To be successful with storytelling you need to understand it. Emotion and connection are what make a great story and experience for the consumer! At the Rocks Digital 2017 Social Media Day celebration, DeAndre Upshaw shares how he came to understand storytelling, and how businesses and agencies can start telling great stories.
How StoryTelling Started for DeAndre
1999 – Dad bought a spiffy new Packard-Bell tower computer and I could connect my computer to my VCR. So now I could make my own Power Rangers episodes! Life is good! Through that experience, I began to understand storytelling.
Telling Your Story with Video
- Storytelling should be integral to marketing, blog posts, Facebook posts, etc.
- What is emotion? Feelings. The dictionary defines emotion as a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.
- What makes you feel emotions? Your kids, politics, sappy videos, music, etc.
We’ve lost a lot of the emotion in digital marketing. The goal of marketing is not to convince them, it’s to make people FEEL something. The tone of marketing has changed to try to tell people what to think.
Emotion Belongs at the Center of Storytelling
- When you’re thinking about your story, think about what you want people to feel. What emotions do you want them to take away? We give context clues = Show, Don’t Tell.
- Put emotion at the center of your story. Every time you talk to someone, you’re telling a story. We want people to feel something, but we don’t want to tell someone what they should be feeling.
- People love aspirational and inspirational. When you’re telling your stories remember that every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Make sure each story you tell has a complete story arc.
Interest Leads to Conversions
If you can create something that leaves people wanting to know more, that leads to conversions. It doesn’t need to be “fade to black … show logo and contact info.”
Tell your story, and let it compel them to want to find out more. That is more powerful than a traditional call to action.
