With the exception of that fun but short period around the turn of the millennium when I was a contractor writer for AOL Cityguide, I have spent the bulk of my career marketing technology products and services to complex and often heavily regulated industries like finance, commercial real estate, healthcare and insurance. I’m pretty sure that I am drawn to these types of products and services, because I love the challenge of, for example, of making something as complicated as the cloud fun and understandable.
I enjoy deciphering complex tech solutions and then figuring out how to gather broad and meaningful attention for them. Over the years, I have developed a few tricks of the trade for working through the process of developing complex stories. My tips, which I will share below, draw from the traditional storytelling elements we learn in school, but I have morphed them to the needs of more complicated narratives.
Jenn’s Complex Storytelling Big Four
- Emotional Attachment—This is a classic storytelling element that I would argue must be present in every marketing campaign, regardless of how technical or seemingly unemotional the product or service is. One of the most popular campaigns my team and I ever produced tied the most unemotional thing in the world—cloud-based disaster recovery services— to the fun and popular “Doppelgänger” fad that was all over Facebook at the time (you know, back when Facebook was still a thing). People would pick a celebrity that they most looked like as their doppelgänger and would post that as their profile picture.
We created an online “Cosmo” quiz as we called it to help IT professionals figure out who their disaster recovery service doppelgänger was, and being in tech, we scored points by making all of the doppelgängers robots. After the quiz, they received an ebook that basically described where they were on the spectrum of disaster recovery preparedness. People were emotionally attached to the doppelgänger fad and really, who doesn’t love a super cute robot? The campaign was incredibly successful and it was produced cheaply in house. Sometimes you just don’t know what your sleeper hits will be in marketing, but one thing is clear, no matter how complex or ethereal the material you are sharing, you have to find a way to create an emotional connection.
2. Tension/Conflict— The first time I really understood the true power of tension, was years ago when I worked at a software company and we put out a risky headline on a press release. I can’t remember the exact words, but we basically said that the advent of cloud computing was creating tension between the IT department and the business. We actually used the word “tension,” and we really wrung our hands over such a headline, but it worked! The Wall Street Journal called me that day, and let’s be clear, it’s usually me begging them for a story. Ever since that day, I always ask myself, “where is the tension?”
The doppelgänger campaign I described above worked not only because it had emotional connection, but also because there was tension. People were concerned about not being prepared for a disaster and that campaign tapped right into that fear and offered solutions to resolve the problem.
3. Tethering— This is one of my favorite storytelling elements. When I am wearing my public relations hat, reporters are always pushing us to tether our stories to the popular storylines of the day. In other words, you need to demonstrate to them how you are important in the big scheme of things. A reporter once sent my team a hilarious email letting us know that we either needed a big trend, a big deal or a connection to the Kardashians to get an interview with him. That Kardashian comment really stuck with me, and I started thinking of ways to better tether our products to the trends of the day. To prove my point about tethering to my doubtful team, I ran a test on the Linkedin publishing platform (back when that was a thing), and wrote a piece about Twitter. It immediately garnered over 6,000 views, and my point was made to my astonished team.
Creating a meaningful tether to a popular topic like Twitter upped the viewers who were interested in my content. This works in demand generation too. Try it, find a meaningful tether to an issue or trend of the day and put that tether into the subject line of your next email to your prospects and customers. Your open rates will increase tremendously.
Now a word of caution on this one. The more meaningful the tether, the better the response. This isn’t just word play, what real trends and issues do your products solve that are meaningful in the world at large? If you merely work the word “Kardashian” into a sentence so like so many failed search engine optimization exercises, your audience will catch that and reject the message. It has to be real and meaningful and most importantly, clever.
4. The Pay-Off- This is also known as the call to action. Marketers often spend so much time working on how to drive attention to their campaigns that they forget to make the pay-off really good. In our doppelgänger example, we not only gave them an ebook with lots of good advice about how to solve their problem, but we also invited them to a webinar where we had live experts answering their questions.
Sometimes you need to shell out money to offer a paper written by a well-known industry expert or invite them to an event, but just make sure that the pay-off is worth it for the customer/prospect. A well done pay-off will create a bond between you and the customer/prospect. They will begin to trust your content and campaigns and participate in them more actively. In the consumer business, the pay-off is often a product sample, in a complex product or service situation, it is often more information to help the customer/prospect make an informed decision or form a strategy for their business. This is really important as it gives you yet another opportunity to provide value and reduce the complexity to your customer/prospect in making a buying decision.
Of course, while all of these elements are important individually, it’s the combination of them that creates really compelling campaigns and helps to demystify the complexity of your product or service. Each element plays a vital role in leading the buyer through the emotional, factual and strategic journey of a purchasing a complex product or service.
Happy storytelling!
Jenn
Inner Brenner 