As we head into the New Year, it’s likely that you’ll be making resolutions. These resolutions often apply to our home and personal life, but they seldom apply to our online marketing and content writing or production.
Auditing your online content is one of the best ways to start afresh, with the groundwork for new and better online marketing, in the New Year. It’s a lot like out with the old. You can’t really bring in the new unless you get the old, outdated, and unnecessary stuff out, right?
As you head into the New Year, focused on starting fresh and doing away with the old things that aren’t serving you any longer, don’t let your website be the last thing on your list.
Let’s talk about doing a website audit, what it is, and how you can do it as you prepare to enter 2016 strong. Here’s what you need to know about a website content audit.
What is a Website Content Audit?
A site content audit is the process by which you comb through your site, correct errors, locate outdated content, and replace it with something stronger. There are many benefits of a content audit, including identifying which pages need editing or updating, identifying which pages need to be consolidated due to repetitive topics, identifying which pages need to be removed from the site entirely and how doing this can help your page’s SEO rank, identifying which content needs to be prioritized based on metrics like conversions and visits, locating your content gaps and making a plan for how to fill them, determining which pages are ranking for which keywords, and identifying new content marketing opportunities.
When content audits are conducted regularly, they can improve the overall quality of your site and ensure that your content is up to date, relevant, valuable, and targeted for your customers and site goals.
What We Found When We Did An Audit
Recently, our team did a content audit on our own site. Our content audit service is done by our team Content Strategists, whom I train—in updated SEO, our favorite tools and current best practices.
The SEMrush Site Audit tool, one of the best audit tools we rely on in conducting website audits, gave us a list of missing or problematic content, including missing alt tags:
And which links were broken:
Besides other issues we fixed. Some of the duplicate hits didn’t apply: the sign-up page was “duplicate” to the sign-in page, which can’t be helped—it’s just a login screen.
With the more manual part of our audit, we found several outdated posts, including:
Blogs that mentioned products that we no longer sold
Seasonal content that contained dates in the headers, i.e. “5 Tips for Better Content in 2014”
Poorly SEO optimized content
We made a list of all these items and have now revised and fixed these errors. Our content is more evergreen, applies more to the reader coming across it at a later date, and doesn’t contain misleading product information anymore. We’ve also improved SEO scores across the board.
Moz: Audits are Beneficial
According to Moz, SEO specialist Rick Ramos (of Inflow) conducted a content audit for Phases Design Studio in 2013. During the audit, Ramos developed a plan to remove many of the old, irrelevant, or stale blog posts from the site’s sitemap. He also used 301 redirect codes to point the traffic from old landing pages to newer, evergreen landing pages that were updated more frequently. Finally, he updated and refreshed many of the site’s pages. After their website content audit, Phases Design Studio started seeing eight times the amount of leads they typically saw in a month. How did Ramos manage to produce these results? The answer is simple: by updating content to make it more relevant and useful to readers.
Website Content Audit 101
If you want to produce results like Ramos did during his audit, you’re in luck. You can complete your own content audit without being a tech guru. Simply follow these steps:
Step One: Develop a Spreadsheet
During a content audit, a spreadsheet is needed to keep your information organized as well as to provide a platform you can return to at any point in the audit. A spreadsheet also allows you to track what you’re doing and collaborate with other content specialists who may want to participate in the audit.
For an example, consider this template from Moz. If you’re relatively new to website content audits, you’ll be fine to begin in Google Docs, although many content specialists move their spreadsheets to Excel as they begin doing larger and larger content audits.
As a general rule, the main columns you want in your spreadsheet are as follows:
URL
Date audited
Title
Description
Content
Keyword
Alt Tags
Last Updates
Internal Links
Step Two: List the Pages of Your Site
In order to perform your content audit adequately, you’ll need a complete list of each page on your site. The easiest way to do this is to use Google Analytics. Specifically, you’ll want to navigate to the “all pages” section by selecting “behavior,” “site content,” “all pages.” For more detail on how to complete this step, consult this QuickSprout guide.
This step allows you to view a list of your site’s most-visited pages. This is an important step because it allows you to focus your audit efforts on your most popular pages and to ensure that you’re reaping results as soon as possible.
