Digital Machiavelli #5: Too Long; Didn't Listen
On the vital importance of narrative in corporate demand generation.
Welcome back to my ongoing digital content strategy course, delivered straight to your inbox every week.
What You’ll Learn Today: How a cohesive narrative prevents self-sabotage in marketing efforts, and why this is of particular importance to enterprise.
A few months ago I attended a webinar hosted by Palantir Technologies titled “Why artificial intelligence hasn’t transformed health -- yet.”
I was drawn in by the effective clickbait title, so I was expecting an interesting narrative and to walk away with something cutting edge to think about.
Unfortunately, the webinar turned out to have no discernable story.
By the end, even as an attentive listener, I simply had an empty space in my head where a summary of what was being presented should have been.
I knew two things on my way out:
There’s trouble in healthcare automation in 2021
Palantir has an offering called Foundry
But beyond that, I just couldn’t summon up any key elements in my head to think about after leaving.
And as I reflected on why this was, it occurred to me that the culprit was the structure of the narrative within this webinar, or lack thereof.
So why is that such a problem?
Long Term vs Short Term
If you don't have a narrative, you don't have a strategy.
The high-level strategic decisions you make in an isolated meeting room full of executives mean absolutely nothing if your message doesn't permeate every piece of content and every interaction your company has with customers, partners, academics, reporters, or anyone else.
If people are walking away from your webinars, speeches, or video ads without a condensed, memorable summary of your fundamental story, you don't have a narrative, you don't have a strategy, and you've just wasted your time.
On the other hand, if you do embed your messaging with an intuitive story containing memorable focus points, you're planting a seed in each viewer's associative memory.
This seed will grow over time, so that even if the attendee doesn't immediately follow a call to action after the event, and even if they don’t remember the technical details, the overarching story will help them remember your brand or product and the problem it solves.
Because we all remember stories far more readily than any throwaway slogans or technical jargon, which outlines just how vital it is to invest effort into storytelling, to cultivate long-term investment from the audience you’re trying to capture.
Enterprise vs Small Business
Another element that outlines the importance of a strong narrative is the nature of demand generation in a big business environment.
Startups and solopreneurs actually have an advantage here, because besides their story, they're also selling themselves.
They make use of individualized branding to stand out in the market the same way interesting individuals stand out in a room of distinctly average people.
Big corporations can only partially mimic this by featuring famous (or infamous) people as part of their events and content releases, but fundamentally, a corporate brand will never have the same kind of highly specific persona as an individual, thus making a memorable narrative that much more important.
Macro vs Micro
So what would have made that webinar more memorable?
Ideally, a combination of brand-level narrative and a smaller-scale story for that particular event.
Some questions to ponder.
What is your brand’s overarching narrative?
What is the story you want to tell with a new event, e-mail, or other campaign?
And can you stack these stories together cohesively?
Answer those, and you’ll be in a great spot to boost long-term memorability, not to mention immediate conversions, social engagement, and every other kind of metric tracked by your marketing team.