Everyone talks about the power of storytelling. But how do you cut through the hype and use it to create real world results? With the right strategies storytelling can become a profitable part of your content marketing campaigns.

In this episode I discuss how to create meaningful story-driven content marketing campaigns with my guest, Katie Wagner.

Katie spent more than 15 years as a journalist. In 2010, Katie realized that she could use the skills she learned in the newsroom to help business owners connect with their clients online and started her own agency, KWSM. Katie is a proud member of Vistage, Provisors and the Young Entrepreneur Council.

She has served as a member of the Advisory Board for Web Wise Kids, a non-profit focused on keeping kids safe on the internet and social media. In 2012, she was honored with the organization’s ‘Champion for Children Award.’

We dive into topics including:

How to use informational interviews with your clients to create your marketing stories.
The structure of a great informational interview.
Where and how to share your story once you create it.
How to get happy clients to share your story with their friends in their language.
Why learning why your happy clients are happy can help you learn a lot about your business and ultimately improve your client experience.
A deeper discussion into how to create a successful marketing strategy with your content once it’s ready.
An examination of the pillars of story-driven content marketing and how to expand that marketing process.
How to uncover how prospects discover you and make the decision to become your clients.
The definition of “nurturing content” and how to create it.
How to nurture your client relationships once you close the deal.
How to get qualified referrals from your existing clients.
Why case studies are the most compelling way to create story-driven marketing campaigns and how to create great ones.
The one thing, above all else, you need to do to create story-driven content marketing campaigns.

…and more golden nuggets of advice!

Getting Into Storytelling

Katie was a journalist for 15 years before she started a digital marketing agency. She specifically worked in television and radio. She worked all over the world and retired from CNN headline News back in 2009 and opened her agency in 2010. She did that because she realized that nobody was going home to watch the five o’clock news anymore. They were craving relatable stories to consume and moving to other social platforms outside of television.

They started getting their headlines from places like Facebook and Twitter. As those mediums came to prominence, they became the way people wanted to get their information. Katie saw an opportunity to teach business owners how to tell their story using digital channels. She believed that founding a company in the tenets of journalism and knowing what attracts an audience was a good place to start.

Let’s look at…

What Successful Marketing is Really About

First Katie defined brand journalism. To her that is the act of creating content that builds an emotional connection with the consumer.

It’s about the humans involved in a business; not just the business entity. Brand journalism highlights the stories of the people that make or deliver your products or services. It highlights the stories of the people that benefit from your products and services. It’s about emotionally connecting stories that we have to tell beyond just features and benefits also known as the marketing or the sales language.

It’s really about human language. Those are the stories they tell at the her agency. Even during the early days of social media gaining prominence, they had to interview their clients to uncover the human side of their stories. When you ask somebody about their business they usually talk about the services they provide and what those services can do for people or their products and what the benefits are. They forget the most important parts. The relatable human parts.

What are they?

They’re found in answers to questions such as what value do your products or services provide for people? How do they change lives? From there the story focuses on the transformation achieved from using your products and services. The first step with Katie’s clients is to teach people to start thinking of their businesses based on the answers to those questions. From there they focus on the outcomes their clients’ are creating more than the products and services they are delivering.

Which leads us to look at…

The Structure of A Great Story

When Katie’s agency is telling stories for their clients there’s a purpose behind every story they tell. They think of it as the “transformation moment”. There’s what’s going on with your clients before they meet you; what is life like before they interact with you? What are their pain points? Then there’s engagement. They use your product or service. And then there’s what happens in your clients’ lives afterwards. That is the story arc you want to tell.

Look at it another way. What are their struggles? What are the fears and motivations they have? And then what happens at that moment they engage with your products or services? Then what is the transformation after that engagement? How is life different? How does life look better, safer or easier for them? If you can start creating content around that transformation point, those stories really resonate with people.

Even when Katie’s agency is creating website content for a client they paint a picture of the pain that prospects are facing and how their client’s product or service solves that. Not through what dit does, but what is the emotional state their solution invokes? The before and the after. If you think of that story arc, that’s a great place to start.

And then there are a multitude of different spinoffs from that. You can talk about individual types of pain. Is it philosophical or an emotional pain? Is it a physical pain? Is it a tactical pain?

Here’s an example using Katie’s own business.

People that hire KWSM do so because they want qualified leads for their businesses. The sort of surface pain point may be that their business is slow or they’re not getting as much business as they want, or they need a better way to get business. But really the pain point is “My business won’t survive unless I bring in new clients.”

That is the emotional connection they’re trying to get. People need lead generation not just to grow, but because they’re afraid of what happens if they don’t grow. Unfortunately, people don’t usually admit that to each other. But if you dig deep, for example, if most of Katie’s clients are afraid in today’s geopolitical climate, they fear that if they don’t have a good lead generation strategy, their business may not make it through to the other side.

And that’s the pain point they have to step into and solve.

And that is just the beginning!

Listen to or watch the interview to continue this story and get more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

About My Guest

Idea Climbing Podcast Katie Wagner Marketing

Katie Wagner spent more than 15 years as a journalist. After graduating Magna Cum Laude from Boston University with a B.S. in Broadcast Journalism and a B.A. in International Relations, she began her career as an investigative reporter, and then spent a decade as a television and radio news anchor. Katie has worked at CBS, ABC, Fox, CNN and National Public Radio. In addition, she has appeared on dozens of commercials...