Joe Lazauskas, Contently

I'm Joe Lazauskas. I'm the head of content strategy at Contently and the co-author of The Storytelling Edge, a book about the art and science of storytelling and how to use it to transform your business and build stronger relationships with people. The book is called The Storytelling Edge, it's about the art and science of storytelling and how to use it to actually build stronger relationships with people, particularly with prospective customers, and through that transform your business. And it really started because me and my co-author Shane Snowes, one of the co-founders of Contemptly, we spent so many years working with different clients and helping develop the industry and seeing what was working for them, what wasn't working. And we had all of these really great lessons we developed over the years and a lot of research that we'd done as journalists and reporters, talking to different neuroscientists, talking to different leading minds in the field. And we wanted to create a book that was really easy to read, that was super fun, that was story driven, that would help people get over the hump and figure out how to tell really compelling stories that would build stronger relationships with the people that they care about. So essentially it actually sparked after Web Summit here two years ago, where we were super depressed about Trump winning the election, and we went back home and we decided, you know what, let's start putting this book together. And we actually wrote it really quickly, in only about six months. And originally we were going to self-publish it just as a Contemptly prank, because we do video series, we do magazines, we do different digital magazines, so we thought, hey, let's sort of publishing wing. But then Wiley came to us asking, hey, have you guys thought about writing a book about content marketing? We were like, oh, well, we already did. So we gave it to them to publish. So it came out earlier this year in February, did pretty well, hit some of the bestseller lists. And more than anything, it's just been great to get to put a physical thing in people's hands that embodies a lot of the stuff that we're just passionate about. The neuroscience of storytelling, the techniques that great storytellers have used throughout history, and just practical tips for developing a strong content strategy and implementing this really hard thing of putting together a great content program inside a brand, whether it's a small startup like us or a giant corporation like Chase or Marriott. We have a lot of checklists within the book that you sort of can see, are you telling a compelling story? One is the four keys to immersive content that's been proven out in a lot of neuroscience tests and studies, which is that one, check is content relatable. So can I actually see myself in this character? Can your customers see themselves in the character and the protagonist of the story that you're telling, whether it's a profile or a video or a case study? The next thing is novelty. Our brains are programmed to light up when we hear or see something new. It's an evolutionary reaction so that when we were cavemen around fires, there's a new threat that came into our environment, we immediately responded to them. Same thing is true with stories, where you want to bring someone in through a relatable story or relatable scenario, but then you want to introduce a new idea, a new plot that they haven't heard before so they don't get bored. The next is fluency. This is the idea of making it as easy as possible for people to engage with your content. Many brands think that, oh, I want to be smart. Let me write at a 12th grade level and use lots of big words and lots of stats and very dry language and then I'll seem super authoritative. But if you actually look at the best writers throughout history, they all wrote at an elementary school level, a third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade level. And what's much harder is to take very complex topics and write about it in a clear, concise way that's fun and that's story driven. And you'll get what the best brands do is they break down very complex topics into simple stories that engages everyone from your 22 year old junior employee to the CMO or CEO, who just as much as us don't want to have to work super, super hard to get through a dense topic. They want video that has quick cuts and quick action and has voiceover and captions that starts in three seconds. They want stories that they want papers and articles that start with stories and use clear, simple language. Fluency is really important if you want people to actually spend any time with your content. The fourth key is tension. So Aristotle once said that the key to a great story is establishing the gap between what is and what could be. And then almost closing that gap before opening it up again. Then almost closing it before opening it up again. And if you think about all your favorite stories, I bet you would find this pattern. I think your favorite rom-coms, right? Stories always about how, boy, in the state he's in, he wants the girl, the girl doesn't like him, there's this gap between what is and what could be for him being with the girl. But then he starts to charm her, but then what happens? Gap closes, then the jerk boyfriend comes into play. And then he starts to get over that and starts to charm her some more, but then he embarrasses himself at her family dinner. And then he starts to close the gap again and something else goes wrong until finally he closes the gap and gets the state of bliss. An action movie, right? George Clooney and his gang is going to rob a casino and they have a plan that's going to work, but then something goes wrong. But then they start to close it again and then something goes wrong. This is the pattern of stories that keep us on our edge of our seat. This is the pattern of stories that keeps us on the edge of our seat, keeps us engaged. The same thing is true for any brand story you want to tell. You need a real plot. Even if it's B2B and it's thought leadership, you need to be talking about the gap between what is for your industry and what could be. What are the problems we're trying to solve? Who are the main characters, the main protagonists that are trying to solve that problem? What risks are they taking? How are they making bold moves to get us to a better state? These are all things that a brand needs to embrace. So I really encourage our clients to embrace these four elements of storytelling as a checklist with any story they tell to see whether they're just checking a box and putting content out there or creating something meaningful that people actually care about. One brand I love is Marriott. So Marriott launched a few years ago, full disclosure with us, a travel magazine called Marriott Traveler. And what they wanted to do is not create any old travel magazine. They didn't want to do the ten bars to visit on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, which a million people had done before. But they wanted to work with really local writers and bloggers that they found through us to tell unique stories about parts of the city that only locals know about. The really cool voodoo shops, the underground speakeasies, the places in the swamps where you can get a po-boy that no one knows about and tell the stories about not just those places but the profiles about the people behind them. And it's extremely successful. They started with three cities, New Orleans, Chicago, Orlando. They've now expanded to almost 50 cities across the globe. And they tell really unique novel stories with really relatable, cool protagonists that make you want to travel to those places. And they never plug Marriott in any of the stories. They never have a little link to book the hotel. But what they do do is treat the rest of the site like Marriott is the sponsor. So in the normal ad space we're used to, below the article they will have a little booking widget where you can book a Marriott hotel. So it's very non-intrusive. It doesn't taint