Creator Stories - by Prewrite.com
By Trent Anderson
Creator Stories - by Prewrite.comOct 01, 2020
Can Storytelling Shorten Your Sales Cycle?
After the demo, what's next?
It's time to end the endless cycle of checking in sharing generic marketing content while you are in working the middle funnel.
Join us for a very special ShiftHappens to explore the intersection of value drivers and strategic narratives, to help you craft "value stories".
Stories win hearts and minds, and value is expresssed in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. How can we start combine the two?
Join ShiftHappens on Thurs Dec 10th to explore marketing myths, define value drivers, and craft better stories to engage stakeholders.
Featuring a round table workshop with
Meghann Misiak, Sales Strategist at The Path to President's Club.
Trent Anderson, Chief Operating Officer at Prewrite.
Chris Ortolano, Account Strategist at Outbound Edge.
Topics include:
- Defining Complex Problems
- Working with Champions to define "value"
- Collaborating to co-create "value stories"
Walk away a template to stand apart from the competition with account specific value stories to increase stakeholder engagement.
The Path to President's Club enables B2B Sales Teams to increase close rates & ACV through value-centric sales training, coaching, & proven frameworks.
Prewrite helps Marketing and Sales leaders craft a business story library to deliver stories that add value and capture the imagination.
Outbound Edge develops sales process templates and diagnostic content for AM's to increase stakeholder engagement via Account Growth plans. Outbound Edge is a certified Membrain Partner.
The Art of Storytelling Essay [BONUS: Storytelling Exercises]
The Art of Storytelling: Finding Your Story
We all know people who are gifted storytellers - people who can captivate a crowd with their tales. While most of these people are charismatic and have a flair for language, they also have one important quality that you don't see: they know what makes a story worth telling.
All good stories have a few elements in common: they contain interesting characters, who are involved in dramatic situations, and they all have a point, or a controlling idea. No one will be enthralled by a story that lacks these key elements.
You may already have a sense of what makes a good story, but you may not be sure where to start when crafting a story of your own. Do you start with an interesting character? A dramatic moment? An intriguing idea?
A good story should have dramatic characters and a good dramatic idea. However, when you're writing short-form content, there's a third possible starting place: the dramatic moment.
Longer-form content give you more time to explore character, to develop plots and subplots, and to suggest ideas. But in the short-form content, you need to be economic and find a quicker route to your story.
A truly dramatic moment has everything a good story needs - interesting characters in compelling situations, who are wrestling with a big idea. If a moment strikes you as dramatic, and you learn how to unpack it, you'll have all the important elements of a good story.
Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XDnNwZaSmPI
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How to Monetize Your Audience (6 Key Questions You MUST Answer)
It’s one thing to build an audience — it’s another to monetize your audience.
There are infinite products and services you can sell, but success in doing so ultimately hinges on one thing: Alignment.
The audience you target, products you offer, and ways you position them must be in alignment with each other.
To ensure your efforts to monetize your audience are not mismatched, consider the following six questions…
1. Will you monetize an audience of the many or the few?
2. Will you sell to an audience seeking a solution or an audience who doesn’t know they have a problem?
3. Will you teach people how to do something or do it for them?
4. Will you sell something that earns or costs?
5. Will you target new money or existing spend?
6. Will you sell to people once or on repeat?
How to Effectively Use Storytelling in Your Webinars
The death of webinars has been greatly exaggerated.
Every once in a while, someone declares webinars “over” as a viable lead generation and nurturing format.
But how can they be when nine out of 10 B2B professionals say that webinars are their preferred content type? So maybe it’s not webinars that don’t work. It’s a tendency toward broad, boring, and overlong webinars that turns people off. What’s going to get that 90 percent of people to show up and stay engaged with your webinar? Yup, storytelling.
Here’s how to use it:
5 ways to set up your webinar for storytelling success
1. Pick a hero. Choose one ICP to target with your webinar. It may seem more efficient to hold 1 webinar that appeals to multiple target audiences but by trying to appeal to many you end up pleasing no one.
2. Pick a niche. Now that you have the hero, focus your webinar content on one pain point your hero is interested in using or solving. Ideally, it’s one you offer.
