Storytelling is an important aspect of community management, because it’s a powerful way to connect at an emotional level with your audience.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Story structure
• Storytelling tactics
• Using stories to get people emotionally invested in your brand
• Content creation and content strategy
• Differentiating content in stories

Storytelling: An Overview

Think about the last time you heard a great story. Not just any story, but a story that held you captivated, one that made you laugh or cry. What was it about that story that kept you interested in hearing more? What stood out to you? What made it a great story?

If you come from a technical background, you may think that storytelling is something for English classes and Netflix. But it’s also one of the most essential elements of community management.

Throughout this book, I’ve taught you a lot about identifying your audience and then obtaining data to reach them. Storytelling is what helps community managers pull this information together to reach their audiences. Using all the findings, facts, and data, community managers must learn to create content that accurately reflects the brand’s voice and vision. To tell your brand’s story, you must create the words and images that help convey your brand’s message to your audience.

Companies that do this well can become powerful in the minds of consumers, impacting peoples’ daily dialogue and resonating within society. Think of Nike or Apple, and then think of the millions of people their stories inspire every year. Storytelling helps humanize the brand, reminding us that we’re not just trying to sell products to our customers, but that we’re trying to connect with them.

Storytelling itself is as old as language. From the moment people could first string words together, they were able to communicate the stories that ­mattered to them. Storytelling is the basis for Greek theater, Shakespeare’s plays, folk legends, and, to at least some degree, nearly every form of artistic communication (including visual storytelling through art, photography, and graphic design).

Storytelling has been bringing people together in communities for thousands of years, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. But marketers often find themselves confused—how does this apply to my business?

It’s true that storytelling as an element of an effective community strategy is far more nebulous than something like identifying your target audience or conducting a social media audit. I tend to think of a story in both a broad sense and a narrow one: broad, in that every single piece of content, interaction, or contribution from a community manager helps build the story of your brand; yet narrow, in the sense that even just a single image can tell an amazing story.

Community managers need to be able to tell stories because they need to be able to entertain their followers, which helps build strong brand impressions and loyalties to the brand. Through a strong narrative or interesting imagery, brands can help regular people form true connections to the brand, and can keep them coming back again and again.

Storytelling in community management takes a number of forms. For example, it can mean reaching someone through interesting content on social media, digital video, podcasting, longer content such as white papers or ebooks, film, art or graphic design—and any of which may be viewable in person, on a cell phone, on a computer, via tablet, or even in new forms of media such as Google Glass. Essentially, each of these items can help you relay a story, and together they can present the brand’s story in its entirety.

Authenticity in Storytelling

As a community management professional, one of the most important things you can do is to make sure your story is authentic. When companies try to take community approaches that aren’t genuinely authentic to the brand, customers notice.

But one of the difficulties in creating an authentic brand story is that sometimes we don’t know who, exactly, we’re trying to reach, so it can be hard to find ways to resonate with them. Hopefully, all of the brand and social media listening exercises I’ve given you are more than enough to give you a deep understanding of your brand and what kind of story or stories will resonate with them. This will help you find ways to reach them, and to share your stories in ways that these people will understand.

The goal of storytelling may be twofold: it may serve an entertainment ­purpose (such as the story your friend tells you about how he once picked the wrong person up from the airport and didn’t know until he was almost home), and it may serve to communicate valuable information (such as a story about someone making the choice to commit to a business idea that turned very lucrative, and using that information to teach people how to follow their passions and also make money from them).

When your storytelling is inauthentic, people can tell. Sure, in some instances you might get by when doing something not truly authentic to your brand, but each time you do that, you’re also risking crippling the brand identity by altering the voice of the vision. For instance, if a kid-friendly brand starts using curse words in its storytelling, this completely changes the brand and the brand story.

Storytelling and the Marketer’s Struggle

If we don’t use storytelling devices, we’re doomed to experience a monotonous recital of information. If you’ve ever had to sit through a boring lecture, wondering whether it was possible to die, literally, from boredom, then you’ve already witnessed one of the reasons you can’t rely on just stating information to get people invested in your brand. All the information in that lecture may have been important and useful, but it didn’t matter because your boredom kept you from listening or truly connecting.

