This week I attend an event in New York City for content marketers. One of the speakers talked about data and storytelling. Creating narratives out of numbers is my everyday jam, but I've seen that the marketing zeitgeist is all headed in the same direction - an impressive statistic, a cute icon, and a short blurb on the proofpoint.
I questioned the speaker about how a company could stand out when everyone is doing the same thing. His answer was to tell your authentic story.
I thought long and hard about this advice and realized that there was an authentic story that the company I worked for could tell - but it didn't align with current marketing directives. Yet, rather than boosting about the proofpoints that everyone else was also crowing about, we could be highlighting a single, definitive truth. How often with statistics are we digging around for the footnote, the asterisk - how much data was used? How many people were surveyed? How fresh are these numbers? If you tell the story that everyone knows is true about yourself, there is, instead, immediate head nodding and acknowledgement.
Like every other area in life, things get easier, marketing-wise, when you own your story.
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