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Someone explained marketing to me like this before and I now use it as a prism to look through whenever I feel like I’m mindlessly scrolling, pushing out content that no-one is listening to or just feeling like I don’t know what I’m doing. At it’s core marketing is just storytelling.
If you forget all the data for a second, views, watch time, all of it. Fundamentally you are trying to write a story. That story of course needs to be interesting, it needs to be written in a way that the people you want to read it want it, and anyone who reads it wants to read it at the right time. I may take this metaphor too far; your target market is basically your audience, you’re not writing a complex book about the ingenious design of the aluminium can for an audience who primarily cares about flower arranging, you’re writing it for people who care about weird engineering marvels. Your language, the tone, the information you convey all should be tailored towards the specific audience that you are trying to get to read your book. You are also giving it to them when and where they have the time, energy and capacity to read it – platform and content type. Someone sat on a long ass train journey is more likely to be reading and absorbing than someone at a concert.
Imagine that every piece of content you make is part of this larger story, how is it drawing your readers along and keeping them engaged. Thats where your pillars of content come in, they aren’t restricting you but guiding your content to make sure it fits within the overall structure, of course you detours (like jumping on cultural moments) but those are just side-plots and shouldn’t take away from the main story.
The fundamentals of story writing apply to each piece of content too, your hook is like your introduction. I think I had plenty of writing classes where the teacher would say to me that even if the story is interesting they didn’t get past the intro. Luckily rather than just words we get to use visuals, sounds and also… words. Tapping into psychological tricks to basically stop someone in their tracks and go where tf is this story going next. Paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 are the body of your content, the information that you are trying to convey. Remember that the body isn’t just random information, its developing the story. Finally, and this is where the metaphor kind of breaks down, the conclusion is what you actually want people to do after they’ve consumed your content, its short and punchy and leaves an impression. You have to motivate often times super content fogged people to switch on and actually do something.
I take this framing and use it to scroll through content, maybe someone is the car niche has incredible story pacing – how can I use that and adapt it. Someone in the music industry has sick intros that hook me in instantly – can I turn that into something for myself.
Apologies for the waffle and hope it helps