Unfortunately, many marketers aren’t trained in using literary devices, so it can be fairly difficult for them to understand the value of superior storytelling skills. Thus far in the book, we’ve talked in detail about facets of business that rely on rationality and numbers, which can form the basis of any reports that can help you determine ROI and review the success of certain initiatives. Storytelling is a little bit more nebulous, in that the “rules” for storytelling are more like guidelines. It’s hard to tell what’s going to truly resonate with your community, but you can use the same experimentation methods taught in the previous chapters to help guide you.

Each of our stories is a representation of our brand. In understanding that the brand identity is essentially a function of all these stories in tandem with one another and how the world interprets such stories, it becomes easier to understand why, as a marketing professional, it’s important to understand the essence of telling a strong story.

Story Structure

In mastering the art of storytelling, it’s important to know that unlike some of the other tools I’ve given you to help understand and connect with your audience, storytelling isn’t always a perfect science. At its core, it is artistic expression, which is one of the fundamental reasons that there’s not always a “right” way to convey the message. It’s also why different stories work for different brands.

It’s important to understand that powerful visual imagery, such as in a photograph, can alone tell a story. However, the emphasis in a story is on the narrative.

Sometimes, in talking about the narrative, it helps to think of the hero’s journey (the plot line of everything from The Odyssey to Star Wars). As applied to business, the story might cover the business trajectory, such as what inspired the business and how the company was trying to solve a problem, the obstacles it faced, and whether or not it was a success. The business story is a little bit different from other stories, because these types of stories don’t always end except when the business itself opts to close its doors. Even then, the story may live in on in the hearts of the people who believe in it, or through history when people are trying to use the story of a brand to help explain and interpret other business stories.

A narrative is a type of story that usually depicts someone sharing a sequence of events over time. Again, this can be interpreted on both the micro and macro levels. Zappos’s story of success through customer service is supported by smaller stories that help give details that uphold that overarching story.

Typically, a theme supports the narrative. For many brands, the theme will be baked right into the brand name or tagline: Apple’s “Think different” inspires thoughts of innovation. With each device, press event, and strategically created hype surrounding various changes within the company, Apple is helping to create that story of what it means to be one of the nation’s most innovative brands.

Most narratives also have a plot. The plot is essentially the logline of the story, and if you’re having a tough time figuring out the plot, if might be helpful to write out: “This is a story about…” and fill it in from there. If you log on to IMDb, every single movie you see has a snippet about the plot. In most cases, you should be able to describe the plot in two or three sentences. (Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy makes attempts to win girl back. Boy wins back girl.) Sometimes—especially in business—you can convey the plot in very few words: David vs. Goliath.

Then, the smaller anecdotes make up the story. If you’re watching a play, these are the scenes, or the vignettes, the slices of the story that come together to create something bigger than itself. If you get in a fight with a friend, this is only one part of the story: we need context for why that happened in the first, place, what the resolution was, and where you guys stand now.

In writing a story, we typically try to offer a little bit of background to help set it up. Who are the characters? What is their relationship to one another? Where are they from? Sometimes this is referred to as exposition. While in most stories some exposition is necessary, it’s often a fundamental flaw of the storyteller or writer to add too much exposition and drag down the story. The important point here is to focus mostly on the things that directly impact the story you’re trying to tell, particularly when you have a limited amount of space and time to tell the story, as is so often the case in marketing.

Most narrative stories feature a protagonist and an antagonist. The protagonist doesn’t have to be a character, but usually is something that’s personified to at least the extent that it can have thoughts and feelings. If you want to tell a story about a cloud, it could work, but you’d probably want to personify that cloud in order to give it thoughts and feelings. If you’re telling the story of your business, the story narrative wouldn’t be about just one person, but about the many people who came together to form the business.

The antagonist is the bad guy in the story. It’s the Goliath to David, or the villain in any James Bond movie. Not every narrative will have a human or human-like antagonist, because many will have something else, such as an obstacle or barrier that the protagonist has to overcome in order to be successful in the story.

Each of these characters typically has a motive. The motive helps drive the story. What does the main character want, and what does the antagonist want that deters the protagonist. Sometimes the main character typically wants simply to defeat the bad guy, but the motive is usually couched in some much deeper element. If you can give that person a justification for their desire, you’re likely to have a much stronger story. The audience needs to understand what lies at the heart of the motive. For instance, if the protagonist in the story wants a sandwich, the story differs significantly if he wants it to steal it from someone else as compared to wanting it because he’s been on a hunger strike and hasn’t eaten in weeks.

