The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [7]
...online, you don’t have a captive audience. You have a multi-tasking, distracted, ready-to-leave-your-site-at-any-time audience who has very specific goals in mind.
If your content doesn’t meet those goals, and quickly, they will leave.
This fact—that the reader’s interest and attention is the central, precious thing—is the professional editor’s mantra. Here’s one of my favorite passages from Arthur Plotnik’s wonderful The Elements of Editing:3
An editor’s only permanent alliance is with the audience, the readership. It is the editor’s responsibility to hook that readership; to edify it, entertain it, stroke it, shake it up . . . Authors know their subject. Editors specialize in knowing the audience.
Great writers know what their readers want and need to hear. But the responsibility for validating assumptions about the audience and tuning the content to suit that audience remains with the editors—and now the content strategists—of the world. Paradoxically, it’s only by working tirelessly for our readers that we can genuinely serve our clients and employers.
Stories matter
Humans are compulsive storytellers. We think and teach and connect by creating stories. And the thinkers who change opinions, the teachers who inspire students, the politicians who win elections, and of course, the publishers who sell books and magazines all tend to have something in common: they can tell a great story.
For anyone who communicates as a profession, stories are the ultimate hack.
Whatever corner of the publishing world they come from, editors know how to help other people tell the best, most engaging stories they can tell. Content people with backgrounds in journalism or publishing usually have the basics of storytelling down cold, but the rest of us can learn from the storytelling principles of these fields—from the basics like building a lead that hooks the reader (and supporting it with facts and quotations) to sophisticated techniques for layering in secondary narratives.
If you’re not entirely comfortable with your understanding of storytelling, it can be helpful to go back to the elementary principles taught in high-school journalism classes—familiar concepts like:
The inverted pyramid: This term describes a classic news story structure in which all the most important basic information appears at the beginning of the story, and is followed by less important information ordered from most important to least important. “Important” here means important to the reader. Note that this is the exact opposite of the fluffiest sort of marketing copy that begins with statements like “The world of international business is getting ever more complicated.”
5 Ws and an H: You may remember this one from grade school. It’s intended to remind writers that they need to explain the basics of every story: what happened, who is involved, when and where it happened, why it happened, and how it happened. If you happen to be writing marketing copy, this might translate to what the product is, who it’s made for, why the intended audience should buy it, how it works, and when and where you can get it.
Show, don’t tell: Instead of going on and on about how wonderful and leading-edge your widget is or how much your client cherishes its mission statement, give evidence. Show results, statistics, case studies, personal narratives, and demonstrations of action, and give the puffery a rest.
Of course, these principles are mere starting points. Storytelling isn’t something you learn from a list of tips or a podcast about narrative tricks. You can learn a lot by analyzing structure and practicing technique, but you also have to dig in and read, watch, and listen to the great stories being spun by novelists, journalists, screenwriters, and—yes—bloggers and marketers. (This will make you not only a better content strategist, but also a more interesting dinner companion.)
But why bother with all that if you’re not going to be creating the content yourself? Primarily, because most content strategy projects deal with narratives: brand messages,