Step Three: Review Your Information
This part gets a little tricky because it varies depending upon which CMS you use. Since we’re partial to WordPress, this guide will offer instructions for WordPress users. Even if you don’t use WordPress, though, you’ll be able to edit these items nonetheless. As you move through your page information, you’ll want to review each of the following sections: URL and Page Title: For each page on your site, your title should meet a few criteria. First, it should be no more than 65 characters long. It should also be unique, descriptive, and it should feature keywords.
When it comes to your URL, the URL should be text that clearly defines the page. If you have a URL that’s comprised of numbers or a random assortment of letters, you may want to set up a 301 redirect code in order to optimize the URL for more traffic. Page Description: Your page description tells visitors what your page is all about and, as such, it’s important! To make sure each page description on your pages is optimized, check to be sure that each features less than 160 characters and is written in a way that makes it easy to read. This means that it should be interesting, descriptive, helpful and completely free of grammatical mistakes. Content: The crème de la crème of a website content audit – your content! When it comes time to check your content, read through your page content carefully to ensure that it is valuable to readers, well-written, and free of grammatical, spelling, or factual errors.
Content auditors who are evaluating these traits today have a step-up over auditors that did this last year: Google recently released the complete version of its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines and, within them, auditors can find plenty of tips on what Google views as high quality content.
A few of the things to avoid include overly obvious facts (“A housecat is a feline”), poorly-written content, expert content that was not written by an expert, or content that is riddled with grammatical, spelling, or factual mistakes. Although the Guidelines don’t offer any specific rule for how long or short content should be, you’ll generally want to be sure that each page on your site offers at least 300 words of content. This applies to “about us” pages and the like as well as main content pages.
Keywords: In order to effectively evaluate your keywords, you’ll want to have a written list of your target keywords and phrases. As you comb through each page, you’ll want to be sure that you have a healthy number of targeted keywords (not too many or too few). You’ll also want to be sure that your keywords are correctly spelled and used naturally throughout the text.
Alt Tags: In order to make your site as strong as possible, every image therein will need to be tagged sufficiently. This means that each image on your page should feature descriptive tags that feature keywords as well as a descriptive, concise title. Add these things in if you find them lacking.
Updates: In order to keep your site fresh and current, every single page on your site will need to be reviewed or edited every two years. This keeps your content current and prevents old, stagnant pages from dragging you down. As you move through your audit, check the edit history of every page you feature. If the page is factually incorrect or has become irrelevant with time, edit or update it. If the page is no longer needed and doesn’t earn any site views, consider deleting it to make your site more streamlined.
Internal Links: Finally, each page of your site will need to be checked for internal links. Each page should feature at least two internal links that point at other pages in the site. For best SEO, these internal links shouldn’t point to shallow pages like your “contact” or “about us” page but should instead point to topic pages that will further a reader’s understanding of a complicated topic or idea. This helps ensure that your page is doing double-duty driving traffic for itself and that all of your pages are getting the attention they deserve.
The Tricks of the Trade
At Express Writers, we’re one of the very few content creation agencies on the web that handles content auditing. To do this effectively, we use a series of helpful tools that can make the process go faster and produce better results: BuzzSumo: BuzzSumo is a great tool in both content auditing and planning. We love it because it allows us to see which web content is earning the most shares and which has the highest domain authority, as well as top influencers, the amount of content shares, and much more. This allows us to better plan our content. When used in a content auditing setting, BuzzSumo allows you to identify how you might be able to strengthen your outdated or irrelevant content to draw new visitors. Additionally, BuzzSumo offers a content analysis feature, which we use to analyze major topics in a given industry. This allows us to figure out where we need to target content and to re-work old content to fit current market needs. SEMRush: SEMRush is our key SEO tool for researching and creating keyword reports as well as full website content audits. It can be helpful in the keyword optimization process as well as in creating topic reports and completing website audits. By using SEMRush, you can get an instant overview of how many pages are missing metas or are duplicates of other pages. WordTracker: We also use WordTracker as a secondary keyword and topic report tool. This allows us to cover all of our bases and ensure that the SEO keyword research part of the audit is as effective as possible.
