What Did Great Literary Works Of Fiction Teach Us About Content Marketing?

There are a number of approaches that you can take when talking about content marketing. There are traditional approaches, as well as, “try and see if it works out” methods. Being an avid reader and given my love for analogies, I came across this thought of how much we can learn from the books of fiction that keep us hooked and leave us asking for more. Well, isn’t that exactly the kind of sentiment you want from your customers?

Here is a post talking about how you can create content that keeps your audience a.k.a customers hooked and more importantly, sells.

Brand – Let us start with branding. Introducing your brand in the form of logo and tagline is key to the content you are marketing. Take for example the protagonist of a novel. The author ensures a very clear introduction of the character, the story is about. It is important for the readers to understand this character to ensure understanding of the plot and the story. The same applies to the brand. Start off your message with your logo (a high dpi one) and a good tagline.

Define – As the story unravels, the author strives to give us enough information about each scene and sentiment so that we can visualize the story unfold in front of our eyes. They give us everything we need to turn the words into a high definition movie in our minds. You need to do that with your product or service. Since in the world of e-commerce is all about your online marketing, it is important for you to give your potential customers enough information that will help them understand your offering, irrespective of the fact that they cannot physically see or experience it.

Introduce – The story goes on and boom! The author introduces the problem the protagonist is going to deal with. Their problem becomes our problem. We look forward to how it can be solved. This is exactly the approach you need to take when it comes to the content you are creating. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Try to understand the issues they might be facing, the ones that your product or service can solve. Lay down those questions in front of them so that they can relate to them. Even though the problem might have been a dormant one, these questions will bring them in the forefront, thus creating an opportunity for your offering.

Tension – Just like the author creates unimaginable amounts of roadblocks and challenges for the protagonist to overcome, talk in length about how important it is to address the pain-points you mentioned in the point above and harp on its necessity to be done away with.

Climax – Finally, give them the solution they have been looking for. Tell them about how your product or service offering can help do away their problem for good. Just like the story finally reaches the conclusion, help your customers reach a logical conclusion by linking the “Define” stage (where you describe your offering to perfection) to the “Climax” stage (where you tell them how your product will positively help them out).

However, there is a catch. The author has plenty of words at their disposal, something that is not so much available to the content marketer. But the good part is; you can create as many copies as you want for your leads. That gives you enough opportunity to try out and test different approaches of the ones mentioned above.