Content Pros: Proof That Your Content Needs Fewer Facts and More Story

Teaming up with the team at Convince & Convert, Vidyard's VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard hosts the Content Pros Podcast. For this week's episode, Tyler is joined by Doug Landis, Growth Partner at Emergence Capital, to share his journey of becoming a bonafide storyteller and what that means for content marketing. Check out the full podcast:

Here's a few of our favourite moments:

Why don't you introduce yourself, give a little bit of that background and is being a chief storyteller actually as glamorous as it sounds?

Well, one little caveat to that is that I think everybody is a chief storyteller in their own little world. So you can take that title if you like it as well. Take it with you up to Canada. It's all yours.

Interestingly enough, this notion of the chief storyteller is the title by the way I created myself when I was at Boxed. And it came out of this need for … that I noted over the course of four years that as an organization, as a company, we needed to get better at telling stories. And the reality is we needed to get better at telling our story as a company. Who we are and what we stand for. We needed to get better at telling our pitch, if you will, or our story to our customers as far as what value is delivered to them. And we needed to get better at telling our own story, our own personal story. Why do we actually work there? What gets us excited about it? About working at Boxed. And then finally, we needed to get better at telling our customer's story.

So if you think about it, throughout the entire sales process every time you're engaging with a customer or prospect you really are storytelling. And here's something interesting I found over time, shifting to the role that I'm in right now at Emergence and working with all these great startups is what typically happens is you have a founder CEO that identifies a problem and they build this product to solve this problem. They gain some customer traction and then they go and build their pitch to go raise money. And when they raise the money and with that money they go out and hire a bunch of sales people and they take their pitch, which they use to go raise money and they kind of modify it a little bit and they give that to their sales team and say go, here's the pitch.

What happened to the humanity of telling stories instead of all facts?

It's this idea of the weekend self. You leave work and you go home to your family, you go home to your friends, you go out for the weekend and people are like so how was your day? You might even go home today and be like so I did this podcast today and it was really interesting and you tell a story about our experience just this morning and all of the sudden you go back to work the next day and what do we do? We go back to speaking in facts and figures and bullets and these truncated phrases. We wonder why people don't remember things, we wonder why we have to take so many notes, you wonder why we have all these collaboration tools because we can't remember shit with just a bunch of facts and figures because you know facts and figures fade and stories stick. It's just remembering that the ethos of a great story is something that should be woven into every piece of content. Whether its content marketing content, whether it's your first callback, whether it's your website, whatever it may be, we should be thinking about the stories that we tell.

If you want to hear the full podcast, we've posted it above, and you can read a full transcript of this talk on Convince & Convert, where it was originally posted!

The post Content Pros: Proof That Your Content Needs Fewer Facts and More Story appeared first on Vidyard.

from Vidyard http://www.vidyard.com/blog/content-pros-proof-content-needs-fewer-facts-story/