While the majority of your content auditing will rely on your knowledge of SEO and content creation, using these professional-grade tools can certainly help make your content auditing more effective.
When to Hire The Professionals
While it’s possible to take a D-I-Y approach to content auditing, many people simply don’t have the time or the skill to do it themselves. Content auditing can be an extensive process (each audit can take hours to days, depending on the amount of pages) and it requires a healthy level of tech skills to complete successfully. Fortunately, we staff several fully trained content experts who are knowledgeable about what makes a great site and can help you on the road to better content strategy quickly and effectively.
Conclusion
Think of a content audit as spring cleaning, or laying the groundwork for 2016 resolutions: it allows you to cast out the things you no longer need and replace them with what is more useful, relevant and valuable. Additionally, a website content audit ensures that your site is functioning at its highest possible level and that you’re bringing in all of the rankings and traffic that you truly deserve.
In order to keep it simple, consider doing a website content audit every few months like we did when we did the 2014 recap. This cuts down on the level of inaccuracies or fixes you’ll likely find and ensures that your site never falls hugely out of date or behind schedule.
When it’s time to perform an audit on your website, don’t struggle through the process alone. Check out our content strategy services or get in touch to learn more about what we do and consider enlisting us to help make your site great again.
It’s almost the New Year! What will your resolutions be?
Maybe you’re dedicating yourself to a daily gym routine or you’d like to make a career change. Maybe you want to move to an exciting new city or maybe you just want to stop binge-eating Oreos and watching bad reality TV. Or maybe, just maybe, you want to make 2016 content marketing the best Internet marketing you’ve ever done, yet.
While I can’t help you with the other resolutions (good luck with those Oreos), we can certainly help you boost your writing habits to the next level and get your content into shape for the coming year.
10 Hot Ways to Get Your 2016 Content Marketing in Shape
Here are some tips to help you get started on great content for the upcoming New Year.
1) Always on the lookout for interesting topics
If you’re a copywriter, it’s likely that the world around you is literally teeming with ideas for great content. Maybe you’ve noticed a new algorithm update that has changed the way you search or maybe you’re seeing that all the holiday ads on TV are using storytelling tactics to make connections with customers.
Maybe you’ve heard about a hot new tech development or you’ve learned something that has made your content creation process easier and more fun. Whatever the case may be, keeping your eyes open and your ear to the ground can help you gather unique content ideas that nobody else is writing about. This will be especially true as 2016 and all the new developments the year will bring begin to roll out.
Some copywriters choose to carry a small notebook around in order to jot down ideas as they occur. By doing this and developing them later, you can ensure that you’ve always got an arsenal of topics at your disposal and that you’re writing about things that apply to real people…like you!
2) Get organized
It’s tough to be great at anything if you’re not organized. How many times have you tried to remember something you read but not been able to recall the website or the book it came from? How many times have you lost track of which version of a project you’re currently on or what you’re supposed to be doing that day? We understand.
As you head into 2016, one of the easiest things you can do to beef your content creation game up is to simply get more organized. Use tools like Google+ and Evernote to file research, take snapshots of interesting things on the web, and store your ideas so you can refer back to them later.
As a side note, both of these services can also be used to store your business and personal expenses and receipts, because nothing kills your content creation process quite so much as stress borne from disorganization.
3) Find your voice
Every writer wants to find his or her voice, but it’s easier said than done. In order to get better at writing in your own voice throughout 2016, get a head start now. You can do this by paying special attention to the writers you admire. Why do you like the way they write? What grabs you about their copy? What does the introductory sentence look like? Does the writer use a specific style throughout all of his or her pieces?
While it’s important to answer these questions, it’s also important to do so from a standpoint of learning rather than imitation. In other words, you don’t want to read this writer’s stuff and go out and copy the form exactly.
Rather, you want to focus on bringing the structure, techniques, and style into your own writing. Remember that finding your voice takes time, especially if you haven’t been writing very long. Be patient with yourself and continue auditing your content and the content you admire. Over time, things will click into place.
4) Stay on topic
If you’re like every other writer in the universe, it’s likely that at some point in your life, a teacher wrote “wordy” in red pen on one of your papers. It’s easy to be wordy – wordiness comes naturally to us and it can be difficult to maneuver away from it. For business or professional writing, however, it’s important to learn to trim the fat and stay on topic.