The plot moves forward through the rising action. The rising action is the sequence of events that lead to the climax. In good story structure, each area of conflict will build onto the last. In the types of movies where everything goes wrong, it helps to build to the zanier aspects and points of conflict in order to help create a solid climax.

The climax is the biggest moment of the story. It’s the last thing that happens before our resolution of the story. In romantic comedies, this is the scene where the ex-boyfriend crashes the woman’s wedding to tell her how much he loves her. The reason this image is such a cliché is that spoiling a wedding is an example of high stakes, which is something we’ll talk about in more detail a little bit later on.

In simple terms, the resolution is about how the protagonist (or outside circumstances) resolve the conflict. The climax has already occurred, so it’s now time to pull the pieces of the story together to create a resolution. The resolution typically lies in: “Does the hero achieve what he sought to achieve?” All of this leads toward the conclusion, or the end.

Your favorite movie may have had a happy ending or a sad ending, or somewhere in between. Occasionally, a story has a cliff-hanger ending, but this is typically a result of setting up a sequel and often leaves people feeling unsatisfied. In sitcoms, this is the “lesson is learned” sort of moment. The goal with the ending is to give the audience something memorable to take away. In ­giving a narrative in public speaking, this may be a listing of actual takeaways or lessons learned.

In some cases, there may be a twist ending. These are harder to write, but they tend to leave real impressions on audiences. In a twist ending, two things that seem generally unrelated seem to tie back together, or the author uses some other mechanism to help create a surprise for the audience. This is not fundamental to telling a great story but is a terrific tool to have at your disposal in storytelling.

Not every story you tell about your business will have each of these elements, but it is useful to know the typical story structure so that you can use these items when communicating with your community. Whether you’re a founder with an interesting story, you want to share an influencer’s story of superior customer service, or you just want to give your audience something to inspire them, you can look to some of these elements to help get your story across so that it resonates with the audience.

Tell the Brand Story

Look at the elements of a good story I have described. Think about how they apply to your business’s story, taking into consideration your brand’s vision and mission. Answer these questions:

• What is the theme of your brand’s story?
• What is the plot of your brand’s story?
• What was the background or landscape at the inception of your business?
• Who (or what) is the protagonist of your brand’s story?
• Who (or what) is the antagonist of your brand’s story?
• What did each of those characters want?
• What were your main characters’ motives?
• What were the biggest conflicts the protagonist was up against?
• Was there a climax moment? What happened?
• What was the resolution? Did the protagonist get what he or she wanted? How about the antagonist?
• How does the story end? (For a business, the question might be reframed as “How is the business doing now?”)

Now, think about how these ideas that build the brand story can be applied to other types of stories as they relate to the brand or the business, such as those told through community experiences and visual representations.

Example: The Chipotle Scarecrow

In September 2013, Chipotle Mexican Grill debuted a campaign that ­consists of a three-and-a-half-minute animated video in conjunction with a video game that features similar content and rewards players with free food at the chain. The video, released via YouTube, depicts a scarecrow who works for “Crow Industries,” a large food plant that supplies the city’s fast-food restaurants with its animal products. The plant, run by robotic crows, processes the cartoon livestock into mechanically produced meals, even labeled “100% beef-ish.” Crow Industries boasts that its food is all natural beef and chicken, yet the chickens are pumped with antibiotics and the cows live in boxes so tiny that only their bodies fit. As Fiona Apple sings a slow, haunting version of “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the protagonist scarecrow visually laments his role in food supply and commutes home to his idyllic house in the country. At his idyllic cottage, he gathers the best homegrown vegetables from his garden and returns to the city to sell his bounty in the form of fresh Mexican burritos under a banner stating, “Cultivate a Better World.”

