact, Sisson has become the de facto voice of the paleo movement, the two brands essentially interchangeable. “I must be doing something right because much of the time now when I Google something for research purposes my own stuff ranks first,” he laughs.

Sisson said that while he hasn’t altogether eschewed other modern techniques – e.g. SEO, social media, analytics, etc. – his focus (and success) remains on creating compelling, enjoyable, useful content.

The challenge with many of these techniques, he says, is that companies aren’t focusing on the right things. “It’s not about seeing how many ‘likes’ you can get or how many numbers you can accumulate on a social media site,” he says. “It’s the quality of the relationships you have with the individuals reading your content.”

It’s not about seeing how many ‘likes’ you can get or how many numbers you can accumulate on a social media site.

Sisson believes that many of the existing incarnations of old-line businesses such as public relations and book publishing are dead or dying, and that it will be increasingly incumbent on businesses themselves to take on these tasks via the Web and the content marketing opportunities it portends.

Of his own forays into those waters Sisson says: “It really has been a labor of love,” and it’s in our efforts to translate that passion into our content that real dividends are reaped.

In his opinion the only effective way for businesses today to reach people “is to build an audience organically by giving them something they can trust and believe in. These are the individuals who will become your biggest fans and help you grow your business.”

Sisson’s advice to other businesses using content marketing/blogging?

• Write about what you love because you’re going to do it for a long time.
• Don’t be afraid to distill it all – i.e. don’t hold back the good stuff as some kind of a premium product. Give it away.
• Be willing to work hard.
• Love it.

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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As a content marketer, there’s a lot of upside to drafting on the content of mainstream media stories (and audiences)

Want a really simple trick for capturing traffic: try content drafting. Much the way a racer will ‘draft’ off the car in front of him to save fuel or a fishing vessel will follow an ice cutter to richer waters, so too can content marketers piggyback on mainstream media storytelling (and traffic-generation) activities.

When I worked at the American Red Cross in the late-90s, like many nonprofits we were forever researching different ways to increase donations. At one point we contracted for the services of a high-end branding firm that could help us discover the ‘gold’ (in a manner of speaking). After two days of intensive workshops, breakout groups, and brainstorming sessions, the BIG LESSON boiled down to this: Whenever a natural disaster struck, someone with a Red Cross shirt needed to be on the ground and in front of media cameras as quickly as possible. Why?

• Even in an age of disintermediation, mainstream media still enjoys big audiences relative to most websites
• The news cycle moves fast, which means your own news cycle needs to keep up if you are to piggyback on their audiences
• In the case of the Red Cross, the viewing public was the most emotional – and thereby compelled to give – in the hours immediately after the disaster. A shirt emblazoned with the Red Cross logo passing in front of (or speaking on) camera presented a natural outlet for that donation response. “I want to give. Oh, the Red Cross is there.” (Similarly, the media loved having an outlet to which they could point would-be donors – a role the Red Cross was only too happy to play.)

A more recent example: One of my clients does leadership management consulting and executive coaching for Fortune 500 companies. He’s also a terrific blogger. Enter AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s recent boneheaded decision to fire one of his executives during an all-hand’s call. A call, mind you, during which the AOL chief was attempting to curry favor in the hearts and minds of his staff.

It’s a leadership consultant’s dream. And it’s big news everywhere – particularly in business circles.

This is where my client can essentially ‘draft’ on this story by cranking out some reasoned, seasoned, expert commentary on the story, employ some proper SEO techniques, then share that story across social and peer networks (even find a guest-blogging/posting opportunity or two). Voila! Some of those many eyeballs collected by the so-called mainstream media are likely to get caught up in your own net.

Obviously this is not rocket science, but it DOES require a journalist’s (or publisher’s) mentality. Which means you not only must pay attention to the news, but develop a recognition of when a story is akin to an icebreaker clearing a channel for your little boat to find new fishing waters.

And this does not apply only to the near-term, quick-strike opportunities afforded by the breaking news cycle. Journalists and publishers alike are famous for keeping calendars of such events and – say, a year later – revisiting the story. We’ve all read these stories. Where are the players now? What lessons were learned? Will history repeat itself? And so on.