One of the most helpful pieces of advice on writing is called “The Day you Became a Better Writer” by the creator of the Dilbert cartoon strip. The piece advocates auditing your sentences, doing away with anything unneeded and focusing on keeping your work simple, clear, and to the point. Even if you’re a professional writer who’s been honing the craft for years, we can all benefit from working on being succinct and clear in our writing for 2016.
5) Focus on fulfilling a need
We live in the age of the content sea and with millions of pieces of web copy flying around computer screens every day, it’s hard to stand out. To get your content into shape for 2016, start focusing now on how you can get better at finding a unique angle to address topics.
For example, there are hundreds of articles about local SEO on the web so it’s unrealistic to think that you’re going to write one that is different from every other article out there. You can, however, approach the same topic in a different way. Maybe you focus on local SEO for new businesses or how local SEO is going to change in light of some new Google update. These topics approach the same fundamental idea from a different angle, and are thus valuable to customers.
6) Get better at titles
8 out of 10 people read your headline so it’s wise to make sure each one is as good as possible. To write great headlines, make sure your titles are answering a question, providing breaking news, or telling readers a secret (as in “The top _______ secrets of perpetually ___________ people.”) These headlines pique curiosity and draw clicks, which can be great for your site and content as a whole.
7) Focus on great first sentences
Right after people read your title, they head onto what? That’s right – your first sentence.
One of the best first sentences in all of literature is widely regarded as the first line of Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, which reads:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Make in a picture to avoid duplicacy?
This opening line does two things: it sets the scene and it grabs the reader’s curiosity instantly. If you can do this same thing in your web copy, you’re in for huge copywriting success. Remember that you only have about 3 seconds to grab your readers, so your first line should make people pay attention.
8) Stay away from “fluff”
People are smart and they’re going to be able to tell if you’re pulling their chains. Trust us, there’s nothing worse than a “Fluffy” blogger. In order to avoid the dread trap of too much hype, keep your content believable.
This means not making insane promises, not over exaggerating results or outcomes, and not stretching the truth. Too much hype makes your reader feel manipulated and that’s not good for anyone. Instead, keep your content grounded, reliable, and relevant. That on its own is enough to draw readers your way.
9) Focus on closing
Once you’ve drawn your readers in, given them something to get excited about, and provided relevant content, you’ve got to send them off with a bang, too. No big deal, right? This means that the close of each piece of content you write should focus on summarizing your main points, telling readers how they’ll benefit from your information, and tying your closing point into the introductory sentence once more.
This ties up the reader’s experience nicely and increases the chances that they’ll go on to interact with your other content. For added power in your closing statements, write great CTAs that direct your readers toward a specific action.
10) Hone your editing game
Editing is almost as important as writing itself and great work never happens on the first draft. In order to make your 2016 content as strong as possible, focus on getting really good at the editing portion of things.
The first draft should be used to get all of your ideas down in one place and the second, fourth, and tenth draft should be used to edit the heck out of the first one and make it what Rand Fishkin calls “10x Content.” According to Fishkin, 10x content is valuable content that goes beyond being “good” and “unique.” What’s more, Fishkin says that if you can’t commit to creating content that’s in the top 10% of quality in your industry, you shouldn’t create content at all. That said, edit, edit, edit, and you’ll soon earn yourself rankings that reflect your effort.
Concluding Thoughts for Your 2016 Content Marketing
2016 is your best content year yet, we just know it and these 10 tips can help you make all your content dreams come true. Whether you’re a dedicated blogger or a newbie just entering the game, these get-fit tips will help you create content readers want to read and share.
Some say he was drawing on intellectual tradition.
Some say he was a plagiarist.
Others just call him Thomas Jefferson.
Hang on a minute. Did we just call Jefferson a plagiarist? Maybe a little. There was a man named John Locke, and it’s said that Jefferson copied directly from it for the Declaration of Independence. (Check out the reasoning behind this claim here).
This meme sums up how most of us would probably feel regarding this claim:
Does plagiarism go back that far? Has it gotten worse in the age of all things digital?
