I am the sort of person who goes home from my full day of content writing at work to write some more in my spare time. I take holidays from my full-time job as a writer to go somewhere else and sit with my laptop to write (I wish I was the sort of writer who could do it by hand, but I hate transcribing afterwards!).

I’m attempting to write a novel and I have other stories brewing in the back of my mind. I am the game master for my friends’ Dungeons & Dragons group, so I have to come up with a compelling plot and tie their characters into it for their enjoyment. When I’m not writing, I read a lot of books and watch a lot of films and television, and there is nothing I like better than trying to guess a twist before it comes. 

No matter what, I spend most of my day surrounding myself with storytelling, and that means that I have a keen understanding of how to structure and deliver it. This looks a little different in my professional work compared to my hobbies and interests. My current manuscript is over 100,000 words. The average blog I write for clients in considered long-form content by industry standards and usually averages out at about 2000 words, only 2% of the room that I have for telling a full narrative in a fiction medium. 

Of course, short stories also exist and they are a good comparison to what I write for customer blogs. But any keen short story writer will tell you that they are very difficult to write; maybe even more so than long epics. 

Nevertheless, I do think that studying storytelling and learning how to navigate its twists and turns can be massively beneficial to marketers. Let’s take a look at what storytelling in marketing can look like, and why it is so important. 

Traditional storytelling structures

There are so many ways that you can structure a story. Even if you have never studied the craft of storytelling, there will be beats that you inherently recognise. We have all heard and told stories since early childhood and we are very good at spotting similarities between things. If you have ever finished watching a film and thought it was very similar to another, it might not be because it is an outright copy but rather they use similar storytelling structures and strategies.

The one that most people will have likely heard of is the Three Act Structure. You can break it down further if you like (I personally like a structure that breaks the three acts down into roughly fifteen beats) but every story essentially needs a Beginning, a Middle, and an End — or a Setup, a Confrontation, and a Resolution. The characters need to go on a journey to discover something about themselves. They grow and change as the narrative progresses. 

This is why some stories feel flat when we get to the end of them. The writer can throw as many twists and turns as they like at the reader’s feet. However, if there is no development in the characters and they emerge at the end having learned absolutely nothing, what is the point?

Whether you are writing a cyclical story, the Hero’s Journey, a rags to riches, or anything else you might imagine, you need your characters to change along the way. 

Frodo does not return to the Shire as the same Hobbit he leaves it. Cinderella is rewarded for her kindness and resilience as she leaves her stepmother and stepsisters and marries the prince. Andy Sachs gains perspective and an understanding of her experiences as she moves on from the world of Runway and Miranda Priestly. Characters should evolve!

Storytelling in advertising

Storytelling is heavily used in advertising as it helps to convey a message about a product or service to potential customers or clients. This is particularly useful to video advertisers as they have room to craft a story over several episodic adverts.

My personal favourite of these were made for the Japanese sweet Sakeru Gummy, known online as the Long Long Man commercials. They have everything you want; mysterious characters, drama and humour in equal measure, romance, and an abundance of twists that you won’t see coming! They truly are a masterpiece of storytelling.

But this is just relevant to advertising, and advertising is just one part of marketing as a whole. How does knowing about storytelling help me as a content writer, whether I am writing snappy CTAs or a much longer blog post?

How marketing uses storytelling

So, we know that stories are transformative. We know that a good story is needed in marketing. How can we bring the two together to make marketing transformative?

We treat the customer like the character!

The customer is the one who is transformed during marketing, just like a character is during a narrative. Think about it; as marketers, we present ideas to help guide the customer towards the decision we want them to make (the purchase of a product or service). It could be in the form of a PPC ad you see while browsing, it might be a software demo, or it might just be a fun little blog post like this that tells you a little bit about the personality of the company. 

We even have something in marketing called personas. When we make a persona, we basically invent an ideal customer and this includes any and all personal details that you might think of. Marketing efforts are directed to personas. The real-life people the personas are based on will then, in theory, resonate with our marketing and will make the decision we want to see from them. 

Once upon a time…

At the end of the day, marketing always hinges on a company’s ability to tell a good story. Marketing experts can take a company’s brand and history and pull out the moments that really sing. Though we rarely encounter a product or service that completely changes everything about us, everything that we choose to buy does shape us in some way. 

Is it as complicated as the Three Act Structure, or the plot of your favourite film? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean that a lot of thought doesn’t go into it. At the end of the day, if the audience has reached a conclusion or learned something new then the marketing has ultimately done its job. 

Customers are the main characters in their own lives and marketing works to appeal to the stories they tell about themselves. Storytelling is such an important part of crafting a strong brand and appealing to a target audience.

Not every great story starts on a dark and stormy night!