A marketing campaign is successful if it broadcasts its message to its intended audience, creates a conversation, and engages its customers. Throughout “The Scarecrow” campaign, Chipotle did all three. It made a statement about the industrial nature of the American food supply and made it obvious that customers want fresh, locally produced food devoid of chemicals. The socially responsible fast-food restaurant uses the video to shed a little bit of light on industrial farming practices without seeming preachy. Additionally, by creating a fictional, animated world, Chipotle sidesteps the issues relating to using real footage of factory farms for shock value. Chipotle prides itself on the quality of ingredients and sources, most from local and/or organic farms. According to Chipotle’s website, it is committed to “food with integrity, meaning serving the very best sustainably raised food possible with an eye to great taste, great nutrition, and great value.” This sentiment is clearly reinforced in this campaign.

In addition to broadcasting its position, Chipotle has started the conversation about the issues surrounding our food supply. A quick Internet search can find numerous articles, even weeks after the initial campaign launched, discussing the message of the video and the game. By having others continue the conversation about the importance of ethically raised livestock and organic produce, Chipotle is reaching a larger audience (for free) and fostering discussion around the food-supply chain and the merits of improving the status quo. Even if consumers and the media are not talking specifically about burritos, Chipotle has managed to associate itself with sustainable food practices in the minds of consumers.

Finally, Chipotle engaged its customer base via a game. Organizations are quickly learning that a glut of messages are vying for our attention, and Chipotle’s video game may force consumers to subconsciously listen to its message a bit longer via game play. The game puts the player in the shoes of the scarecrow, navigating the dangers of the industrial food factory, essentially causing the player to fight the industrial food system digitally. Players can even win a free burrito coupon, bringing gamers straight to the steps of their nearest Chipotle. Through “The Scarecrow” campaign, Chipotle has created informed consumers through education and engagement.

Tactics

Unfortunately, storytelling isn’t just throwing each of the story structure ­elements together to create a story. In order to effectively convey a message, there are a few items you should keep in mind while telling your story. We refer to these as tactics, and you can use these tactics to help make your stories more interesting and memorable to your audience.

A story won’t be captivating unless there are stakes. In talking about stakes, we mean knowing what costs would be associated with failure. The best stories have all-or-nothing stakes, where people can lose their homes, their families, their loved ones, or their livelihoods if they fail at their missions. Sometimes, storytellers can manipulate concepts that don’t seem inherently high stakes into something that has the tension of a higher-stakes dramatic climax, merely due to the relationships between one another or the context of the story. You might see this in cases where the character has to get her lucky doll back, or where someone has to get something difficult done within a short amount of time. It may not seem like that big of a deal if a slacker protagonist has to get her final exam essay complete within 48 hours, but the stakes are much higher if we know that if she fails, she won’t get to graduate from high school and she’ll lose her college scholarship. If you are telling a story and you can’t identify the stakes, identify the worst thing that could happen if your main character doesn’t complete the task, and aim to put your audience into your main character’s shoes.

Another aspect of storytelling that’s important to understand is dialogue. While not all types of stories rely on dialogue, some rely on it almost exclusively. If you are writing dialogue for your script or story, think carefully about what people actually say and how they communicate information, and try to tap into that. This can be difficult for someone who is new to storytelling, but taking an improv class can help with understanding the natural flow of conversation. When dialogue sounds stilted and unrealistic, people notice.

Sometimes stories are just as much about what’s not said as they are about what is said. In telling your stories, experiment with ways to deliver subtext. These are subtle messages that indicate a stance on an issue, even though the story never outright announces that’s the point. One example we often use at General Assembly is the epic storyline of Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl TV ad, which seems to imply a subtext that the world is going down a draconian path, but that Apple is there to create a revolution. Even though the commercial never explicitly says as much, it is often interpreted in such a way that the subtext, a better future, shines through.

Crafting a great story goes beyond understanding the fundamental structure of storytelling. To create the best story, you should also have some degree of understanding of the power of language. Community managers need to have strong writing and communication skills, and part of that is having an extremely strong grasp of language. It means knowing the technical aspects, which includes editorial skills such as capitalization and punctuation, but it also means knowing more nuanced things, like sentence structure and how to use interesting stories and copy to convey information.

In writing a story, one device you can use to help set the stage for your audience is character development. Steve Jobs will likely prove to be a major icon in America’s history, much like Thomas Edison or Teddy Roosevelt, but much of his legacy hinges on knowing what kind of guy Steve Jobs was when he was alive. Sharing facts about his past or illustrating ways he took his work extremely seriously are great devices to help a person understand what it meant to be Steve Jobs.