Content Plagiarism of Olde: Let’s Take a Little Peek
Content plagiarism didn’t suddenly begin when the Internet happened.
A poet in 80 A.D., Martial, wrote some poetry aimed at a plagiarist that was copying his work. The original word he used, a Latin word plagiarus, described his unnamed thief – and was the formulation of today’s word, plagiarism. Interestingly enough, the word originally meant to kidnap. Yikes, Martial was pretty angry at the copier of his poetry – but hey, I totally get his anger.
But before and after Martial’s age, it was common practice to copy off other people, even in writing complete history books, with little repercussions. It is said that Benjamin Franklin plagiarized entire volumes. (Whoa, dude!) Jefferson reportedly stole from John Locke to create the Declaration of Independence.
Shakespeare even swiped entire plot scenarios from others. He took entire whole phrases from Plutarch and copied them in his play Antony and Cleopatra. But, some have stolen from Shakespeare, too (the famous early author, T.S. Eliot).
So as you can see, it’s actually “olde practice” to copy off others. But not all olde practices are good practices, especially this one.
In the 18th century, originality really started becoming an idea, or a thing. In 1755 the word plagiary was added to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, defining a plagiarist as a thief in literature.
More recently, there was a plagiarism fiasco that went on at the widely Internet-famous BuzzFeed. It was related to some crappy content going out (never put out crappy content, folks).
Do you remember the controversy of that Washington Post live chat where Gene Weingarten held forth on that Benny Johnson plagiarism scandal that happened at Buzzfeed?
To jog your memory: Johnson took full lines from sources that ranged from Wikipedia to Yahoo! Answers. That plagiarized content was then used for some rather bottom-of-the-barrel posts.
What Weingarten had to say about this was “…to be guilty of theft one must steal something of value.” You can find the full, hilarious opinion here.
Is It Merely About Repackaging?
Let me put this to you: one man’s treasure is another man’s trash.
Of course, using direct quotes without the right citations or marks is indefensible. But is there anything inherently evil about repackaging another person’s ideas in a way that resonates a little more loudly with audiences? I mean, isn’t this a variation of the entire model used by some of the biggest Internet platforms, from Pinterest to Facebook?
Let’s Talk Content Attribution
Attribution. This is where the problem lies.
The bad thing about the Internet is that it’s just too easy to steal stuff.
The good thing about the Internet is that it’s just so easy to link to the primary source.
This was probably the biggest crime in Benny Johnson’s piece – there was a lack of quotation marks in some of the direct quotes, but had he included a link to the source, it would’ve been more acceptable.
The entire practice of linking is a service for both terrible and good content. It gives the original writer their credit or alerts readers to a questionable source when content isn’t up to par.
What about Content Originality?
Did you know there’s an unwritten rule in advertising – you can steal from a book, movie or anything else so long as you don’t steal from another ad.
The principle here makes a fair point. Originality sells.
Finding that smidgeon of reality that is appropriate to your client and their product is basically advertising’s holy grail.
But hasn’t the Internet gone and changed what we perceive to be wholly original to a more widespread, collaborative type of originality?
While the World Wide Web had transformed our view of “originality,” it’s also made it a lot easier to plagiarize and even detect plagiarism.
So you can go and, um, ‘borrow’ ideas from ads. Or you can use the Internet to check you’re not unintentionally ripping someone else’s ideas off.
Does That Make Every One Of Us A Copy Plagiarist?
Doesn’t that seem like a level playing field then?
Or have we all become plagiarists?
Or, gasp, have we always been?
A lot of teachers view plagiarism as a clear cut issue. They bring it up when you’re starting out a research paper, discuss it during, maybe, one period, and never come back to it, unless a student is caught copying.
Teachers warn us not to copy or there will be consequences. They tell us to present detailed citation guides; they teach us how to quote, summarize and paraphrase. Then the onus is on us to use these techniques properly.
But It’s All Right There – Online – Staring At Me
In an age when students can gravitate to online sources for their research, and when copious amounts of both questionable and reputable information is available – many people have come to regard the Internet as a culprit in plagiarism. Some teachers will even go so far as to forbid their students from doing research online, mistakenly believing that if they use hard-copy sources only, the problem will go away.