Which means you, Mr. and Ms. Content Producer, need to think the same way. Maybe my client does some preemptive guest-posting a week or so before the one-year anniversary of Mr. Armstrong’s gaffe? Maybe he even secures an interview with Armstrong himself? Remember, some portion of the mainstream media is likely to do the same, which means there will be online traffic on the topic and social media trending, which means my client’s own content will be smack in the mix.

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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The post A Simple Trick for Capturing Traffic: Content Drafting appeared first on Beware of the Doug.

I get asked by startups and small businesses alike about marketing on a small business budget. Since I’ve been giving them the same advice over and over, I figured it would be easier to type it all out for posterity and send them this link. So herewith, the handful of To Do items on which I’d focus my energies and scarce resources. Come to think of it, this is pretty much what I’d do if I was a mid-sized business as well.

Nail the Message

Look, I like creating pretty graphics and videos as much as the next fellow. It’s always more fun window-shopping for a sexy new WordPress theme or animation template from which I can create a messaging vehicle of some kind. There are so many from which to choose, look how sleek and colorful!

But there’s still that issue of the message, the product all those stylized vehicles are supposed to deliver.

Anyone who has been on a date with a gorgeous man or woman only to regret the whole thing when they open their mouths and out comes inane nothingness knows of what I speak. All genetic flash signifying nothing.

The sheer number of businesses that so consistently miss the fundamental importance of nailing the message is astonishing. They want a ‘memorable’ vehicle, something that really gets people’s attention. They spend lots of cash and time for that zippy new video. It gets watched. And nothing. Congratulations, you are the owner of an expensive, flashy video.

So why aren’t you getting the likes / views / visits / subscriptions / sales? Because you look good and have nothing to say. Check please.

Use Media You Will Actually Use

Assuming you tackled Item 1, step 2 is to translate that core messaging across media that are actually applicable to your audience types. Which is to say, build it into a website (public face of the organization) and then consider a few additional channels that resonate with you and your customers. Alternatively stated, don’t take up blogging or build an Instagram channel if you’re promptly going to abandon them like the half-completed projects littering your garage. A sure way to create a ghost town effect is to have a blog whose most recent post predates the current presidency. Same applies to those other channels.

I recommend keeping this particularly simple. You are small, meaning you are wearing a lot of hats, meaning be realistic about what you really have time to do. If you’re managing six channels, a staff of six, and your overall business, something has got to give. So give up a few channels and focus on a few core competencies. Personally, I’m fond of Google+ and LinkedIn. Twitter? Feh, who has time to monitor an endless stream of hyper-clips? Facebook? Nope. The others, nope, nope, nope…. But that’s just me. Find what is right for you and your audience and fit them to your schedule and resources.

Blog/Keep Telling Your Story

Ok, I’ve hit on this one many times in the past and will do so again now. There are soooo many benefits to blogging and you need them all. First, you keep your loyalists informed. There’s the SEO benefit of dynamic, fresh content. You keep learning about your own business (this is a biggie – you’d be surprised how often a recent blog post will inspire you in a business meeting or sales call). And it’s damned affordable compared to a lot of marketing tactics.

And oh yeah, there are quite a few folks out there who have created a business – lo, an entire industry – out of their dedication to blogging. Which is to say, their passion for talking about what they do.

Give Away Your Story – A Lot

The last step is to share your story with others. Which is to say, find blogs, magazines, and other outlets that can use your content. Here’s the thing: Content marketing is all the rage these days. But guess what all those marketers really need to make their content marketing engines go? You got it, content.

So if you’ve got a good story or a good angle on a good story, find folks who would like to share that with their audiences. Make sure you point back to your own site. And by all means extend the same courtesy to others. The thing is, it’s an awfully big world out there and there are plenty – probably gazillions – of others out there who are peripherally related to what you do without being direct competitors. (This is another place that blogging helps: It forces you to expand your universe, listen and learn from others and get outside your own oft-repeated script.)

The most tangible benefit here is the link juice you get from driving other website traffic to your own site (this jacks up things like your page rank and authority in the eyes of Google which jacks up your search results which jacks up your chances for new business, etc.). And, if you turn out to be a popular guest-blogger, you may start landing some spots on more popular sites which will send droves of traffic your way. Short story: If you are good at what you do, share that expertise!

I firmly believe if you practice these diligently and faithfully, you’ll at least have a shot at growing your business. Good luck!

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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Good news to anyone who creates rich, meaty, useful content: Google has its new Hummingbird update out there looking to make you really popular.

