Telling tall tales - how storytelling helps create great content

Thursday, February 21, 2013

It's easy to get lost in space when creating online content, whether it's a web page or landing page, blog post or article. Sometimes the very thought of having to write something 'marketing-y' puts people off. Marketing is complex stuff and if you don't know much about it, content creation can seem very daunting. So it's useful to think about it in a different way. 

Every piece of online content tells a story

Remember when you were at school? Writing great content follows the same rules as writing a story or an essay. In English we were taught to order information like this:

• introduction
• middle
• conclusion

In science we were taught much the same thing, an efficient and clear way to write up experiments. 

Most content demands a call to action. You want people to respond in some way or another and you need to make it clear exactly what you want them to do. And because people are short of time and patience it's also a good idea to sum up the proposition in one sentence before you even introduce the subject. So your content creation plan might look like this:

• proposition
• introduction
• middle
• conclusion
• call to action