Can We Completely Blame The Internet?
Many a commentator blames the easy accessibility of the plethora of information online as the main cause of student plagiarism.
Sue Carter Simmons, a researcher, dispelled this myth, though. She has shown that we have been plagiarizing since the 19th century. In fact, a 1986 survey of high school students – a time long before the Internet was a cultural phenomenon, confirmed this finding: as many as 80 percent of high school students surveyed admitted to copying some to most of their school reports.
Does this not render the Internet, at most, a complication in a long-standing dynamic?
Of course, there are some features of online research that could affect how plagiarism tends to creep into writing, and it’s no wonder educators are up in arms by the potential the Internet has to encourage unlawful copying.
Since it has become so easy to appropriate text via cutting and pasting, it’s just so easy for even the most well-intentioned of students to overlook boundaries between what they have produced themselves and what they found on their screen.
The same goes for writers, bloggers, journalists – we all leap ahead, creatively brainstorming and checking out a plethora of online sources. We may forget – or neglect – to pause and insert that citations or quotation marks. Perhaps we intend to come back later and do that. But “later” just slipped away. Did this happen to Benny Johnson?
So What About That World Wide Web?
Is the amount of plagiarism on the web really embarrassing? Or is it okay to repack, rephrase and re-cite so long as the quotation marks are there, the hyperlinks are inserted and the right credit is given?
And what if a writer has merely enhanced, updated and improved another’s piece to not just speak to an audience, but shout it to them from the rooftops?
Hey, don’t quote us, but we’d say there’s a debate in here somewhere!
What do you think? Let us know!
If you’re looking for unique, original and creative copy, check out our Content Shop. We promise we’re better at being original than Thomas Jefferson.
It’s the first full week of December, and at Express Writers, we’ve cooked up something special for all our fans, friends and followers! We’re calling it 5 days of content giveaways. We’re giving back to you—thankful for our community of clients, friends and fans this holiday season! Each and everyone who signs up will get one free content gift every single day for five days.
My team and I have stayed up late nights together finalizing each and every one, and I’m really excited about all the useful content we’re giving away over these five days of giveaways. I’m not going to spoil the surprise by naming each and every one of the gifts, but I’ll give you a brief synopsis of the surprises on the way:
Day 1: For day 1 and our first free holiday gift to you, we’re releasing Express Writers’ first free eBook to the public. It’s about blogging, and I won’t share the full title, but it’s really informational and we spent months putting this together!
Day 2, 3 & 4: We’re giving a series of PDFs away over these next few days, sharing some informational resources that you’ll love to have in your back pocket. Perfect for the content marketer, writer, blogger, and creator!
Day 5: I’ve recently finished writing an email course, and I’m giving it away for free as your last gift in our giveaway series. I’m showing you the ropes of blogging for your business, from getting started to writing and creating great content, visuals and getting your content ready for rankings. Plus more! You won’t want to miss this.
I’m thrilled that you’re here reading this post and a part of Express Writers. And don’t be the Christmas Grinch—if you have friends who would love a free eBook, blogging guide and other related resources, please share! Over the next five days, everyone who signs up for our gifts will get a special something from us, delivered straight to their inbox!
“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
J.R.R.Tolkien, The Hobbit, Gandalf speaking
What is “timeless” in our mind, as humans? What stays unforgotten, down through history?
The Bible. J.R.R.Tolkien. C.S. Lewis. Leo Tolstoy. William Shakespeare. Emily Bronte.
These are familiar names that are correlated with stories. Some of the greatest stories, of all time, ever written. And you know what? Nearly 90% of us (I bet those of you reading this post) know those names.
That’s pretty incredible – they’ve stuck that well through years and years of history.
Let’s turn from the world of unforgettable authored storytelling and look at a few marketing stories. Some aren’t boring, luckily.
If you were to sit down right now and turn on the television, what would you see?
Far too many commercials. And all these commercials have one thing in common: a story.
Regardless of whether they’re advertising a drug or a new car, commercials are one of the most easily identifiable instances of storytelling in marketing today.
The best commercial is the best-told, most-shared story.