The search giant recently revealed that much of the algorithm changes in its most recent major update – brand-name Hummingbird – are built around enhancing search results’ contextual relevance. Meaning, Google wants to help you find exactly what you want by determining the meaning behind your search.

All of which makes sense given that Google’s ultimate success is about delivering relevant search results.

The idea is simple: We humans tend not to think in keywords so why would we search the Internet that way? So if I’m looking for a cool new pair of quality but casual mid-rise shoes, I don’t necessarily want to key in: “quality, shoes, mid-rise, casual.” I want to key in, “Find me a cool new pair of quality but casual mid-rise shoes.”

Seriously.

Love them or hate them, the brainiacs at Google recognize that all of us, deep down, want to treat our computers pretty much like Jean Luke Picard in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” We want to look at it and bark (with a cool British accent), “Computer, find me some shoes that make me look cool!” and have the computer do the rest.

And Google knows that the only way to do that is to continue to refine its search alchemy so that it interprets the motivations behind our search through our particular use of search language.

In a terrific new post for the Content Marketing Institute, Raubi Perilli of Copypress writes that ”Google is trying to return results that provide not just what people are looking for, but also why they are looking for it.” Or, as she puts it even more bluntly: “Google doesn’t want to provide search results. Google wants to provide answers.”

To which I say, Hurrah! After all, I spend a lot of my time conducting research on the Web for valid, useful, informative content and I loathe churning through endless results. Like most people I suspect, I don’t want to be served 3,452,201 results – I want 5 of them that tell me what I need to know.

If you wan to know how to leverage all these Hummingbird-related changes, check out another CMI post on the topic, this one by Further’s Paul Hill. As Hill puts it, the evolution from the previous update – Panda – to Hummingbird demonstrates “that Google has been on a consistent path. The Panda algorithm update penalized ‘thin’ content; website content stuffed with keywords but providing little else of value to the user.”

Whether or not all of these changes will bear fruit anytime soon remains to be seen. As for me, I believe in the power of meaty, useful content and I continue to urge others to do the same. Besides, it’s better than being half-assed about it – at the end of the day you feel like you did something worthwhile with at least some of your time.

So friends, keep cranking our meaningful content that highlights all the great things that you do. Google has a whole cavalcade of animals doing its best to find you.

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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I hate marketing. Which is why for 2014, my resolution is simple: Marketing is dead, be human instead.

The thing is, marketing was pretty much invented at a time when brands owned the consumer conversation. Meaning, they told us about themselves and we either bought or we didn’t. In many cases, they may have been the only game in town (recall Henry Ford’s famous offer to sell automobiles in any color as long as they were black).

For a long, long time this dynamic more or less remained the same.

Yes, corporate competition grew, but the channels through which their marketing took place remained fairly constant. Marketing in those days was a lot like the era when movies were first offered on airplanes – you were pretty much stuck in that aluminum tube watching whatever the airline thought you should watch.

Which sucked. Which is really what this tradition of corporate marketing is all about. Which is why marketing has to go.

Today you may not have much leg room in that tube, but damned if you don’t have your own little screen in the seatback in front of you. If not that, then you’ve got a tablet or laptop or smartphone and WiFi to entertain you.

In other words, you’ve got lots and lots of choices.

So lament, if you must, the passing of marketing, the days when you, as a brand, could control the message through a limited number of media. But celebrate, as a consumer, that you aren’t trapped by all that marketing, that you can use your DVR to fast-forward through commercials and tune-out or close the online ads and pay for ad-free music and so on. Nobody wants traditional marketing (did they ever, really?) and today they don’t have to put up with it.

Great sales people have always known the secret sauce to brand success. Be human. They communicate, connect, cajole. They personalize their messages and remember the nuggets that help them to engage more deeply over time (“How is little Bobby doing?”), etc.

In essence, these sales people did in person what sales automation technology today is supposed to do in the background. It recognizes the visitor, ID’s him or her, and then over time keeps adding more detail to that profile until not only a flesh and blood customer emerges, but aggregated over many such records, an idealized ‘brand persona’ is formulated.

That’s the great thing about technology. It’s helped the consumer tune out all the old-world, intrusive ‘push marketing’ and allowed brands to develop more customer-friendly, targeted, direct messaging.

So for 2014, let’s resolve to be authentically human with customers and prospects and see where it gets us.

Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.

I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).

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