3. Pick a point of view. Stories have conflict. So if you’re just showcasing how your product works, that’s a demo, not a webinar. Take an interesting stance. Go against an industry norm. Ask a polarizing question.
4. Pick some ‘action points’. Like a page-turning book, your webinar needs cliff-hangers and foreshadowing. Ask questions you don’t answer for a slide or two. Introduce a startling statistic or attention-grabbing graph. Tease some info that you’re gonna touch on later.
5. Pick a format. How you present your webinar is going to inform how you tell your story. Single-presenter webinars are the most common and the easiest way to control how you tell the story with a detailed script. But if you opt for multiple presenters, it’s still possible to keep your story flowing. Structure your webinar with a clear beginning-middle-end
Plan your webinar for free at prewrite.com
How to Use Video Storytelling to Increase Sales with Ali Hammoud of Vidyard
Say you’re selling widgets. You know your widget is 39% lighter than the competition, works 53% faster, costs 13% less, and has 29% more support.
Your client is asleep by now.
But maybe, three years ago you had a friend who struggled with their widget, who complained about the cost, the size, and how frustrated they were because a widget part broke, and they couldn’t get any support to fix it. So you decided to do something about that. And you designed this better, cheaper widget, and have around-the-clock o-call support, and your friend’s company has now doubled their production capacity.
This is the difference between fact-telling and storytelling, and it's even more effective when told via video.
Ali Hammoud and his team at Vidyard have cracked the code on effective video selling and video marketing.
Now we examine video selling and video marketing through a storytelling lens.
Key Points:
"Video storytelling becomes effective when you treat your prospects as if they were archetypal characters in a story."
You have to figure out their:
* character traits
* wants
* needs
Then you can weave in your narrative.
How to Use Storytelling to Stand Out in Senior Living
How do you stand out in senior living - arguably the most competitive sales environment today?
According to Jeff Altschul, Director of Sales and Marketing at Arboria of Long Grove, you stand out by using storytelling in marketing and sales videos.
How to Create Content for a Living - 7 Lessons I Learned from a Barstool Blogger
Do you ever wish you could give a big middle finger to your dead-end, 9-5 day job?
No more BS reports, no more infantile coworkers, no more absolute clown of a boss.
And instead of all that crap, you get paid to talk about topics you LOVE - baseball, reality TV, dogs, whatever.
Well good news, you can ditch the 9-5 and create content for a living.
The road ain't easy, but there are 7 Lessons I learned from a good friend who did exactly that.
He parlayed his passion for baseball into a full-time gig with Barstool Sports, the fastest growing and, arguably, most influential new media brand in the world.
In this episode I talk with Dave Williams, aka White Sox Dave, about his journey from dorm room blogger to breaking news on Twitter to leaving his day job to ultimately landing his dream job at Barstool.
You might be surprised to learn of 7 Lessons that stood out through the conversation:
- Hustle
- Know your audience
- Find your voice
- Play the long-game
- Failure isn't fatal
- Seize every opportunity
- Lean into it
Enjoy this story and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe
The Storytelling Formula Our Brains Crave
Told any good stories lately?
No? Well you might want to start.
Stories are more than simple fairy tales. Turns out, they actually alter our brains, and can even change the way we think and act.
Storytelling is a community act that involves sharing knowledge and values. It's one of the most unifying elements of mankind, central to human existence, taking place in every known culture in the world.
Here’s the psychology behind stories, and how you can craft a story for your brand that engages your customers and drives conversions.
The Psychology of StoriesYour brain is programmed to recognize patterns of information (human faces, letters, music notes, etc.) and assign them meaning (your mother’s face, the alphabet, the Star Spangled Banner, etc.)
Stories, too, are recognizable patterns, and we use them to find meaning in the world around us. We see ourselves in them, and the stories we hear become personal to us.
Stories are so near and dear to us, in fact, that we even invent them when they’re not actually there.
In 1944, 34 Massachusetts college students were shown a short film with two triangles and a circle moving across the screen. They were then asked to describe the scene. All but one described the movements with elaborate, human narratives, including:
- The two triangles were men fighting as a woman (the circle) tried to escape.
- The circle was “worried.”
- The circle and the little triangle were “innocent young things.”
- The big triangle felt “rage and frustration.”