It helps to use vivid imagery to illustrate your stories. This can mean interesting graphics or videos, but in many cases, you can create interesting visual imagery using only words. These visual images keep people interested, and in many cases can also inject some humor or emotion into your work.

In using this vivid imagery, you can experiment with similes. A simile is a literary device that uses the word “like” or “as” to compare two items. Instead of saying, “The dress was soft,” you might say, “The dress was as soft as the fur of a kitten.” Clearly, it’s much more interesting to use the kitten simile than it is to simply say the item is soft.

Additionally, you can incorporate the use of metaphors into your stories. A metaphor is an implicit comparison of one thing to another. Rather than using “like” or “as” as with a simile, you’d say something more like “All the world’s a stage” (to borrow from William Shakespeare). This well-known phrase elicits the image that we are all just performers on the stage of the world.

If you’re creating a story to share with your community, you might also want to use tactics of persuasion to help inspire people to see your point of view. In storytelling, you can do this best by stating your thesis, using facts and data to support it, and then coming to a logical conclusion at the end of the piece. This is more of an expository storytelling tactic, but every so often it can be applicable in the community space.

One of the more useful storytelling tactics is the element of surprise. I touched on this previously when I mentioned twist endings, but even on a broader scale, it’s this element of surprise that really creates a special connection with the audience. No one wants to watch a video if we already know what’s going to happen. What we want to watch is a piece that delightfully surprises us through humor, or through uplifting content, or through an unexpected dramatic twist. But even when presenting and speaking in front of people, surprising them by using an interesting tactic such as asking them a question, doing a silly dance, or embracing a different character can make all the difference in the effectiveness of your story.

Finally, another interesting storytelling tactic is to start by setting the stage for where you are now, and then use that to formulate what the future could be. This tactic gets people excited about what the future may bring, and it helps encourage them to follow you forward in this journey. This tends to be an excellent persuasive tactic, and is used by people seeking business budgets and funding, as well as by people giving TED talks and hosting major press events, such as when Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s iPhone.

Getting People Emotionally Invested in Your Brand

Now that we’ve discussed the story structure and the tactics you can use to help tell your stories, it’s time to address the number one issue that plagues marketers when it comes to storytelling in the community space: getting people emotionally invested in your story.

A really great story is an honest appeal to a person’s emotions. These are the stories that make us laugh, cry, or cower in fear. Each of these elements may be simply an aspect of the story, but they could also be incorporated into the overarching narrative (that is, a sad story or a funny story). In community management and digital storytelling, we tend to see the most success with uplifting stories and funny stories, as these often have the highest possibility of “going viral.” People tend to share things that make them look respectable or cool in the eyes of their audiences, and as such, funny and uplifting stories seem to have the most impact.

On the other hand, stories may rely on a rational appeal as well. In these cases, the author uses numbers and hard data to help get the story across. It might mean using facts and statistics to help back up claims. Many good stories incorporate the use of both. You might use an emotional story to drive your narrative, but then incorporate data to help hammer home important points.

In deciding how to appeal to your community’s emotions, it’s essential that you know them, and know them well. It’s also important that whichever stance you take is on-brand for your business, as your 100-year-old investment ­banking firm may not be the right place to try to tell humorous stories. Remember that all of these stories are reflections of your brand, and as such it’s important that all are true to your brand and can tap into the needs and desires of your audience.

One of the best ways to determine how your stories might best appeal to your audience is to be in touch with your community. A community of mommy bloggers might have a collective need to protect their children, so the story you might want to tell with your new children’s soap products is one that taps into the desire to protect children. This may mean telling about products that have been proven unsafe for children, and then using your product to show all the benefits, such as all-natural ingredients and fewer reported skin irritations than competing products.

You can learn what your community is interested in by going back to the listening and discovery exercises we talked about in Chapter 7, in order to help set the framework for these stories. It’s important to remember that different communities will respond to different things. And, like most things, it’s important to test and validate your assumptions before spending significant resources in executing.

To get people emotionally invested in your brand, it’s important to create an awesome story. The story is what will resonate with people, and it’s why people remember your brand. It should be true to your mission, and your voice should be consistent. Using the preceding tactics, you should be able to find numerous ways to reach your readers, and should never be stuck trying to think of types of content to generate. Your audience is already telling you what they want to see. They need to know that your brand is listening.

