We’ve added a new Content Marketing Story Tool to this website that can help you generate story format content easier than ever. It’s a shortcut around writer’s block. Try it out and you’ll see at how easy generating good, rich, relevant content can be. I was surprised by how quickly I was able to create a testimonial format around a real customer’s experience.

When we first learned about this approach, we were skeptical. Then we used it. In no time we had a long story that became a blog post. These are the kinds of stories that get audiences engaged and start generating SEO traction as soon as they’re published. That’s what content marketing does when it works right. This simple-to-use tool works! We’re sharing it with you here. Try it out.

We learned this content marketing story tool approach at a seminar on online marketing.

We went to an online marketing seminar where the speaker had an acute expert knowledge of content marketing.  Listening closely, we learned something extremely valuable. It was a slide revealing a tactic: writing a story by following a formula. This was explained as a solution for generating a story quickly.  The presenter explained how stories are effective for content marketing because they’re easy for a reader to follow and to relate with, plus they are a great way to crank a page out with a high word count. Digital marketers are often faced with the content marketing challenge of deciding what to say. Some people call this dilemma “writers block”, and for someone doing content marketing, it’s a showstopper. This formula approach, she explained, makes writers block easy to overcome.

Is using a formula to generate content a sincere approach?

Although we’d published dozens and dozens of testimonials before, I hadn’t thought of communicating a testimonial in this manner, by using a formula. If you’re like me, you probably have the idea that making content has to be sincere, not artificial. I believed it was about generating organic, unique prose whose form is dictated by the message itself, over and above its function. Storytelling was about accurate representation of a real event, it had to follow some chronology. This was the way it seemed to me.  I didn’t understand how emphasis was more important than technical accuracy, especially when the story illustrates the benefits of a brand.

I thought I had what it takes to generate content. I doubted I would benefit from using a formula.

Then we tried it. We used the formula to describe how we were solving a problem ourselves by using one of our vendor’s products. It was so easy. It was almost effortless to recall real stories about real people who’ve benefited from using Massive Impressions too.

It was so easy for me. I got excited about how easy it could generate good content for us and for our clients.  Instead of shunning using a formula, now I’ve gotten too many results with it, and I love using this approach to creating content.

The Formula-Driven Approach To Content Creation

This content generation formula involves a protagonist, a main character who the story is about. He has a wish and solves a problem. It’s akin to a testimonial. It illustrates an experience of a real client.

It’s different than a testimonial because it doesn’t have to be in the real words of the main character. The content can be optimized for SEO, made to read easier, or parsed with some rhyme or meter. These are among the great advantages that using a storytelling approach has over copying and pasting an actual client’s words. Plus, sometimes you don’t want to use a real client’s name, but instead illustrate an accurate representative experience, so telling a story is better.

Why is sharing an easy-to-read story of a client’s success good for content marketing?

Simple: it’s an easily understood, engaging tactic.  It’s a lot more readable compared to simply listing benefits of a product or service, especially effective compared to using the internal language company loyalists are fond of. It illustrates those benefits in a way that the audience directly relates to, in the audience’s language, putting themselves in the position of the protagonist.

This particular formula of questions, in the order they’re asked, yields a testimonial whose format drives audience sympathy towards the main character and awareness of the brand promise effectively, above and beyond awareness of the brand. It gets right to the point of how the brand benefits the audience.

One key point of sticking to a formula is making sure the core critical elements are addressed. Formulas might feel mechanical, but they work.

We’d certainly love to experiment with and discover more effective content marketing storytelling tools and tactics, so if you’ve got one to share with us, please let us know. If it’s working for you, we’d really treasure your sharing it with us.

There might be better formulas than this particular flavor for addressing other elements that are in different ways. This one sure seems good. We like the results it gives us.

We were so impressed by this approach that we’ve built an online content marketing storytelling tool around it.

This tool we’re sharing wasn’t too difficult to produce because we use WordPress and a fantastic form building plugin, Gravity Forms. There’s this really cool feature: the tool will send you a copy of the story you tell. You can copy and paste from the email into your Word Document, or even into a WordPress Post or Page you’re editing in another window. This tool is a web page form, so you can enter text into it just as easy as typing into Facebook. Since our site is mobile friendly, you could even go to the beach or the park. You can dictate several stories to your phone. They’ll be in your email, waiting for you, back at your desk. Don’t feel guilty if you produce a client success story masterpiece and it feels as fun and easy as finger painting.

If we’re doing content marketing with you, and you hear us asking these questions, you know we’re following a formula that works. Formulas work, and they allow us to produce content whose quality is consistent, easy to read, and effective for content marketing. It’s an easy to use way to communicate how simple it is to succeed using your brand.

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