Take, for example, the Budweiser Super Bowl commercial of 2015:
At first glance, you wouldn’t think that a Clydesdale and a yellow Labrador puppy have much of anything to do with beer, but this commercial did storytelling so well that it went viral with emotional connections (some shed tears).
So what is it about these brands and, more specifically, how are they getting their consumers to relate, love and appreciate their story—and immediately gain that connection?
All with the use of a great story?
And will this grow a lot in 2016?
Let’s find out.
Storytelling & Content in 2016: Why The Brain Loves Stories
It goes without saying that storytelling in marketing wouldn’t be nearly as effective as it is if our brains weren’t ravenous for stories. It’s been estimated that we spend roughly 1/3 of our lives daydreaming, which means we’re constantly searching for an entertaining tale. What’s more, we consume upwards of 100,000 digital words on a daily basis, mostly in the form of advertisements and web copy, and the majority of us (about 92%) want to be able to internalize those words as a story.
For an example of this, consider Budweiser again. What sounds more appealing to you, personally: a list of ingredients including water, barley malt, rice, and yeast or a “best friends” tale of a little dog and a big horse who found friendship on the Budweiser farm?
The answer is obvious.
Budweiser opted for story over facts because the human brain loves stories much more than it loves lists of boring details. In fact, it’s been proven that storytelling in advertising actually activates interactive portions of the brain. For example, if a person reads a list of facts, only the language center of the brain is activated. If a person hears a story, though, the language portion of the brain lights up alongside other portions of the brain that are connected to personal experience.
In other words, experiencing a story makes us feel a personal connection. This is why storytelling in advertising is so incredibly effective: when a brand can tell a story that triggers an emotional connection in the consumer (like Budweiser did when I cried at their advertisement), that story has a higher likelihood of being remembered. This is due in large part to the fact that the brain releases dopamine during intense storytelling experiences, and this, in turn, leads to sales and conversions down the road.
Storytelling also engages the phenomena of “mirroring” in the human brain, which means that people listening to a really great story will share emotions with other viewers, but also with the person telling the story. To put this another way: if you can tell a story that fully underlines how life-changing, unique, important, and special your product, good, or service is, consumers are likely to agree with you.
5 Tips for Finding The Pot of Gold (Your Story) With Content In 2016
If you’re unfamiliar with brand storytelling or you’re simply interested in getting better at it, there are five key things that you can do to outshine your competitors and ensure that your stories are ones that customers want to engage with. These will hold strong in 2016:
1) Get real
Would the Budweiser ad have been as moving if it featured, say, an intergalactic alien duo? Probably not. The reason for this is that regardless of where you are at this exact moment in your life, you can probably relate to the cuteness of a puppy, the bond between friends, and the love of pets better than you can relate to life in outer space.
In other words, the Budweiser ad works because it is authentic.
Over the past several years, authenticity in content marketing has risen to near-epic levels of importance. This is at least partially due to the fact that there are more than 80 million millennials living in the U.S. today and 43% of them rank authenticity as more important than content in everything from news to blogs. With that in mind, it’s clear that the hokey advertising blasts of the 1950s-60s are dead and that a new wave of advertising has entered the picture. Not only does this advertising have to tell a story, but it has to be an authentic story.
For an example aside from the Budweiser ad, consider Rand Fishkin. Founder of Moz and SEO guru extraordinaire, Fishkin has built an Internet empire and is widely regarded as one of the key influencers in the industry. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, Fishkin almost went bankrupt in the early years of his career and he talks about it openly in a 2011 blog post titled “Just Keep Going.” Now, why would a successful guy like Rand espouse on his near-catastrophic early failures? Because it happened, it is authentic, and it helps people connect with his brand in a real and personal way. When it comes to storytelling, it doesn’t get much better than that.
2) Let your personality shine
There are innumerable companies online trying to sell products, so what’s going to set you apart? It’s likely that the product you sell is also sold, in some form or another, by roughly 742,561 competitors and, in light of that, there’s virtually nothing more important than letting your personality inform your storytelling. Consider Dollar Shave Club for a moment, who is maybe one of the best examples of a company that’s done this exceedingly well.