the actual editorial integrity of the magazine. But they are able to drive millions in revenue every year and greatly grow this content program. So it's just a great example of a brand that really cares about editorial integrity, about great storytelling, about embracing an ethos of putting their audience first, about above all else helping them discover places that they will love. While at the same time creating a customer experience and pathway that does drive results for the business and allow them to continue to invest in their program. I think that a lot of it starts with this need to not just view content as this separate siloed thing, right? This little side project that we're going to throw over here and maybe we'll do a blog or maybe we'll do a little video series. We view it as a very holistic and central part of all of your marketing operations. We're now in an era where you can't really just shout at people, right? You can't, intrusive advertising no longer works. You can't just push a message at people and expect them to actually respond to you. We can very easily at any moment choose to not listen to you by looking at this magical device in our pocket that's giving us millions of stories at any moment that we can dive into. So if you actually want to build strong relationships with people, you need to think about how are you saying something really interesting and that's delivering value to someone's lives in every state, every touch point that you have with your customers. Whether it's marketing emails, whether it's your search and social campaigns, whether it's the stories that you're telling at events or at your trade booths. You need to really think about all of these opportunities that you can't waste. The key there that I advocate to a lot of customers is hire people who know how to do this well, who have trained to do it their whole lives, who understand storytelling in their bones, who understand great content in their bones. So many businesses point to a demand gen market over here and they're like, just go out there and you're going to do content now. But that person hasn't gone through all the years of school, all the trials and tribulations that come with really developing your own distinct voice, the ability to communicate well with people, the ability to tell stories that people really care about. So I say one of the number one things you can do is hire great editorial people, hire great storytellers to work inside your business. We're out there, for the most part, we're poor and pretty broke, so go out there and bring that type of talent into your business and you will reap the rewards. The Editor Marketing Minute is a fun piece that we sort of in a lot of ways did on a whim. And I think often a lot of the best content that you produce comes that way. It was something that the first batch of episodes we shot in one night in our office, made a set out of random printout and props that we'd had from previous magazine shoots that different like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, art in the background that I just wrote the scripts for. I started it myself. We did it super cheap, single camera, little lav mic, and it's done really well. It's performed super well on social. That's what we built it for, right, is to have a minute long video series that gets right into a lesson that communicates a content marketing lesson in 60 seconds that plays into the short attention spans that people have on those networks that has quick action and voiceover and captions within the first three seconds. And we've seen really high engagement on social with it, which is the main channel that it was designed for and the main KPI that we're looking for is how much of the video are they watching through, total views, shares, etc. So it's a really quick and dirty experiment for us that's done really well that we're going to be expanding a lot over the next year. Yeah, the biggest thing I'm thinking about because it is content marketing lessons is how do you turn it into a more immersive learning experience where there's actually more of a structured syllabus. There's interactive quizzes and tests you can take against yourself to see how you're progressing and what you've absorbed, different templates and tools and worksheets that you can use to actually build some of the content strategy elements we're talking about in our lessons. So just to make it a little more applicable for the audience that we have, they can take that, learn something from it, but then actually design something that will help them in their own marketing program. So it started with us stealing the desk of our sales op guy, Greg, after work, setting it up behind the tiniest sliver of blue wall that we could find to actually get in frame, taking three different cool art pictures that we've done for our magazine and putting them on the wall, finding some cool trinkets to put on the desk, and then just having a single straight on camera shot. And then me with five different changes of clothes for the first five episodes just cycling through so it looks like different days. And then we found some fun things to throw in there, like there's a basketball hoop in the top left corner of the frame at the end of every episode. I curl up my, I crunch up my notes and try and shoot it behind my head. I only get it in once, but it's like a little bit something that keeps people watching to the end. I have a lot of fans who are really rooting for me to actually make it one time. And so yeah, it was really quick. Just honestly, my roommate who's a video editor, I came over and shot it for me and edited and made the intro. We bought the theme music, which is like a blink 182 ripoff intro for $49 on a stock music site. So overall very cheap to produce. And that's the type of thing that I encourage a lot of companies, especially a lot of startups like we are to just experiment with. You don't have to spend 25 grand on a video shoot. You can do it, you know, quick and dirty with a single camera, with some friends, with a few hundred dollars and really make something happen. Yeah, I see a few big trends coming up this year on the enterprise, enterprise marketing level. I'm seeing a lot of companies developing what they call content centers of excellence. So these essentially are centralized newsrooms inside an org that are responsible for creating content for multiple lines of business. Because what a lot of companies have realized is that they have all these different lines of business creating content in silos. And often that content is inconsistent in quality, in brand messaging, and often even contradicts what one group is doing, contradicts what another group is doing. So it's not great. And so a lot of brands in their digital transformation efforts are trying to get a handle on that. So they're building these centralized content teams where they usually take one group that's done content really well, taking them as a model and having them build out this team for the rest of the org. So with a lot of our bigger clients, that's a big trend we're seeing. Obviously, I'm seeing more video particularly in the B2B space. One thing I see happening, at least I'm praying is going to happen, is that we burn the PDF to the ground. So in B2B, there's been this very old school focus on, oh, let's just create white papers. Let's create PDFs that someone has to fill out a form to get to, which has a lot of problems. Chief amongst them, PDFs are designed for one thing, which is to be printed. No one freaking prints stuff anymore. We have PDF analytics as part of our offering, and we see that print rates are below 10% now. So why are we creating this piece of content that sucks to read on your phone, that takes a lot of effort to design, that isn't web first in any way? I think you'll see a lot of B2B brands start to move away from that into more interactive pieces of storytelling that you can still ask for an email address for us or the price of access, but not use such an old school tactic that I feel should have been left behind a decade ago.