What, you might wonder, is the point of all this talk about Storytelling, as a tool within Content Marketing? Shouldn’t one simply “create content” and let it do its SEO magic?

In short — you can do just that and as a result, you will find Content Marketing to be a suboptimal use of your marketing dollars since it will deliver neither new customers (n the form of leads) or more loyal ones (in the form of fans).

Instead, I like to recommend that people looking to engage in Content Marketing think about it strategically — beginning with the goal (challenge to be solved), and then tracking the Storytelling tactics that will be best used to accomplish that goal.

In this post, however, I’d like to take yet another step back and talk about how, exactly, Storytelling works within a Content Marketing strategy, and what you can expect it to do.

The way I like to explain these concepts is through a simple “Story Marketing Funnel.” As you’ll see in the below image, it’s a pretty typical sales or marketing funnel image, but instead of tracking a customer journey — we’re tracking an audience journey — from Discovery all the way to Advocacy.

As you see, there are five steps in this journey, and an audience member can enter the process anywhere. The longer they engage with a given level, the more likely it is that they move down to the next and so on.

The top, and largest, audience group will always be those to whom you are just introducing yourself or your brand. They want to hear who you are and what you’re about. This isn’t the place for a pitch or a product description or even a demo. Here, you’re simply saying hello — Engaging. It’s time to Begin Your Story. Think of this as a cocktail party or coffee & tea social: You don’t ever want to be the person that offers an elevator pitch at a social gathering because everyone hates that guy.

After getting to know you, some significant portion of the folks at the party will want to hear what you know about your chosen topics of expertise. You can tell stories based on your experience and education. Where can you be a teacher? More importantly, where do you want your audience to see you as an Expert? You take this group and show them your Story Leadership, which is the set of stories that show how and why you know so much about what you know. And you share that with them, so they know it, too. And where they learned it.

Naturally, there will be a slightly smaller group of those who learn from your Stories that want more direct help and insight from you. This is where you begin to advise. You now tailor your content to solving specific challenges and problems for your audience, and through these Functional Stories, you show them tactics and strategies that can help solve their specific challenges and meet their needs.

In the fourth, and still smaller, audience group is where you will find your customers, clients and all the other members of your audience who are paying you — or are wiling to pay you — for your services, products, entertainment or whatever it is you’ve been doing this whole time. This is your opportunity to team up with your audience to provide them with your services as a partner. The content you create here will be about them, for them, and built with that audience as a collaborator and consumer.

Finally, in the fifth, and smallest group will be those members of your audience who have engaged with your stories fully enough that they will become your advocates. Here, you will let go of the narrative because that’s how you can let your story grow exponentially thanks to this devoted audience’s sharing, repeating and recommending your stories and offerings to their network, increasing your reach far beyond where you could reach by yourself.

We’ll talk more about all these topics in future posts, so I’ll leave this here.

Click here for the second part of this series on the “Storytelling Funnel”

Be well.