Dollar Shave Club sells razors, which is nothing new. But the way they’ve gone about it is. In the beginning of the brand’s career, the brand raised $75 million to fend off big name competitors like Gillette. Since the 2012 launch of the company’s now-viral promotional video, starring founder and CEO Michael Dubin, the company has grown to account for 13.3 percent of all razor sales in the U.S., with a subscriber base of more than 2 million customers. Part of that success is certainly due to a great product, but a healthy portion of it is due to creative storytelling that brands the company as unique, quirky, and fresh.
3) Create characters your audience loves
In the days of old, people used to wait months to read serialized versions of novels, all because there was a character in the story that they related to on a personal level. It’s a very powerful thing for a brand to create characters their audience wants to connect with and doing this ensures not only that the brand will be remembered by consumers, but it will also be recommended by consumers.
Consider Progressive Insurance, for example, who has created Flo. Flo is portrayed by Stephanie Courtney. The character has her own Twitter and Facebook profiles and has appeared in upwards of 100 of the company’s commercials.
While insurance companies may all blend together for consumers, it’s likely that even if people don’t remember Progressive’s name, they’re going to remember the company’s advertisements and, thanks to Flo’s quirky, relatable nature, they’re going to choose Progressive over a company with a less effective advertising persona.
To follow in Progressive’s footsteps, create characters that your target persona will relate to and root for. This enhances consumer bonds to your product and ensures that you’ll outshine your competition in 2016.
4) Give it structure
We all learned in middle school that every good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. This holds just as true for brand stories as it does for novels. In the beginning of a story, you should immediately establish the setting and characters. The middle should focus on the conflict that is central to the story. The end should offer a resolution. For a fantastic example of this, consider Amazon’s recent commercial advertising its “Prime” subscriber service.
The beginning of the commercial opens with the main characters (Jessie and his dog Flash). The middle of the commercial establishes the fact that Flash is in a cast and that he can’t romp with the other dogs and, frankly, that he feels a little embarrassed about his current state. The end of the commercial provides resolution when Jessie heads to Amazon Prime and orders a baby-wearing device (with free two-day shipping, of course) to tote Flash around in. The story is wrapped up in a neat little bow, the consumer is happy, and the value of Amazon Prime has been established through the structure of the advertisement.
5) Pace yourself
In storytelling as in life, it’s important to pace yourself and not give everything away at once. An effective storytelling campaign, much like an effective novel, is very careful to build and maintain a sense of tension. This keeps audiences wanting more and ensures that they’ll keep coming back to find out what happens next.
When a brand paces its storytelling effectively, it creates an environment in which the consumer is virtually embedded in the brand experiences. For a recent and timely example, consider the Christmas ads that Target has been running on television lately. The commercials are organized into Chapters (a nod to the novel) and tell the story of several children (all dressed in Target clothing) and Bullseye, the trademark Target dog, who go on an epic quest to light a huge Christmas tree for the enjoyment of the people.
Like the Advent calendars of yesteryear, this storytelling method provides excitement, fun, and anticipation for the consumer. After a consumer has viewed the commercial, he or she is directed to a special portion of Target’s website where the consumer can interact with a virtual storybook and access curated gift lists for kids of all ages.
In addition to promoting Target’s various products, this form of storytelling also borrows a bit from the epic adventure stories we all know and love. In this way, it makes audiences feel involved, excited, and linked to Target’s brand, while also helping people get into the Christmas spirit.
Find Your Story: Tell It
From novels and movies to commercials and beyond, stories have always been deeply ingrained in the human experience and, when they’re good, they’ve always been one of our favorite ways to feel connection to other people.
Marketing has changed by leaps and bounds throughout the last several years and, today, the marketer who is the most likely to be successful is the one who can best establish an emotional connection with clients. One of the most sure-fire ways to do this is and has always been through brand storytelling.
While storytelling has existed as a marketing tactic for decades, storytelling in 2016 promises to be more colorful, more personal, more intriguing, and more exciting than ever. As customers move toward favoring brands that are authentic, innovative, reliable, and unique, marketers can stay ahead of the curve by following these tips on storytelling and ensuring that every piece of content your brand puts out engages your customers through effective, irresistible storytelling.
