Talking Content Marketing – With Bernadette Jiwa
Talking Content Marketing gives a warm welcome to speaker, author and brand story strategist, Bernadette Jiwa.
Bernadette helps businesses to see their customers, unlock the value in their stories and become meaningful brands.
Here we go with six questions and six answers related to adopting a story first mindset for your business.
Have businesses got to stop thinking in campaign mindsets and the final delivery (the print, the website, the post) but the committed connection with their audience?
The campaign mindset is based on a marketing model designed to sell things to our grandparents 60 years ago.
In a world where the power has shifted to the consumer, where she decides what’s relevant and what to pay attention to, campaigns are a poor investment of time and resources. We need to think beyond just building awareness and focus on creating difference for, and emotional connection with our customers.
Robert Rose stated that the ‘stories we tell are the only differentiator we have left.’ Is an audience understanding what we stand for (and the voice we develop) more important than the products we sell?
The product is part of the story.
It’s true that increasingly people buy from companies that they feel an affinity for. People who are discerning are exactly the sort of customers we should be working to attract—the kind of customer who doesn’t just make purchasing decisions based on price.
When the standard of everything we buy is good enough, the only way to differentiate ourselves from transactional brands that sell commodities at the cheapest price is to create meaning.
It is easier than ever before to jump in and create (we can blog, we can film with our phones), does none of this matter if businesses don’t understand the problems to solve?
If we’re talking about content marketing here then yes, it’s easy to create something. The trick is to make something that people will care about, the only way to do that is to understand what matters to them before you begin.
A business that is looking to adopt a story first mindset, what are the first two questions they need to be asking themselves?
- Who is this story for?
- Why will they care about it?
A 20th Century mindset of companies bragging, disrupting and self promotion, are consumers becoming better at switching off what isn’t relevant to them?
Yes, but it doesn’t stop us trying to get people’s attention.
We spent $500 billion on advertising in 2013. The question is how much of that ‘marketing’ was designed to please shareholders or our boss? How much of it was business owners feeling scared to stop doing the old things (even when they know it’s not working). If the campaign didn’t work it’s an unsuccessful campaign, which is a lot easier to swallow than the fact that our idea didn’t resonate with people as much as we hoped it would. Our marketing should serve our customers.
If I could grant you a long afternoon lunch in your best restaurant to talk marketing with three other people who influence you, who would they be?
Seth Godin, Angela Ahrendts, Ron Johnson.
HUGE thanks to Bernadette for taking the time out for Talking Content Marketing. To discover more about Bernadette’s approach:
Bernadette on Twitter: click here
The Story Of Telling: click here
Bernadette’s Blog: click here