This study demonstrates our tendency to personify abstract shapes and seek ourselves in the objects around us. This is called pareidolia, or “the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist.” It’s what happens when you see a face in an electric outlet, or when you see shapes in the clouds.
Basically, we’re obsessed with the human story and want to hear it all the time.
Why are we so in love with human stories? Because they activate our minds. Stories can activate parts of our brains that give us sensory experiences and influence our way of thinking.
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How to become an influential thought leader by using storytelling
Marti Sanchez, CEO of Influence Podium , drops by to help us learn how to become an influential thought leader by using storytelling.
Marti and his team have helped c-suite leaders CRUSH it on social media with their personal brand in a box service offering.
They even have their own process:
Define objectives and prepare the Content Pillar series that will drive all the content volume.
Assign a personal brand manager that will place and lead the right team around you — producing, creating, and publishing your content assets across all platforms to build your personal brand and drive business opportunities.
Constantly audit and report analytics, apply newfound audience insights, monitor social media trends, and take advantage of dynamic opportunities.
Marti also tells us his story, which is bound to get you determined.
Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling
Many business people have already discovered the power of storytelling in a practical sense – they have observed how compelling a well-constructed narrative can be. But recent scientific work is putting a much finer point on just how stories change our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.
As social creatures, we depend on others for our survival and happiness. A decade ago, my lab discovered that a neurochemical called oxytocin is a key “it’s safe to approach others” signal in the brain. Oxytocin is produced when we are trusted or shown a kindness, and it motivates cooperation with others. It does this by enhancing the sense of empathy, our ability to experience others’ emotions. Empathy is important for social creatures because it allows us to understand how others are likely to react to a situation, including those with whom we work.
Stortytelling 101 - Kristian Altuve Creative Director at Zero Degree Story
Do you wanna learn how to tell more effective stories?
Stories that move your audience?
Stories that will inspire viewers to stand up, take action, and make a change?
Then you won't want to miss Kristian Altuve, Creative Director at ZeroDegreeStory.com, dish the filmmaking secrets that marketers use in kick-ass video content.
https://youtu.be/SNStHqbJbOA
Storytelling That Moves People - Robert McKee Transcripts
Persuasion is the centerpiece of business activity. Customers must be convinced to buy your company’s products or services, employees and colleagues to go along with a new strategic plan or reorganization, investors to buy (or not to sell) your stock, and partners to sign the next deal. But despite the critical importance of persuasion, most executives struggle to communicate, let alone inspire. Too often, they get lost in the accoutrements of companyspeak: PowerPoint slides, dry memos, and hyperbolic missives from the corporate communications department. Even the most carefully researched and considered efforts are routinely greeted with cynicism, lassitude, or outright dismissal.
McKee believes that executives can engage listeners on a whole new level if they toss their PowerPoint slides and learn to tell good stories instead. In his best-selling book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, published in 1997 by Harper-Collins, McKee argues that stories “fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living—not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.”
https://hbr.org/2003/06/storytelling-that-moves-people
The Science of Storytelling: What Listening to a Story Does to Our Brains
We all enjoy a good story, whether it’s a novel, a movie or simply something one of our friends is explaining to us that they’ve experienced. But why do we feel so much more engaged when we hear a narrative about events?
We know that we can activate our brains better if we listen to stories. The still unanswered question is: Why is that? Why does the format of a story, where events unfold one after the other have such a profound impact on our learning?
You'll want to tune in to understand the why before you dig into the how.
Storytelling According to a Military Man turned Master Marketer
Do you want to know the secret to massive success in healthcare marketing?
Then you won't want to miss Matthew Ray Scott, CEO of FEED the Agency, discuss how he's helped surgeons and medical device companies unlock massive growth thanks to storytelling.
But Matthew didn't start out in marketing.
He's a former psy-ops officer in the US military.
He's also led massive sales teams and marketing operations.
We discuss:
What is storytelling?
Why should you care about storytelling?
How to use storytelling in your marketing?
For more information on Matthew and FEED:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewrayscott
Website - https://feedtheagency.com/
Introducing Creator Stories - Episode 000
Welcome to Creator Stories by Prewrite.com
Topics include: the art and science of storytelling (duh!), content creation, and the business of creativity.
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Instagram: @prewriteapp