Improving your storytelling content strategy

The most successful marketers today know that the value of content marketing is driven by great storytelling. A content strategy that’s focused on telling powerful brand stories is far more effective at capturing the attention of audiences, engaging them for an extended time, and building an emotional bond that ultimately results in high-value actions.

To build and execute a great storytelling content strategy, marketers need insight into the wants and needs of their users. They need to know which stories that will resonate most with target audiences. And most importantly, they need real-time feedback on how effectively their stories are winning audiences over. That’s where the Knotch Content Intelligence Platform can help.

The power of storytelling in content strategy

It’s no secret that storytelling is a critical driver for the state of content marketing today. A successful storytelling content strategy can help brands to:

• Hook an audience. Good storytelling cuts through the noise of ho-hum campaigns to capture an audience’s attention with a strong opening premise.
• Keep them engaged. Because human beings love stories more than facts and figures, a storytelling-based content strategy is able to keep users engaged much longer, allowing marketers to drive home their value proposition and build a stronger relationship with target audiences.
• Create a bond. Stories engage the emotions – hope, fear, aspiration, and desire – while building bonds based on empathy and trust. When audiences are moved by the stories a brand is telling, they’ll return time and again.
• Move them to act. While we value intellect, it’s our emotions that most often drive decision-making. A good storytelling content strategy focuses on provoking the emotions that prompt audiences to take action, and to decide that a brand can help them achieve a goal or solve a problem.

Knotch: the Content Intelligence Platform

The Knotch Content Intelligence Platform provides marketers with all the tools they need to improve storytelling and content strategy. With tools for planning, measuring, optimizing, and benchmarking content efforts, Knotch provides real-time intelligence that fuels data-driven content campaigns and infuses brand stories with greater insight and accuracy.

With a clear view of their audiences’ need and want, marketers can craft stories that will capture attention and resonate more effectively. A publisher matching tool help to identify the channels that will best reach target audiences, and an innovative feedback tool provides real-time data on the most important metric in content marketing – how audiences feel about the content and stories they’re consuming.

To help marketers know how audiences feel about content in real time, we’ve developed an innovative feedback unit that we embed directly into every piece of content. When audiences watch a video, read a blog, or interact with a questionnaire, our feedback unit appears and asks them to share their feeling about content as they consume it. An intuitive design lets users register their opinion in just a few seconds. By providing an immediate and frictionless experience, we have been able to garner response rates that are thousands of times higher than the industry average for measuring audience sentiment. And because our feedback unit collects real-time data, we can provide our brand customers with analytics that help to optimize storytelling in real time.

Comprehensive solutions for content strategy and execution

The Knotch Content Intelligence Platform provides a suite of solutions for content marketing and storytelling.

• Competitive content analysis helps marketers to understand the stories that the competition is telling, along with insight into their content strategies, publishing cadences, and creative approaches.
• A publisher matchmaking feature gives marketers access to a comprehensive catalog of publishers and tools for identifying the best channels based on target audience demographics, KPIs, and more.
• Our content analytics software shows marketers how to track content performance to know what’s working and what’s not. We provide a comprehensive view of performance based on quantitative metrics, qualitative feedback, and audience demographics/psychographics.
• Our content journey mapping tool lets teams execute storytelling content strategy by defining custom stages in the journey of each audience and mapping the most appropriate content to each stage.
• A content recommendation engine engages audiences in conversations to get answers to essential questions, using AI-powered processes and continuous learning to inform the next, most valuable step in the customer journey.
• An automated content library makes it easy to keep track of every piece of content ever created, organizing and classifying content in a central repository for faster search and easier access.
• Automated content insights provide marketers with critical intelligence based on topic, audience, and other criteria while also surfacing insights that content teams might easily miss.

Why brands choose Knotch for storytelling and content strategy

To refine and improve their storytelling content strategy, leading brands choose Knotch because we deliver an unbiased view of data. Most content analytics are based on data provided by distribution channels, digital agencies, and other third parties. These firms are inevitably incentivized to provide data that shows their work most favorably. And because their data is collected through opaque processes, it’s hard for brands to know how reliable this information is.

With Knotch, brands get data that is totally unbiased and transparently collected. We work exclusively for brands and never monetize from distribution channels. Consequently, our only obligation is to tell our brand customers the unvarnished truth about the success of their content efforts. The data we produce is first-party data, owned forever by the brand, enabling content teams to end their dependence on unreliable third-party data.

FAQs: What is storytelling in content strategy?

What is storytelling in content strategy?

In content marketing, a storytelling strategy focuses on identifying the wants and needs that drive a target audience’s decisions and telling brand stories that will resonate deeply with individual users. Content that is story-based is far more likely to capture a user’s attention, engage them in a prolonged conversation, and help to build an emotional bond with the brand.

How can marketers improve content strategy and storytelling?

Telling good stories requires marketers to have clear insight into the needs and interests of target audiences, and to know how audiences feel about the stories they’re consuming. To tell stories successfully, content marketers need solutions that can deliver accurate data on audience psychographics as well as real-time feedback on audience sentiment, letting marketers know whether audiences like the content they’re consuming.