Making Stories Compelling, Memorable and Tied to ROI

We all want to write great stories, and as marketers we understand that the best stories often last longer than competitive advantages. But let's face it, it's often hard to find the "gem" in our company tales. But I assure you, the gems are there and often right in front of our noses. Ben & Jerry's offers a perfect example. Early on in the company's life, as Ben & Jerry's Premium Ice Cream started gaining popularity in and around the company's home state of Vermont, founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield discovered that Pillsbury was strong-arming one of its distributors. The food giant had told the distributor that it could either represent Pillsbury's brand, Häagen-Dazs, or Ben & Jerry's. But not both. Many business owners, and sadly many marketers, would not even consider this a story. Even more disappointing, the communications staff may never hear about it. Instead, the company would treat the situation as an isolated business problem and relegate it to a sales director or relationship manager, or maybe the legal department. But Cohen and Greenfield were smart enough to see a David and Goliath story in the making. They mounted a campaign entitled, "What's the Doughboy Afraid Of?" Nearly instantly, the company garnered national attention, including broadcast coverage, national news stories and a cover story in Time. The campaign was leveraged across numerous vehicles and media, and within months, Ben & Jerry's ice cream was selling across the country and around the world. What tips can you learn from this story to apply in your own content? 1. The best stories are about people. Whether it's Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield or the personification of Pillsbury through the "Doughboy," this story would have resonated much differently if the campaign had been called, "Pillsbury Competitive Practices Unfair." While the campaign presented a business issue and a unique opportunity to introduce a great new ice cream to the world, it was framed in human terms that appealed to businesses and mainstream media. 2. Stories begin when results doesn't match expectations. In other words, if everything happens as you expect, there's no story. We care when events don't go as expected: The experiment yields an unexpectedly good or bad outcome. The boy gets bitten by a spider that's no ordinary spider. The beloved football player is a murder suspect. The giant doughboy is afraid of a tiny competitor. The cute doughboy we've gotten to know is really a frightened and conniving opponent to endearing entrepreneurs. 3. Stories are about meaningful change. The Ben & Jerry's example would have been meaningless if the competition were between two corporate giants fighting over a distributor. But for the small Vermont ice cream maker, losing the distributor could have meant losing the business. The stakes were high, just as they were when Steve Jobs introduced the Apple Stores. And when Bill Gates quit college to create Microsoft. 4. Great stories bring about meaningful change through conflict. When you tell stories around the watercooler or the campfire, you generally don't focus on how well everyone got along. The best stories offer meaningful change achieved through conflict. That's why we care more about how a company solved an angry client's challenge and made a lifelong customer than a list of features and benefits. Business stories, about people and meaningful change, must include conflict. That is, if you want audiences to remember them! What about ROI?It's all about leads and sales, right? We're constantly tracking metrics; including, but not limited to, "leads generated per offer," "call to action clickthrough rates" and "qualified leads generated" (or, as Hubspot calls them, Marketing Qualified Leads—MQLs). Yet according to Todd VanHoosear, vice president of public relations and stakeholder engagement here at HB Agency, businesses must measure impact beyond leads and sales, which are often short-term and short-lived. Performance of marketing campaigns and stories can play out over the long-term. To help measure such performance, VanHoosear puts the following metrics at the top of his list: 1. Amplification, an umbrella term to point out how much people have amplified a story—sharing it in various forms and on various networks and helping to make it bigger than it was. 2. Applause, which measures the level of praise that a campaign, story or bit of content received: "Plus" clicks, thumbs-up clicks, likes, kudos, etc. Smart marketers must learn to combine lead and sales metrics with more long-lasting performance measures, remembering that at the end of the day, their stories still remain the best road to compelling, memorable and repeatable marketing initiatives. Nicolas Boillot is CEO of Newton, Mass.-based HB Agency, an integrated marketing agency. Reach him at nboillot@hbagency.com.

General

Making Stories Compelling, Memorable and Tied to ROI

Nicolas Boillot

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Nicolas Boillot