Content Creation

Using the tactics outlined in this chapter, you can now start finding ways to create content that that will truly speak to your reader. Let’s do a little overview of the types of digital content you can create:

• Micro: This is super short content, such as those types that live on Twitter.
• Short-form: This is slightly longer content, such as the type you might post on Facebook.
• Photographic: Most social media sites these days have some area for photographic content, but sites such as Instagram and Snapchat are almost exclusively dedicated to pictures.
• Video (and animation): Filmed (or animated) content of any length, available on sites like YouTube and Vimeo.
• Graphics: Graphics could include webcomics or infographics, and they are often supplemental to blog content.
• Blog: Medium-length content that goes deeper into particular subject matter, typically hosted on sites like WordPress.
• Long-form: This type of content may appear in the form of ebooks or white papers, and involves a much deeper analysis of information.
• Press releases: If you have news to share about your business, you may wish to issue a press release to help garner interest in your story from media outlets.
• Slide decks: A mishmash of the preceding content types, brands are using slide decks more and more often to tell their stories using many different images and text.

You may also be able to submit content via newspaper columns, magazine articles, and traditional books, but in digital media we tend to think of this less when thinking about what it means to create content. Content could also technically encompass paid media such as Google Ads and Sponsored Tweets, but we tend to think of those separately, as they serve a different purpose and typically that type of ad spending comes from different parts of the budget.

Content encompasses a range of things, but the content we’re talking about here is the type you own and that you can use to help communicate your message to your community. In the preceding chapter, we discussed which platforms we can use to best reach your audience.

It’s important for brands to generate numerous types of content in order to keep their followers engaged. If you can provide consistent, interesting content, your followers will be more likely to interact with your brand and ultimately become the types of brand advocates who can generate coveted word-of-mouth recommendations.

In creating good content, look back to the storytelling methodologies I’ve listed to help figure out the most powerful ways to reach people. If necessary, you can hire a blogger and a graphic designer to work with you on a freelance basis to help keep the content flowing. They’ll know what to cover after you start your content calendar, which we’ll cover in Chapter 12.

Remember that if you create long-form content, you can also repurpose the content as short-form content. Or if you post freestanding photos, you can also incorporate these in emails and other press materials. Because so much of community management is about sharing great content and putting it into the world, it’s important to make sure you have interesting, relevant content on a consistent basis. Notice that the most popular blogs and social media channels thrive on consistent content, and that when they stop posting and updating, they lose their relevance.

Content Strategy

Once you decide which types of content to create, you’ll need to focus on how to get that content out there in the world. Earlier in the book, I talked about designing a content strategy that takes the information you gleaned from your social media listening and developing a content strategy for your business.

The content strategy should be a protocol for your content creation efforts, identifying which areas of content you’d like to focus on developing, as well as what results you’re seeking by distributing that content. It should offer realistic goals, and should also aim to take into consideration the types of content that are creating conversions on your website. Your content strategy should determine which platforms are the most valuable to you, and it should offer guidelines as to how to best leverage these for results.

Content strategy means also developing a system for maintaining the content on the site. This means designating who will be in charge of which community management roles within your company. If your social media accounts have a high level of customer service focus, the community team might have to work with the customer service team to best figure out a system for handling both the customer service complaints and the community conversations.

Essentially, the content strategy should be a repeatable system for creating and distributing content. This means that if a new person were to walk onto the job tomorrow, the content strategy document could guide them in how the business is using community management. It should take into consideration the results of the social media listening study to determine which platforms to focus on, as well as the strategies to best execute these plans.

In creating the content strategy, setting goals is one of the best ways to help you put a plan in place to hit those goals. Though the process of iteration has been talked about more deeply throughout the book, by using the framework in Chapter 9 you can figure out what’s working and what isn’t and use that information to help create a strong community.

If you have an e-commerce business or a business with seasonal activity, take that into consideration as you build your content plan. Will you need to hire new people or agencies to help with execution during these busier seasons? Think about all the things that might impact your content strategy, and do your best to address them within the content strategy document.

At the end of the day, the content strategy document is a living document. It should be updated regularly to reflect changes in implementation, and it should be reviewed frequently to address changes in audience tastes or the market landscape.

