There are a headache’s worth of statistics out there about how well content marketing works. According to WebDam, for example:

• B to B companies that blog generate 67% more leads than companies that don’t blog
• 52% of marketers have found a customer through Facebook
• 43% of marketers have found a customer through LinkedIn
• Inbound marketing generates 54% more leads than outbound marketing

So, as you can see, the numbers support a strong content creation and marketing approach.

But the management of what you say about yourself and your business online is an intricate dance of story-telling and digital mastery: your online content affects both how you are perceived and how your business ranks in the search engines.  The goal is to use your stories to get results. A lot of people I work with don’t think they have any stories worth telling but when we get right down to it, almost everything they’ve chosen to do in the production, management and distribution of their product (or service) has at its very heart the stub of a story we could tell to encourage people to want to do business with them.

How to Use Storytelling and Content Marketing for Your Business

For example:

• A business that doesn’t want to ask customers for testimonials because they are concerned about safeguarding customer privacy can create a blog post about how focused they are on their customers’ confidentiality
• A business that has been around for 30 years can create an interesting article about how their industry has changed over the past few decades (and they with it)
• Almost everybody can write case studies about projects they’ve completed
• Every case study can be turned into a power point presentation that can be posted to the web as a Slideshare presentation
• Slideshare presentations can be turned into videos
• Every time you post content to your website or other online platform you can tweet about it or create a status update sending people to the content (that you’ve posted to your website) so they can find out more
• And all of this content signals to the search engines that there is something good going on at your place of business, so they will reward you with better rankings

Storytelling is an ancient art form and the people who study these things tell us that ancient humans crouched around campfires together sharing stories of strength and valour, passion and pain long before a printing press (or the internet) was ever a gleaming idea in a questing mind. A good story-teller has likely been a necessity in human society since the dawn of time and unlimited wisdom has been passed along painlessly through the vehicle of a good story.

Although the way we tell our stories has changed, their importance is just as significant today as it has always been: people are far more engaged by a good story well told than they are by a simple collection of facts packed together in an orderly row. As most of us know, life (and business) is anything but consistently orderly and the lyrical surprises inherent in a good story catch our attention like nothing else can.

If you’d like help telling the stories about your business that will make your ideal customers pay attention and take action, please let me know! I’d be honoured to put my skills to work on behalf of your business!