Surveys show that companies that have content strategy documents in place, as well as at least one person who is responsible for the development and maintenance of the content strategy, end up seeing far greater returns for the content they put out into the world. Keep this in mind as you develop your content strategy, as having these tools in your back pocket can contribute to significant ROI.

Differentiating Content

While we’ve nailed down the fact that it’s important to have consistent content, there’s also one other thing that will push your content above your competitors’: differentiation.

In nearly any industry, you can find businesses publishing content merely because it helps improve their visibility in search engines. This is fine for those companies, and content produced for search engine optimization is a fairly useful and important marketing strategy. But they’re also putting a lot of wasted effort into generating content that’s not generating engagement.

To create the type of content that will help drive your community, you need to really be in touch with what interests them. Again, this is where your social media listening comes into play. You can also draw on your understanding of your target audience and brand, which we discussed in detail in Chapter 6.

But beyond that, you can use the storytelling principles and tactics detailed in this chapter to help create interesting content. Tell emotion-driven stories, and see how they resonate with your brand. If it’s on brand for you, use humor to help make people laugh, or to tell an uplifting story to inspire your audience. Post inspirational quotes or jump into the conversation when there’s a new meme making the rounds.

Another way to differentiate your content is to experiment with creativity. Creativity knows no boundaries, so keep the ideas flowing. I’ve seen stop-motion animations, inspirational documentaries, funny commercials, Google Hangouts, Q&As, and a plethora of other ways to bring people together in their communities.

Also, be sure to keep abreast of trending topics so that you can chime in as it seems suitable. Think back to the Super Bowl in 2013, when the lights in the stadium suddenly went out. While the lights were still out, people turned to social media to figure out what was going on. At the same time, Oreo posted an image of one of its recognizable cookies emanating a white-light aura in a dark backdrop, with the words “You can still dunk in the dark.” That simple act cost no media dollars but garnered 525 million impressions. In the first hour, the tweet was retweeted more than 10,000 times, received more than 18,000 likes, and was shared more than 5,000 times. Why? Because it was topical, funny, and creative, which is a perfect recipe for differentiating your content.

Finally, one of the most important—yet often overlooked—keys to differentiating your content is to spend time honing your brand voice. If people know just from a certain style of picture or a type of content that it’s yours, then you’re helping to facilitate recognition of that nebulous thing we call brand. Writing in a consistent voice can help tremendously in helping people recognize your work.

Storytelling: The Essence of Reaching the Community

All the work we’ve done so far in establishing business foundations, understanding our target audience, learning about our brand, and using listening and discovery doesn’t mean much if we don’t have great content to help reach our customers. In creating good content, it’s important to be authentic, and to use powerful storytelling techniques to captivate readers. Additionally, it’s necessary to understand how your community is using these platforms, and to create content that touches on the conversations they’re already having in the space.

Think, for example, about a community of fitness advocates. Assuming the community manager has done his or her work well, that person might understand that the fitness group loves to be motivated, loves to know about new health trends and topics, and has frequent conversations about the safety of health supplements.

If this is all true, then it follows that there are many types of content you can create. But it does not follow that all of them will be on-brand. If the company is rooted in inspiration and motivation, humor may not be an appropriate tactic The important thing here is to test and iterate so that you’re tapping into the conversations that drive conversions for your brand.

If, as a community manager, you want to chime in on the safety of a nutritional supplement, you can do so using text only. But what could be better is an infographic, which your designer can create based on information your team finds on the Web. It takes significantly more work to create an infographic, but they also tend to be more sharable as well. That means that by investing in that type of content, you’re also encouraging your followers to be advocates for your brand.

Again, in creating and distributing content types, it’s important to test and iterate. If your blog content isn’t pulling the number of clicks that you would deem a success and is failing to help you meet your goals, think about why that might be the case. I feel so strongly about the importance of tactical initiative testing that I’ve dedicated an entire chapter to it, which is the next chapter in this book.

Summary

For CMs, the art of storytelling is an important skill to refine if you’re not walking into your role in possession of it already. Like any skill, creating great content is one that can be developed and evolved. Use your listening and discovery work to determine what your audience is most interested in reading and sharing, and you’ll have a strong foundation to build from.